99

by Al Strachan

  “Players are going to put in more when they see how hard he works,” Keenan said. “A guy like Chris Pronger is not going to dare to have a bad practice now, and that’s what players like Wayne Gretzky bring to your team.”

  Keenan said he could see the Blues coming together just the way Team Canada ’87 did. “These guys just don’t know it yet.”

  Neither did most other people. The Blues certainly did not immediately start to dominate the league, even though, in most ways, Gretzky looked like Gretzky.

  He still wore the same style of Jofa helmet, one much loathed by NHL officials because it was basically useless. It was often said that if someone threw an egg at it, the helmet was more likely to crack than the egg.

  But Gretzky—who, like most hockey players didn’t like to modify equipment—loved it, and the league’s grandfather clause allowed him to use it for the rest of his career.

  That style of helmet had been out of production for a decade or so. In fact, every year the company’s representatives made a point of sending a letter to the few NHL players who still wore them. It was full of legalese that translated to “Please don’t wear this helmet any more.”

  “We didn’t have many because they didn’t want to make them anymore,” laughed Gretzky in 2013. “Every time they sent me one, they’d say, ‘This is the last one.’ When I was playing in New York, the Rangers went to their third uniform and it was that dark blue, and I didn’t have a helmet that was that colour of blue, so I had to paint one.

  “All the helmets had to match. But if you look at the old tapes of the Oilers, there were six or seven different colours of blue depending on whether the helmet was Jofa or CCM or Cooper or whatever. You can’t do that now.”

  So it came as something of a surprise when Gretzky wore a blue Jofa helmet at his first Blues practice. Had the team’s trainers painted his white one? If so, how had they got the paint to dry so quickly? He’d been in town only an hour or so before he hit the ice.

  It was simple foresight. As soon as the trade was announced, the Blues’ trainers dug deep into the storeroom in St. Louis and found a few old helmets in mint condition. They then packed some for the trip to Vancouver. The pleas of the Jofa representatives continued to go unheeded.

  And Gretzky continued to use an aluminum Easton stick, although he told me the silver one he had used in Los Angeles was to be retired in favour of a blue aluminum version.

  “I didn’t know Easton made blue sticks,” I said.

  “They didn’t make silver ones, either, until I went to L.A.,” said Gretzky.

  The specifications for the sticks of both hues were the same, and he continued to go through them at the usual rate.

  But while the good news for the St. Louis fans was that Gretzky continued to look and play the same as he always had, the bad news was that the Blues as a team did too. They didn’t change, and they certainly didn’t appear to improve with his inclusion in the lineup.

  In fact, when Gretzky arrived, the Blues were two games over .500. When the regular season ended, they were two games under .500.

  He scored in the first period of his first game, and Keenan had him on the ice for almost half the game. “He wasn’t in as good a shape as he should have been,” recalled Keenan. “I don’t know if they weren’t pushing him that hard in L.A. or what.”

  The fact that Gretzky had lost twenty pounds during the course of the two-month negotiation, largely as a result of stress, was probably a factor.

  “It might have been,” conceded Keenan. “He went out for dinner after the game and the waiter said, ‘What can I get you, Mr. Gretzky?’ and he said, ‘A bottle of oxygen.’ ”

  Over the course of the eighteen games he played for the Blues in the regular season, Gretzky contributed twenty-one points. But the fact remained that the style he preferred to play wasn’t the one Keenan liked. Dale Hawerchuk, another St. Louis forward, explained it this way. “Mike’s style is very tight. You don’t make too many chance passes. If you make a pass through the middle and it gets picked off, even if you’re the first guy back, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t like that play. When I first came here, he sat me quite a bit to drill it into me, but that’s the style he plays.”

  When I put the matter to Keenan, he said the prohibition might be eased a bit for Gretzky. “It’s suitable for some and not for others,” he said. “Most often, Wayne is not putting it on somebody else’s stick.”

  There were other areas of adjustment, though. Shayne Corson said, “Wayne likes his wingers to come late, and I’m the type of player who likes to be up, to be ahead of the play a little bit more, to drive to the net a little bit more. With Wayne, you come late and he finds you. He’s got eyes in the back of his head.”

  But Corson conceded that, from a defensive point of view, Gretzky’s approach had its advantages. “With Wayne, you want to be high to get a good chance to shoot the puck,” Corson said. “If you’re already high and the puck gets turned over, then you’re already there to make it a lot easier on yourself.”

  There was also the on-ice relationship between Gretzky and Brett Hull to consider. Although Gretzky was a great sniper in his own right, he felt that in this case, he would contribute more as the set-up man with Hull doing the sniping, the same sort of arrangement he’d worked out to great advantage with Mario Lemieux in the 1987 Canada Cup.

  “Brett has to learn to play off me in the sense that I’ll give him the puck,” Gretzky explained. “He doesn’t have to spend time trying to chase down loose pucks and getting the puck. Now he’s got to spend more time getting open. I think it’s going to make his game easier.”

  There was another area that required modification. Keenan was in the forefront of today’s style of hockey—short, hard shifts of forty seconds. Gretzky certainly wasn’t stuck in the earlier era of three-minute shifts, such as those played by Phil Esposito, but he felt comfortable staying on the ice for ninety seconds.

  “He’s still going to get his ice time,” Keenan said. “He’ll get twenty-seven minutes or more each game. But I want them in shifts of forty seconds or so.”

  Keenan always had a habit of being totally unpredictable because he felt it kept players off balance. It was a concept he had learned from Scott Bowman, the idea being that if a player never knows what to expect next from the coach, he’s more alert and more determined to do the right thing.

  Keenan’s explanation of his system included the assertion that the only unbreakable rule is the one that says no rules are unbreakable. “You don’t implement a system and say, ‘This is my system,’ or, ‘This is our system.’ What you do is adjust to the personnel you have. Variables are great because it’s hard to defend against them.

  “You make the adaptation as a coach to the personnel you have—at least, that’s my philosophy. We’ve got to have a semblance of order and discipline and structure, but at the same time you’ve got to create an environment that allows the creative abilities of athletes to surface.”

  Nevertheless, as the Blues struggled towards the end of the eighty-two-game season, there was no indication that they would cause any ripples in the playoffs. Keenan purported to be unconcerned.

  “The only game I want to be ready for is Game Eighty-three,” he would say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Towards the end of that eventful 1995–96 season, the Detroit Red Wings whacked the Blues 8–1. Those expecting a Keenan meltdown were disappointed. He disappeared seconds after the game and went to Vail, Colorado, where he owned a hideaway on the ski slopes.

  Those who knew Keenan well just chuckled. “I wouldn’t say he’s intentionally lying in the weeds,” said one, “but I wouldn’t underestimate him for a minute.”

  Sure enough, the Blues opened the playoffs with a series win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. At first glance, that might not seem like a great achievement, but by virtue of having more wins in the regular season, the Leafs had been given the home-ice advantage.

  Furthermore, every
pre-series assessment included a statement along the lines of “The Blues must have Grant Fuhr playing the way he tends to play in the post-season if they’re going to be a factor.” But in the second game—with Fuhr sporting a 0.89 goals-against average, Nick Kypreos fell on Fuhr in a goalmouth scramble. Fuhr’s knee was injured so severely that he was out indefinitely.

  “When Grant Fuhr got hurt, that kind of changed everything for us and the team,” recalled Gretzky in 2013. “I had thought we had a really good chance.”

  Nevertheless, the Blues won the series in six games and advanced to the next round. This one figured to be much more onerous. Detroit was by far the best team in the league that year, having finished with 131 points. The second-place team, the Philadelphia Flyers, had 103 points. The Blues had 80.

  If the Blues were to knock off the Wings, it would not only be an upset, it would be the biggest upset in the history of the National Hockey League.

  To do it at all would be astonishing. To do it with Jon Casey in goal would border on miraculous. Casey had been outstanding in a playoff run five years earlier, but his talent appeared to have fallen off considerably, and, on average, he allowed a goal a game more than the injured Fuhr.

  Did Kypreos do it intentionally? “Absolutely,” said Keenan in a 2012 interview. “Absolutely. I’ve always said that if Kippy didn’t destroy Grant’s knee, we might have won the Cup. Gretz says that too. I still see Kippy and I tell him he did it on purpose. He just laughs. He says, ‘I accidentally fell on him on purpose.’

  “God bless Jon Casey. The guy played as well as he could play, but he was not Grant Fuhr. When we lost Grant, the team got a little edgy defensively. They were nervous. You could sense that they stayed back instead of going for it like Gretz and those guys could do.

  “If we had Grant, I don’t know if we would have won the Cup, but we would probably have beaten Detroit. And for that matter, I don’t know if Scotty Bowman would have lasted as their coach.”

  It was in that setting that one of the greatest series ever played kicked off. Had this been a Stanley Cup final, it would have been the stuff of legend. But because it was only the second round, it gets written off as remarkable but not great. That is an underassessment of the first degree.

  It started off as many suspected, with the Wings winning the first game at home, but the pot-stirring by the two coaches was well under way.

  The matter of injuries was under discussion. Gretzky was reportedly hurt, but pretending not to be. Wings star Sergei Fedorov was pretending to be hurt when he wasn’t. “He’s a disgrace,” snorted Keenan.

  Bowman, who doesn’t miss much that takes place on a hockey rink, left no doubt as to his view. “Gretzky’s hurt,” he said flatly as we sat in his office with the door closed. “He’s wincing. He was in real pain. Every time he came by the bench, I was watching him. He’s really hurt. He only played nineteen minutes, and that’s unusual for him.”

  In Game Two, the good news for the Blues was that their first-period power play was operating at a 50-per-cent clip. The bad news was that Jon Casey’s save percentage was only slightly better. And since Casey faced eleven shots from the Detroit Red Wings, that put the Blues down 5–1 after only twenty minutes. The final score, when the afternoon’s proceedings dragged to their merciful conclusion, was 8–3.

  Now it was the turn of the Blues’ players to feel the sharpness of Keenan’s tongue. “Casey played very poorly. He was awful,” he said.

  But the fault was certainly not all Casey’s. The Blues’ two big stars, Hull and Gretzky, also played poorly.

  “Wayne let his man go twice, and they got two goals off it,” said Keenan. “That was pretty much the end of the hockey game. It was over in five minutes.”

  “He’s right,” Gretzky said. “I stink. The second goal was definitely my fault, and the other night was my fault as well. I missed a breakaway when it was 2–2.” Needless to say, Gretzky wouldn’t admit to being injured. That was something he never did, always saying that if you were healthy enough to go on the ice, there were no excuses.

  Keenan moved on to other targets—Chris Pronger being one. “That was a very undisciplined penalty he took early on,” Keenan said. “A selfish penalty.” Was it a humiliation? “That would be a pretty good summary, fairly accurate,” Keenan conceded. “We haven’t got a chance to win a playoff series if our best players, including Brett Hull, play like that.”

  As far as most fans were concerned, they didn’t have a chance anyway. The Blues saw it differently. Looking like a completely different team, they shut down the Wings 1–0 in the next game, with Gretzky getting the goal. It came on a breakaway, and he didn’t bother with any fakes, choosing instead to simply blast the puck between the legs of Detroit goalie Chris Osgood.

  “That was my Joe Sakic snap shot,” he said with a laugh. “Actually, I’ve had four or five breakaways in the playoffs, and when I had one against Osgood, he moved to the side. I felt as soon as I got the puck tonight that I was going to go for the five-hole.”

  It was his first playoff goal since June 5, 1993. Was it a relief?

  “It was probably more of a relief for you guys than for me,” he smiled. “For the first five games in the Toronto series, I feel I played as well as I can play. The first game in this series, I was mediocre, and in the second game, I played poorly. But all of a sudden, it’s starting to roll again.”

  It rolled for Gretzky and the Blues in the next game. And the next. Suddenly, the hockey world was noticing. The Blues were one game away from knocking off a team that had finished fifty-one points ahead of them!

  It wasn’t overly pretty. The defensive plan, as explained by Blues forward Craig MacTavish, was simple: “Everybody go to the front of the net and start chopping.”

  But really, the Blues were doing everything that needed to be done, paying total attention to detail and, as a bonus, getting great goaltending from Casey. They still needed one more win, however, and they knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  Hull’s statement on the matter was typical. “Confident?” he snorted in answer to a question. “We’re playing the best team in hockey.”

  The Blues produced a great effort, and with less than five minutes to play, trailed 3–2, but lost 4–2. That sent the series back to Detroit for Game Seven, and now, to darken the outlook even further, Casey’s participation was questionable.

  At least Keenan said it was, but that didn’t really mean an awful lot.

  “It’s uncertain at this point,” he said on the off-day.

  As expected, Casey did play. And he was outstanding. At the other end, so was Osgood. The Wings had the better chances, though—and a lot more of them—and Casey was repeatedly called upon to stop shots that looked like sure goals.

  After one period, the score was 0–0.

  After two periods, the score was 0–0.

  After three periods, the score was 0–0.

  After the first overtime, the score was 0–0.

  In the second overtime, the Wings went to the attack right away, and Fedorov had a glorious chance from the edge of the crease. But Casey, as he had done all night, shut the door. Moments later, the Wings were coming out of their zone down the left side when Gretzky, reaching back one-handed, almost intercepted a pass that probably would have sent him in alone. But the bouncing puck skipped over his stick and went to Steve Yzerman, who raced across centre ice with Gretzky in hot pursuit, moving towards the right point. Once there, he unleashed a shot that rocketed over Casey’s shoulder into the upper corner.

  In some accounts of that game, Gretzky is blamed for a turnover, but that was hardly the case. Keenan saw defenceman Murray Baron as a much greater contributor to the Blues defeat than Gretzky.

  “Murray Baron!” he said with some vehemence. “I can still see it. The guy lifted his leg. If he just keeps his foot on the ice, the puck bounces off his shin pad.”

  “It was going to be a goal like that that won it,” Hull said, “or a goal where someone went
wide and then put it out front to a guy coming in. There’s nothing anybody can do about a shot like that. Jon was screened and it took him a while to pick it up.”

  In 2013, I asked Gretzky if he had indeed been hurt. “My pride was hurt,” he said ruefully. “No, I wasn’t hurt. I can’t lie. I played well in that series after the first two games when we were down 2–0. I played really well the next three games that we won, and I thought I was okay in Game Six. I thought I was okay in Game Seven, too, but we lost 1–0 in double overtime.”

  It was a heartbreaking defeat for the Blues, who had started to believe they could pull off the biggest playoff upset in NHL history.

  “You sit on the bench and there’s nothing but positive things going through your mind,” said Hull. “You picture the team winning, and you see yourself scoring the winning goal. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over and you’re numb.”

  That was Gretzky’s last game with the Blues.

  No one had ever expected it to end that way. When the Blues acquired Gretzky, they had intended to keep him around for at least three years, and he himself had intended to finish his career there. His wife, Janet, was from St. Louis, and he considered it to be a great place to raise a family. He had even started looking for a house.

  “The day I got traded, we met with the ownership and the general manager,” said Gretzky in 2013. “I wanted to get a deal done that day. They kept saying, ‘We’re going to do it.’

  “A week later, they were still saying, ‘We’ll get a deal done,’ and before we knew it we were into the playoffs and I said, ‘You know what? Forget about it. Let’s see what happens in the off-season.’

  “It had nothing to do with Mike Keenan. He was sort of on the outside. He was coaching and sort of acting GM but the ownership, they just wouldn’t sit down with us and ink a deal.

  “I wanted to sign the day I got traded. I wanted them to fly to Vancouver and get the deal done, but it never got done.”

  Rumours exist that Gretzky and Keenan had a major blowup, but Keenan denies it. “No,” he said flatly when asked if that was the case.