Bryan Trottier noticed.
Last week, Avalanche captain Joe Sakic passed Trottier to take sole possession of the No. 13 spot on the NHL all-time scoring list.
“Young Joe just doesn’t want to get old,” Trottier said with a laugh Friday from his home in the Pittsburgh area. “I have to send him a little letter, congratulating him.”
Not bad for a couple of Western Hockey League boys who played major junior hockey for the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Broncos.
“I look at it like he has the NHL record for guys who played for the Broncos when they were green and blue, and I still have it for when they were green and gold,” Trottier said.
The soft-spoken Trottier worked with Sakic for four seasons as a Colorado assistant under Bob Hartley before landing the head coaching job with the New York Rangers for the 2002-03 season. The Rangers were a mess before and after he arrived, and Trottier convincingly speaks of a lack of bitterness over his firing at midseason. “Glen Sather probably saved me from a nervous breakdown,” he said of the Rangers’ president and general manager.
In Manhattan, Trottier was fighting a stigma: His best years as a player came with the dynastic Islanders, when there could have been four bench-emptying brawls on the ice and there still would have been more fights in the stands at most Islanders-Rangers games – especially when they were played on Long Island.
Sometimes this is forgotten, but it also was fashionably avant garde in the early 1980s to proclaim Trottier was a better all-around player than Wayne Gretzky.
Of course, after Trottier won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player in 1979, the final season before Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers entered the league, Gretzky won the award the next eight seasons. But Trottier and the Islanders were winning, and he ended up playing on two more Stanley Cup champions at Pittsburgh and getting his name on the trophy a seventh time as an Avalanche assistant in 2001.
I ran into Trottier last season during the lockout when we both went to see the Avalanche affiliate, the Hershey Bears – Trottier because he is friends with Paul Fixter, who coached the Bears last season and now is an Avalanche pro scout. A year ago, Trottier was pondering whether to try to get back into the NHL on a bench, and when I again caught up with him Friday, he talked of finding a new and emotionally rewarding challenge – and of rediscovering his Native North American heritage.
“My grandma was a full Chippewa on my dad’s side,” Trottier said. “My dad is pretty much full-blooded and my mom’s Irish. So I grew up with the ‘half-breed’ label, which for me was like, ‘OK, that’s what I am. Big deal.”‘
From his Pittsburgh base, Trottier is organizing and serving as general manager for a touring team of former NHL and pro hockey players of Aboriginal descent, primarily from the Ojibway and Cree tribes. He also is making trips to speak and give clinics to native communities in McKenzie Delta of the Western Arctic.
“I brought my skates and talked to the kids about staying in school and making good choices,” he said. “It was an absolutely fantastic experience. It’s wonderful to see the traditions and the culture. It’s all Aboriginal, traditional drum-dancing, and it was amazing to see their social events and their respect of elders. You get into the villages, and you’re amazed by their survival skills. It took me back to thinking about my grandfather and my great-grandfather, when they were living off the land.
“They think they’ve got the world by the tail. But the kids know the NHL because they have TVs and they watch the NHL game. The younger kids don’t know who I am, but their parents and grandparents do.
“The NHLPA, through its Goals and Dreams program, sent up a bunch of equipment, and I felt like Santa Claus.”
The Trottier-organized Aboriginal team will play a series of about 20 exhibitions, and the first is scheduled for Jan. 12 against the Winnipeg Jets Alumni in Winnipeg.
“It’s been called the Aboriginal Alumni Hockey Team,” Trottier said, then laughed. “I think we’re going to have to find a shorter moniker. We go all the way back to Freddie Saskamoose, the first Native Indian-Aboriginal to play in the NHL.”
Trottier said he hasn’t given up on landing an NHL job, but it isn’t an obsession.
“I know that if I don’t get back in the NHL, I know that for the rest of my life, this will create wonderful opportunities to work in Canada and throughout North America with native groups,” he said. “These are things I’ve never been exposed to in my life, and I’m gobbling it up.”
Foppa sidelined
With the Philadelphia Flyers’ Peter Forsberg sidelined with a groin injury last week, some eyebrows were raised. Nobody questioned whether he was hurt, but it was at least reasonable to wonder if this could be a sign that this is more than the garden variety groin muscle problem. Forsberg missed more than half the 2003-04 regular season with the Avalanche because of what started out as a groin problem and developed into a more complex injury involving abdominal muscles. He underwent surgery after the season. Of course, that speculation could be overreaction, but it wasn’t unreasonable to at least wonder about his long-term availability.
Not so super
The Avalanche visits Pittsburgh next weekend for its only meeting of the season with the Penguins, and if Mario Lemieux – who has been battling a stomach illness – plays, chances are it will be the last time he faces the Avalanche. He has been terrible so far this season, and it’s time to pass the torch to Sidney Crosby. Plus, the surly Steve Yzerman, who seems to be having no fun at all with the Red Wings, is playing only about 10 minutes a game, grousing about the new NHL. Speculation has begun that one, or both, might quit before the end of the season.
Always have Parise
With all the attention being paid to marquee rookies, it has been a bit overlooked that the Devils’ Zach Parise, the former North Dakota star and son of former NHL player J.P. Parise, has struggled with New Jersey. “It just seems anything I touch doesn’t go in,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Points have been tough to come by. Breaks have been hard to find. Guys are just so good up here.”
Immovable
The Blues still are for sale after the collapse of negotiations with a group headed by Dave Checketts, but team president Mark Sauer moved to quiet fears that the franchise could end up being moved. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that when the current owners, Bill and Nancy Laurie, bought the team in 1999 (after their purchase of the Nuggets and Avalanche fell through), they entered into an agreement to keep the team in St. Louis through at least 2010-11. New owners would inherit that obligation.
Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
Spotlight on…
Brui …er, Sharks’ Joe Thornton
When the Boston Bruins meet the Avalanche on Wednesday at the Pepsi Center, they will be without the star center they traded to the San Jose Sharks last week for defenseman Brad Stuart, left wing Marco Sturm and center Wayne Primeau.
There is no truth to the rumor that the Bruins thought they were getting Keith Primeau.
Well, it’s probably not true.
The deal represented recognition on both sides – from the Sharks and Bruins – that their offseason strategies had failed.
Believing they had the core of an elite team in the fold, the Sharks turned their major attentions to nurturing and retaining that group.
The Bruins, who when the lockout ended had fewer veterans under contract than the Celtics, arrogantly believed the new system would lead to elite players all but knocking on their door and signing for the “reasonable” salaries that would be the norm in the new marketplace.
That didn’t happen.
Mike Modano came close to signing, but instead stayed with Dallas. And Thornton played hardball in his negotiations before signing a three-year, $20 million deal in August. The Bruins, meanwhile, had seen Brian Rolston, Mike Knuble, Sean O’Donnell, Michael Nylander and even short-termer Sergei Gonchar sign elsewhere.
For months, I had been assuming the Bruins – with cap room and the need to land a drawing card – would be one of the serious contestants for Peter Forsberg. That apparently never happened, either.
Time for changes: So when the Bruins got off to a slow start and owner Jeremy Jacobs came in from Buffalo, N.Y., and groused through a briefing with the media, dramatic moves were inevitable.
With the Bruins, that usually has meant Harry Sinden – the longtime general manager who now is team president – scapegoats a coach. This time, both GM Mike O’Connell and coach Mike Sullivan survived, and the blame – at least implied – fell on Thornton’s shoulders.
The 26-year-old who was the No. 1 pick in the 1997 draft never quite has broken through to megastar status, but the point here is the Bruins had a prime chance to build around him, now that every other team was brought down to Boston’s level of mild ambition. They didn’t take advantage of it. They can blame Thornton all they want, for taking up so much of the cap with his contract, or for not being the best darned player in the league, but some of the back-channel trashing of him – trashing a lot of media folks and commentators seemed to buy – was ridiculous.
Advantage? Sharks. Hands down. Stuart will be a top-four defenseman, but Sturm hasn’t shown signs of taking advantage of his speed in the new order. Thornton already was one of the top 10 players in the league, and this deal might help nudge him a few more rungs up the ladder – and get the Sharks back in the hunt as a legitimate threat to come out of the Western Conference.
