When Selanne, crashing the net, redirected the puck past Jose Theodore on Wednesday night for his 500th career goal, the Anaheim bench emptied and the Pepsi Center crowd – at least officially – was kept in the dark. No public acknowledgment, not even on the scoreboard during a media timeout, was made that Selanne had just become the 36th player to hit the 500-goal threshold. And that’s too bad, because the Finnish Flash is a class act whose renaissance the past two seasons with Anaheim has been one of the NHL’s heartwarming stories.
In retrospect, it has become clear that his knee was troubling him far more than he let on in 2003-04, when he was awful with the Avalanche before undergoing reconstructive surgery and rehabilitating during the lockout.
“Guys who can skate like that sometimes can take nights off mentally, and, still, their speed and their skill can take over,” Ducks defenseman Chris Pronger said after Anaheim’s 3-2 shootout loss in Denver. “But he plays hard every night, and that’s something young guys on this team can see. A 36-year-old who can skate like that still, and play physical in the corners and move the puck down low? They can learn a lot from a guy like that.”
Pronger was with St. Louis during Selanne’s ill-fated season with the Avalanche, and then was with the Oilers when Edmonton beat the Ducks in the Western Conference finals last season.
“I know he had a tough year here and wasn’t skating very well,” Pronger said. “I remember playing against him when he was here, and he didn’t have that same jump. He got it fixed during the lockout. Last year, I remember one game going against him, I had a full zone on him, taking the rush, and he went blowing by me. I went, ‘Well, apparently he’s got his speed back.’
“He had his legs working last year and it has carried over to this year.”
Selanne himself shrugged off the accomplishment, focusing on the Ducks’ shortcomings as a team in the loss to the Avalanche. “I wasn’t really thinking about it that much, but it’s good to get it behind me,” he said. “I can start concentrating on other things.”
He had the group of reporters around him laughing, when he said it was almost as if the Ducks’ front office – whose team at one point was being outshot 26-2 by the Avalanche – had sent the “B” team to Denver, and that it would have been “almost a crime” if Anaheim had managed to win the game.
That’s another reason it was too bad he wasn’t his old self in Denver.
We would have been able to quote him more often.
