Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor Read Free Book Online Page A

$20-million offer * from the Vancouver Canucks. He later reconsidered, however, and signed a one-year deal in December. It was not a good decision, as he managed only 9 goals and 19 assists in 41 games, though he rose to a point a game in the playoffs. Sundin did retire this time, leaving with 1,349 points in 1,346 games, Hall of Fame numbers by any measure
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NO “ORDINARY JOE”
(
National Post
, May 28, 2001)
    The star thing just isn’t me.—Joe Sakic, 1996
    I t still isn’t. It is now five years since Joe Sakic, hockey’s “Ordinary Joe,” won the Conn Smythe Trophy as he led his Colorado Avalanche to its first Stanley Cup.
    A second is suddenly looming, thanks to Sakic’s extraordinary play in Game 1 of this final series, in which he scored the winning goal, added a spectacular insurance goal and set up another in the Avalanche’s 5–0 romp over the New Jersey Devils—a game also notable in that Sakic, the team captain, turned New Jersey captain Scott Stevens, last year’s Conn Smythe Trophy winner, inside out and upside down and outside in as he quietly went about his business.
    They are talking today about a second Smythe for the player with the early lead on playoff MVP honours. He is already nominated for the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player during the regular season, the Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward and the Lady Byng as the NHL’s most gentlemanly player.
    Not since 1991 has any player been nominated for three regular-season awards (goaltender Ed Belfour for the Hart, the Vezina as the top goaltender and the Calder as top rookie), and if Sakic were somehow to pull off a Tiger Woods–like sweep of four major awards—plus the Stanley Cup—it would stand as one of the best individual seasons the game has ever witnessed. Only Boston’s Bobby Orr, in 1969–70, pulled off a similar feat (winning the Hart Trophy, Conn Smythe Trophy, Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s top scorer and Norris Trophy as top defenceman to go with the Bruins’ Stanley Cup title).
    Perhaps then they would spell his name right, as one paper here failed to do back in 1996 when he brought the Avalanche a championship in the franchise’s very first season. Perhaps a few people might even start pronouncing his name correctly—“Sack-ich,” his parents claim, not “Sak-ic,” as it has become—and, who knows, he might one day even escape the only nickname he has in hockey, which also happens to be incorrect information.
    â€œBurnaby Joe,” they call him in Canada. It should be “Vancouver Joe,” if anything. Born there, raised there—and only off to Burnaby to play his minor hockey and pick up the moniker that still somewhat irritates his parents, Marijan and Slavica Sakic.
    Joe Sakic himself is unlikely to set the record straight. What he learned from his father, Marijan—a Croatian stonemason who ended up working in construction on the West Coast—is that “talking meant nothing,” and there is certainly ample evidence of this to be found in the thirteen years of reporters’ notebooks that track his career. He does, actually, have one more nickname among the NHL press: “Quoteless Joe.”
    Even in the heady minutes following Saturday night’s impressive win over the Devils, Sakic was his usual librarian self. The Devils—frozen to the ice in the eyes of everyone else—were “a great hockey team” in the eyes of Joe Sakic. His lovely first goal, a quick snap shot between the legs of New Jersey goaltenderMartin Brodeur as Sakic flew down the right side, was the result, he claimed, of “a great pass” from Rob Blake to Milan Hejduk who then “just got it over to me.”
    As for Sakic’s second goal—in which he flew down the same side, curled, set Stevens in place as if he were more ice auger than defenceman, stepped