Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  I’d already been in the minors for two years, remember, so I knew a thing or two about solutions that come in pill form. The medical staff isn’t there to ensure that hockey players live long and satisfying lives—their job is to help guys play. If you’ve ever gone from excruciating pain to mere discomfort, you know how gloriously welcome a Vicodin or a Percocet can be.

  Well, Vicodin kept me out there on the ice, though it didn’t heal me, of course. Finally, Scotty Bowman came over and told me to hit the showers and get that leg taken care of because he was going to need me.

  Being told by hockey wizard Scotty Bowman that he needs you is a lot better than the warm glow of a Percocet, I can tell you, and a lot harder to come by. Suddenly, the pain in my leg morphed into a kind of ecstasy, because I felt, finally, like I belonged. It’s a feeling, I would learn, that can change in a shift, but for now, I was needed.

  I watched the first two playoff games from the box, and by the end of them, we’re down two games to zip at the hands of the Canucks. The Presidents’ Trophy winners have lost their first two games at home. Two more losses and we’re golfing, and I’ll believe in that curse.

  We land in Vancouver for Game 3 around 3 A.M., and on the drive from YVR to the hotel downtown there are dozens of cars—as many as forty of them—full of Canuckleheads driving alongside our bus holding brooms out the windows to remind us we’re two games away from being swept from the playoffs. Popping out of the cars’ sunroofs are ladies who’ve yanked up their tops to show us they’re braless, and have “sweep” painted across their tits. Just in case we’d missed the message with the brooms. I have to admit I preferred the ladies’ way of delivering it.

  Only in Canada would fans stay up all night waiting for the opponent to land so they could fuck with them. During the playoffs, visiting teams usually rent out an entire floor of a hotel to keep the players away from that kind of fan. Not to mention puck bunnies and autograph seekers.

  Seekers are the norm in pro sports these days, and while most guys always have time for starry-eyed kids, they cringe at the seekers. There are guys who wait outside the team hotel twenty-four hours a day like paparazzi, trying to get players to sign every type of card or iron-on jersey number or fathead picture or anything else that could decorate the wall of fame in a man cave. Autographs that they then sell for a sweet profit.

  I learned about this game from the best: Stevie Y, and Shanahan, and the king of autographs, Brett Hull. These guys could make $250K a year just by selling autographs, so they were very smart about setting prices and not flooding the market.

  After they won their first Stanley Cup together in 1997, they would only sign team pictures as part of prearranged deals done directly with the autograph dealers. The guys would also sometimes personalize their signatures so the dealers couldn’t resell them. Brett Hull told me my autograph was horrible and so on a road trip we sat together on the plane and he helped me find the signature that I still use today. “All you really need is the first and last initial and the rest is just scribble,” he told me. This lets you sign fast and easy.

  I’d mailed Brett Hull a hockey card to sign ten years earlier, and he told me that a family friend had probably done it. In return for all those “Brett Hull” signatures, he paid for her college education. I felt like Santa Claus had just been busted but was also impressed at his business sense. Of course he could never have signed all those cards and letters. I know that most of the greats had a similar situation set up with either a stick boy or assistant trainer who was more than happy to make the extra cash and could have signed a few dozen cards while sitting on the toilet, if they really wanted.

  You could also make money just by being in the playoffs, when players are not actually being paid, but when there are bonuses and cash bumps for doing well.

  At the beginning of the 2002 Stanley Cup Playoffs we were each given a form to fill out with the number of additional tickets (beyond the two given to every player) that we wanted to purchase. I’m sure the haters are going to see this as proof of what a terrible man I am, but I bought these extra tickets to sell to a broker I’d become friends with, and who was a great contact for tickets to shows in Vegas and NYC. If the face value of the ticket was $100 then he gave me $200, and this sale price would increase game by game and round by round. I bought six tickets for each round and by the finals I was making around $2,000 profit per game, so let’s call it roughly a $15K profit over the four rounds.

  It’s absolutely laughable to me that anyone should object to this. But it’s so typical of the old-school sports mentality that you’re vilified for what you say rather than what you do. Keep your mouth shut, and you can do whatever you want. I’m not like that. I wouldn’t do something that I wouldn’t own up to. The way I saw it, I was taking advantage of an opportunity presented to me because of years of hard work.

  And then, it looked for a horrifying few minutes as if that opportunity was going to vanish forever.

  On our first morning in Vancouver for Game 3 I get a call at 9:30 from the Wings’ GM, Ken Holland, telling me to meet him in the restaurant downstairs ASAP. I think “Holy shit! They’re putting me in for Game 3!”

  “Hi Mr. Holland,” I say, greeting the guy with the ultimate power over my career, to which he quickly replies, “Cut the shit, you know the guys call me Kenny.”

  Ken Holland had a great relationship with almost every single player who’s been part of the Red Wings core over the years, and one of the reasons for this was that he didn’t lie or bullshit them. This is a rare trait among NHL general managers, who would lie to their own mothers about being their sons if it meant they could keep their jobs. So many of them had permanently chapped lips because of all the ass they’d kissed along the way.

  So just as I’m thinking that good guy Ken is going to tell me I’m dressing for Game 3, he surprises the hell out of me by barking, “What the fuck did you do last night?”

  “I was in my room as soon as we got to the hotel,” I reply, suddenly feeling not like the game buster I imagined I would be but some sniveling kid in the principal’s office. For a moment I even think to myself, “Jesus did I go out last night and just can’t remember?”

  Holland looks like he’s already sentenced me to death. “I got a call from the owner of your complex in Detroit who said your motherfucking buddies broke your front door down and proceeded to destroy everything in sight, and were running around naked with a bunch of broads.” (Note: All NHL GMs refer to any women their players are fucking—except for their wives—as broads.)

  I told him I had no idea what happened and I would kick my friends out immediately and pay for any damage. At this point my eyes are starting to fill with tears. I’ve never been this scared in my entire life, and there’s also the gut-punch feeling that I’ve let down the guy who’s given me the thing I’ve put every ounce of my soul into achieving since I was eight years old. I’m wondering if I just ruined my life.

  Holland told me it was the last time anything like this could happen, or else I’d be finished. I believed every word that came out of his mouth that morning. And I could have wept with relief that I wasn’t finished yet. He’d given me a second chance.

  Game 3 did not include me leading the team to a glorious comeback in the famous winged wheel sweater, and honestly, that was fine, as I was still too hurt to play. But the way things turned out in that quarterfinal series against Vancouver shows what big-time veterans we had on that team, guys who played even better in big-time situations.

  We won Game 3 in Vancouver because of one of the flukiest plays I’ve ever seen. It was at a point in the series where if we’d lost the game, we were probably done. We were tied at one goal apiece with thirty seconds left in the second period when Nick Lidström skated the puck out of our zone and just before he hit center ice, fired it toward the Vancouver goal. It was a knuckler, and it dipped right underneath Canuck goalie Dan Cloutier’s
glove. You could hear the wind being sucked out of the arena, and the Canuckleheads, and their team. We won 3–1, and the Canucks never won another game in that series.

  I ended up playing with Dan Cloutier toward the end of his career in LA. I’d always heard rumors that he was tough, and for a goalie to be tough is like a baseball pitcher being a great hitter. But it was true. Dan Cloutier had three fights in the NHL and one in the AHL, and for a goalie, that’s like being a rabid dog. He had crystal blue eyes and Clark Kent looks, but he was really a fucking savage inside.

  That goal he let in was something that could happen to anyone, and a good team shrugs it off and comes out harder. It was largely Dan’s play that got the Canucks into the playoffs in the first place. He won thirty-one games that season, posted seven shutouts, and went 7-0-1 down the stretch. So they’d definitely overachieved going up two zip on us, and when that fluky goal went in, the Canucks looked in the mirror and we looked forward, to our next opponent, the St. Louis Blues. We knocked the Blues off in five games. We’d won eight of our last nine. I can feel the momentum rising in the room, and now we’re halfway to the sixteen wins needed for the Cup. Standing in our way to the final are the evil Colorado Avalanche.

  Because I looked up so much to the guys on Detroit, I inherited their hate-on for Colorado, which started with Claude Lemieux’s nasty, nasty hit on Kris Draper in the 1996 Western Conference Final. Lemieux checked Draper face-first into the dasher boards and got five and a two-game suspension while Drapes—who had a concussion, a broken jaw, broken nose, and broken cheekbone—got a new face, as the medics pretty much had to rebuild it.

  The Wings also hated Lemieux because he was hard to play against. He was a very smart defensive player—you could always feel him breathing down your neck and you knew he was going to finish his check. He was unusual because French-Canadian guys played a skill game and left the tough stuff to others, but not Claude Lemieux.

  I tried to do my part both times I played against Colorado in 2002. The first game was on February 4, 2002. I was sitting on the bench doing my usual routine of giving every guy on the other team who skated by a piece of my mind about how they should just resign from humanity.

  I soon learned there were guys in the league that my Hall of Fame teammates wouldn’t allow me to unleash on. Standing at the end of the bench was something I did till the end of my career because I knew it was annoying to my own team if I was constantly shit-talking while moving up and down the bench until my name was called to hop over the boards.

  Brett Hull sometimes would stay at the end of the bench when he was pissed off at his line-mates for not seeing the play open sixteen seconds before it happened, the way he could see it happening. In my first game against the Avalanche, with Hully right next to me, I leaned over to tell Joe Sakic that I’d seen him walking into the arena before the game and that he should sue the blind thief who sold him his sports coat and that I wondered how a guy making $8 million a year could dress that badly.

  I threw in the intel that if our shifts overlapped, I was going to follow him like a Scud missile and blindside his old ass. As those words came out of my mouth I felt a hand the size of a baseball mitt attached to a wrist the size of a ham pull the back of my jersey onto the bench. I turned to my right and was shocked to realize that it was Brett Hull grabbing me, and then he told me, loud enough for Sakic to hear, “You are never to speak with or to Mr. Sakic in that tone again.”

  It was the first time Brett Hull was pissed at me, and I suddenly understood that certain guys were really truly off-limits. Brett would have been the first to smile if I’d put Mr. Sakic on his ass with a clean hit between whistles, but he was not smiling at the other stuff. So the character of Sean Avery got a major adjustment at that moment. I’d have to find another way to get the future Hall of Famers off their game.

  After my leg healed I resumed my daily grind as a Black Ace, which is the term we use to describe the extra players on a team’s roster during the playoffs. Usually these guys get into the lineup at some point, and in Detroit there were five of us who’d spend an additional hour on the ice after the guys in the lineup were finished practicing. The Aces would do skating drills hidden inside shooting drills which would be followed by a “bag skate.” This is when you start at your goal line, skate to your blue line, stop, skate back, stop, do it again, stop, skate to the center line, stop, skate back, stop, skate to the far blue line, stop, and skate back again, until you’ve skated your bags off. Some coaches use it as punishment, but during the playoffs conditioning is king, so they want to be sure we’re game ready if we get tapped.

  We’d then finish Black Aces sessions with a four-on-four game that also included the assistant coaches: Joey Kocur, Dave Lewis, and “Bug-Eyed” Barry Smith. Dave Lewis would be our coach the following year, though we didn’t know it then, and Barry Smith was another one of Scotty’s secret weapons. Because he had the same kind of wide-eyed stare that Marty Feldman has we called him Bug-Eyed Barry, but he didn’t notice. You could always talk to Barry about Scotty and feel that he wasn’t going to throw you under the Zamboni.

  Joey Kocur was one of the toughest guys who’d ever played in the NHL. He was a big, strong Saskatchewan farm boy with hands so massive it looked like he could do one-handed curls with bales of hay. He was the hardest-nosed guy I’d ever played with, and had over 2,500 penalty minutes to show for it. Not to mention three Stanley Cups.

  Joey had recently made the transition from playing to coaching, and he broke down video for us during the playoffs. I remember he was looking rough one morning during practice, which could only mean he’d been out late washing down our latest playoff win.

  I was getting bored with the daily Black Aces grind, so I had to push through it and work extra hard, which was my way of keeping it fun. One day, I guess Joey didn’t like how hard I was working, because after a goal that he buried on a rebound—one that he scored when I’d been hooking him—he turned around and open-hand punched me in the shoulder and sent me flying backwards four feet, easily, and it would have been even further on fresh ice. He hit me so hard that I lost my wind and was looking up at him gasping for air as “Bug Eyed” Barry skated by and explained, “Nobody hooks Joey when he’s hungover.”

  The series against Colorado was long and tough, with three of the first five games decided in overtime and Colorado taking a 3–2 lead. But, again, I saw firsthand what a championship team can do when push comes to shove. One of the biggest differences between a team that knows how to win and one that doesn’t is that the champions buckle down. They all understand that for two and a half months, everything shuts off—personal life, social life, your phone between periods, everything. There’s total focus.

  Winners also don’t panic when facing adversity. They understand that it’s a seven-game series and the first to win four games takes the series, so it takes as long as it takes. And championship teams are able to balance their attack so that every line can get the job done. Federov was not going to be dominant every night, but other guys would rise to the occasion. The Grind Line would step up and win the game and no one would feel that they’d stolen the superstars’ chance to shine. It’s very hard to play against a team like this, as Colorado found out. We shut them out the next two games, with a 7–0 emphasis in Game 7, to win the series and a place in the Stanley Cup Final, which we would go on to win in five games.

  There is a story from Game 6 of the Western Conference Final, though, that I don’t think has ever been told.

  So we’re facing elimination, and we go up 1–0 on a very strange goal by Shanahan—Patrick Roy made a showboat Statue of Liberty move after a glove save, but he didn’t actually have the puck securely in his trapper as he raised his glove to the ceiling beams. The puck dropped to the ice and the ever-opportunistic Shanny poked it into the net.

  Roy had a reputation of being as hard on his teammates as he was on himself. It’s what drove him to be
great every night. When we saw him showboating and making an ass of himself, we loved it. He wasn’t as much of a superman as he thought. But even so, he did the same move again about thirty seconds after Shanny scored on him. This time, Shanny tapped him on the pads to congratulate him on not giving up another bad goal. The bench loved it. Then my old pal McCarty intercepts a pass in the defensive zone and goes in on a two-on-one. The usual play here is the pass for the tap-in, since it’s pretty much impossible for any goalie to get across in time for that save. But McCarty winds up and leans into a slapper that beats Roy cleanly. It’s a pretty obvious fuck-you to the guy who is supposedly the best goalie in the world. Goalies like that can get inside guys’ heads, can get players missing the net or not taking shots at all since they think they have to shoot for the corners. But a shot like McCarty’s says “we can score on this guy.” And now it’s 2–0.

  So there’s 2:23 left in the second period and Colorado is on a power play, trying to get back in the game and close out the series. Their coach, Bob Hartley, is holding what he thinks is an ace. He calls the ref over and asks for a measurement of our goalie Dominik Hašek’s stick. Hartley thinks the goal stick is illegal, and if it is, the Avalanche will have a two-man advantage at a crucial point in the game.

  Illegal sticks are very common—“illegal” meaning the blade is too wide, or has too much of a curve, or is too long. In the playoffs, everyone is trying to get an edge, and everyone knows it. So it’s like an elaborate game with its own set of rules. Everybody does it—the trick is in the timing. For example, guys play with illegal sticks for most of the game, but also have a “legal” stick stored on a rack behind the bench.

  Nobody would dare to make that call in the regular season—you’d be seen as a petty worm. If a team even tried it, there would probably be a bench-clearing brawl (see what I mean about unwritten rules?). But if Colorado can win this game they eliminate us, so Hartley gambles.