Fine sunset for Martin Brodeur
His numbers are sagging, but at age 40, he’s mighty close to the Cup again
NEWARK, N.J.
Milestone birthdays are really more odometers than anything; the thing rolls over and all of a sudden you’re wondering when the transmission might blow. The big three-oh, the big four-oh, and so forth. You get reflective and then you keep moving.
Of the four goaltenders still playing in the National Hockey league playoffs, the worst one, at this moment, is Martin Brodeur. It’s not really close. Los Angeles’s Jonathan Quick has a postseason save percentage of .949, Mike Smith of Phoenix is at .948, and Henrik Lundqvist, the man Brodeur will face in the Eastern Conference final — the king of New York, to Brodeur’s king of New Jersey — is at .937.
Brodeur turned 40 last week and is at .920, though he’s allowed just 2.05 goals per game behind New Jersey’s ferocious forechecking. He’s in the third round for the first time since his third Stanley Cup win, in 2003; the Devils have not played the hated Rangers in the conference final since 1994 when Brodeur was a rookie. He made 47 saves and lost in doubleovertime in Game 3, and made 46 saves and lost in double-overtime in Game 7. It doesn’t keep him up at night, does it?
“No, I grew from that,” Brodeur said on the eve of Game 1 in New York. “It hurt, no doubt about that. That was probably one of the toughest losses I ever had.
“But if I didn’t have that loss, maybe I wouldn’t have become who I became, or even [what] our organization [became]. And I think sometimes you need to hit the hurdles before you’re able to go over them pretty easily. And I think that was one of them in ’94. But you’re right: it doesn’t keep me up at night at all.”
This is an unexpectedly bright sunset for Brodeur, who hadn’t escaped the first round in five years. He was drilled along with his team in 2008 and 2010, and allowed two goals in the final 80 seconds of Game 7 against Carolina in 2009. After years of 70-game workloads, his regular seasons have been trimmed to 56 and 59 games the past two years, and his save percentage has tumbled into the low .900 range. Sometimes his limbs seem a little heavy. And yet here he is, playing his longtime rivals from across the river. This series will be cast as the big city against its spiteful little brother, and it will be real. The Rangers have a lot of rivals; Jersey has the Rangers, more than anything. But Brodeur seems content with which side of the river he chose.
“I like my life in New Jersey,” he said, with that easy smile of his. “I love my life in New Jersey. So I never thought about that. If anything I was thinking about spending my life in Montreal, and how that would be, how that would be different. But New York for me doesn’t give me any special [feelings]. I don’t even go in New York.”
You wonder if there is any jealousy there, because for a man as competitive as Brodeur is, fading can’t be easy. Lundqvist is handsome and the darling of Manhattan, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, nominated for the Hart Trophy and the Vezina both, and he has dominated Brodeur in the regular season to the tune of a 23-6-5 record. They are 4-4 in the playoffs.
And Marty — well, he’s 40. He says nice things about Lundqvist, but what else could he say? There’s just a trace of nostalgia, just a whisper of the fight he wants to have.
“He’s kind of the top goalie in the NHL right now,” Brodeur said. “And I think I was in that position once. Played against Patrick [Roy], played against Dominik Hasek, I played against all the guys at maybe, you know, the top years in their career. But for me it’s kind of nice to be able to compete against them, regardless of what’s going to happen. I’ll do my best to try to match up, but it’s going to be pretty hard.”
The Rangers block shots like they’re protecting a President. The Devils protect Brodeur by being aggressive as hell chasing the puck, and they must know that Brodeur can’t save them all the time. But he is four wins from another chance at a Cup, all these years after Messier’s Game 6 guarantee, after all these years of having Stéphane Matteau’s name gleefully chanted at him at the Garden. The question now is how much he has left.
“If he played in Canada, you see a lot of times that the goalies, any player, any top player, things can go wrong certain years, certain games,” says his longtime teammate Patrik Elias.
“And they can turn on you and sometimes it can affect you. And I think he may be playing [in] maybe not as big a hockey market as they have for the Rangers or, for example, Toronto, then he can kind of stay focused on his job and keep doing his thing.
“So I think he’s happy here. And nobody’s going to take that away from him, his records and the way he’s been in his career. I think that the most important thing [is] that he knows that he can have success here, and have a chance to win Stanley Cups. Which he did, and not just one time.”
We have reached a sort of curtain call for Martin Brodeur. Centre stage, if you please.