|
Time Healed Lindros and a Relationship |
|
|
|
|
|
Whenever anybody is allowed to get within pinching distance of Carter Hart again to verify he is for real, there will remain one irony to the three decade-long search for a Flyer long-term solution in goal.
Right under all the millions of noses perpetually out of joint in sports-mad Philadelphia always has remained the primary trait necessary for goaltending success: A short memory.
“It’s official, I’m coming home,” tweeted a happy Eric Lindros last week at the announcement he is becoming an official Flyers’ ambassador.
There is enough water under this bridge to surge over all six lanes of the Walt Whitman, more hatchets being buried in this multi-staged process of bringing the Big E back than there were fatalities at Little Big Horn. But, having chronicled in two books the whole ecstasy-to-good-riddance process leading to the most poisoned relationship between franchise and franchise player in the history of sports, we still hardly are surprised and certainly not disapproving.
These days, nobody needs to be reminded that life is even shorter than the work Lindros made of the Sabres in the 1995 first round. Forgiveness is far more divine than even that sequence in the 1997 Pittsburgh series where the 6-5 man mountain didn’t have a stick and kicked the puck around in his skates virtually unchallenged for a full 38 seconds before making a play that led to a goal. What Penguin was brave enough to try to push Zeus off his mountain?
Time heals, as has Eric’s brain from all the blows, thankfully. He got out with his health, plus a healthy perspective. The last guy in sports to prefer the grudge over adaptability to changing circumstances might have been Jackie Robinson when he retired rather than accept a trade to the hated Giants.
This columnist got his first clue that nothing is forever the night Dave Schultz got booed in his first post-trade game at the Spectrum for crosschecking Rick MacLeish. Dave Brown tried to take Tomas Sandstrom’s head off at Madison Square Garden and later ended up working for the Rangers.
But the occasion upon which I once and for all came to understood the power of amnesia was the 1996 day I participated in Ed Snider’s invitation-only and personally conducted tour of his new arena. On it also was former Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut, whose reneging on a verbal deal to trade Lindros to the Flyers in favor of a subsequent better offer by the Rangers set off the angry arbitration fight that Philadelphia won. Snider proudly showing off the building that Lindros’s presence helped get out of the ground to the lying rascal who tried to screw the Flyers out of the kid? Now that’s irony upon irony. Could have knocked me over that day with an Alexandre Daigle body check.
So, contrary to convenient assumptions, I am not so certain Eddie is rolling over in his grave today, now that No. 88 is back and reclassified as iconic. The late chairman and founder wasn’t on the orange carpet the 2014 night that the Flyers got around to inducting Lindros into their Hall of Fame–and did it smoothly thanks to Eric’s awkwardness-reducing idea to go in with John LeClair–but Snider told team president Paul Holmgren afterwards that he was glad the Flyers did it, no doubt because the reception was so blessedly and completely warm.
That was hard to foresee in 2000, when Lindros wanted out and the Flyers were anything but sorry he felt that way. By the end of his eight seasons in Philadelphia he was a hugely polarizing figure. There was some strong loyalty for Lindros within the fan base but the team didn’t fall apart without him so more stayed on the organization’s side.
The ground rules set by Snider when he hired me in 2013 to write The Flyers at 50 – was to dig no further into the Lindros falling out than had already become public. Ultimately new revelations about the divide within the team over taking him back deep into the 2000 Eastern Conference final made the book without censorship—there was virtually none with the entire project–but the point here is that even Snider gradually made his peace.
Once Lindros made the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2016 there could be no snub of No. 88 in the rafters alongside fellow Flyer enshrines Clarke, Snider, Bill Barber, Bernie Parent, Keith Allen, Fred Shero, and Mark Howe. And of course Eric could again be a big hit at alumni games, most of them for charity. But only now, as Lindros begins to represent the organization at functions, is the rehabilitation of a once-bitter relationship complete.
The then lack of NHL protocol with head trauma and the family’s distrust from Day One of almost everybody in the organization–not just the team doctors–made for a boiling caldron stirred vigorously by GM Bobby Clarke at his perception that the Lindroses were perpetually putting their kid above the team.
Nothing could ever made the ultimate team guy more crazy. Unnecessary things were said, climaxed when Lindros blamed trainer John Worley for not diagnosing symptoms that Eric never reported. That was the final straw with teammates, who when Lindros was cleared and ready to go for the final two games of an Eastern Conference final series, conducted the split vote on taking him back, the ayes winning only on this unassailable logic: One win from the Stanley Cup final, who would they rather have in the lineup: Eric Lindros or Peter White?
Lindros proved the Flyers’ best player in their Game Six loss, although some on that team always will feel that taking him back damaged morale built during two series wins without him. Next came the Scott Stevens hit in Game Seven, concussion No. 5 that needed a year to heal, the two sides now needing to move on despite championship expectations unfulfilled.
Sadly, after the 1995 semifinal and 1997 final runs, Lindros was healthy enough to participate in the playoffs only one more occasion and even then had missed significant time that season. For all the he-said-she-said as the result of the physical setbacks, it was the concussions themselves that led to the point of no return between he and team.
For all the unending swirls of controversy there never was a problem with the production of a player who is fourth in NHL history in points per game. Did he do it for long enough? There are ample Hall of Fame inductees whose number of peak years didn’t exceed No. 88’s.
Had Lindros remained relatively healthy, the distrust on both sides was not going to get in the way of the reason the Flyers had traded half their team to get him in the first place. Since last winning in 1975, they had been to four finals when the other club had the best player and the Sniders wanted to have him the next time they got there. And as Lindros gratefully has acknowledged even before this relationship began to be patched the Flyers were willing to spend what was necessary to put the best possible contender around him.
So, however uneasily, they likely would have gone on pursuing together a championship, the very reason the franchise always has existed and why Eric still wants to consider it home. It’s not like he won anything in New York, Toronto or Dallas to bind him there forever instead.
Holmgren, the GM and later team president–the only person Lindros trusted in the organization through all those years of alienation–is now a senior advisor and no longer there day-to-day. Clarke, much more consulted by Chuck Fletcher than he ever was by Ron Hextall, is back as a keeper of the Flyer culture under the management by Comcast people who basically only know that Eric Lindros used to be a star.
From different departments Clarke and Lindros will antagonize each other no further. Both are feeling more complete again at being involved, Clarke with a hockey team on the rise again, Eric with his sleeves rolled up for Covid19 causes among others. How does one be cynical about that?
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • 
Join the Discussion:
»