Captain Vancouver — Page 4

Then the Rangers scored twice. And when Mark Messier tied the game with half the period remaining, Pritchard brought the Cup up to the concourse level. “Then a strange thing happened,” he said. As soon as the Cup reached daylight, the Canucks scored and went on to win the game. Pritchard was sure this was a dire portent for the Rangers.

So was the city of Vancouver, after a Game 6 win that then-team owner Arthur Griffiths called “the greatest game ever played at Pacific Coliseum.” Then, in Game 7 back in Manhattan, Linden tried his damnedest to win the Jug himself, scoring both goals as the Canucks fought desperately to tie the game—and almost did when Nathan LaFayette hit the Rangers’ goal post with less than three minutes to play. “That was tough,” says Linden, about that ring of the iron, which was actually a death knell. As for the loss, well, he says, “that stays with you for a long time.”

That series was itself a portent. Canuck history was about to take a nasty turn. First came a riot in Vancouver, then an NHL lockout the following season, and then, despite off-ice happiness—he married Vancouver native Cristina Giusti—two tough seasons for Linden. His “Iron Man” streak of 482 consecutive games ended when he sprained a knee in Philadelphia on December 1, 1996. “I didn’t have the puck and the guy that hit me didn’t have the puck. We just banged into one another and he hit my knee. I was out over two months. That was basically the first injury I ever had.”

Things got worse. General Manager Pat Quinn was fired in 1997. A few days later, head coach Tom Renney got dumped in favour of Mike Keenan, and Linden was replaced as captain by recent arrival Mark Messier—rather, by himself. He graciously offered the “C” to the legend he’d gone head to head with in 1994 and Keenan supported the move, making it abundantly clear that not just the dressing room, but the team, was Linden’s no more.

Keenan kept people on edge as a tool of motivation and control. It had helped propel the Rangers to a Stanley Cup, but the method was the Mad Hatter crossed with Snidely Whiplash. When Canuck defenceman Grant Ledyard (with the team’s permission) went to Dallas to be with his wife, who was receiving cancer treatments, Keenan had Ledyard’s locker-room stall cleaned out. Keenan told the players that Ledyard had abandoned them. And when Linden hurt his knee in a game in Phoenix and Ledyard came to check on him between periods, Keenan, who considered injuries a betrayal of the team, ejected Ledyard from the trainer’s room on a jet-stream of profanity.

When the Canucks played St. Louis three weeks later, in one of those games where a team can show solidarity with their coach by pasting his previous team, Vancouver got walloped 5-1, and Keenan unloaded on Linden—who had returned early from a groin injury for the game. “He thought Linden was a pussy and told him so—in front of his teammates,” says Gary Mason. “It was nasty, nasty stuff and made Trevor hate going to the rink for the first time in his life. He handled it with the class we’ve come to expect but it really, really hurt. There’s a part of Trevor Linden that will never forgive Mike Keenan.”

Linden agrees that the low point in his hockey life, and perhaps life in general, came that miserable season. “It was the darkest time for me, for sure, and not only because of my relationship with Mike. Pat Quinn had been fired, the organization was going through tremendous turmoil, and the team was struggling on the ice. It was just a bad, extremely difficult time.”

It was thus bittersweet relief when the Canucks traded him to the Islanders on February 6, 1998. Fittingly, on a franchise that was treating its first-class citizen in a second-class way, he heard the news from the equipment manager. “I just came off the ice and Pat O’Neill—he was a close friend—came in and gave me the news,” says Linden, who points out that this is not unusual because equipment men get called early by their counterparts on the new team to inquire about the traded player’s gear. “Obviously, I never got along with Mike,” says Linden. “But I wouldn’t put that on him.”

Coming this way was Todd Bertuzzi, a 23-year-old problem child of infinite potential with a talent for getting in the way of himself. To the city, it played like Greek tragedy: the evil villain (Keenan) banishing the wounded young hero (Linden was still just 27) in exchange for, among others, a dubious hero-in-waiting in Bertuzzi.

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