Friday, February 14, 2014

Peter Forsberg Jersey Card

As if Team Sweden hadn't been dealt enough blows with the losses of Henrik Sedin and Johan Franzen, it lost its captain Henrik Zetterberg yesterday, so most of its hopes for Olympic gold with rest not on their scoring ability, but on Henrik Lundqvist's ability to keep less from entering his own net than his team can put in their opponents'.

And so, a throwback to the Peter Forsberg-led teams of 1994 and 2006 seems improbably considering the powerhouses that are Russia, Canada, the USA, and now fall behind - at least on paper - the Czechs and Slovaks. Though you never know, and one hot goalie in any given game can give any team a victory it may not deserve.

With Sweden, Forsberg also won gold at the World Championships (1992 and 1998), World Cup bronze (1996) and an impressive collection of World Championship (1993, 2003 and 2004) and World Juniors (1992 and 1993) silver.

With his two Stanley Cups acquired while with the Colorado Avalanche, Forsberg has enough hardware to make the Triple Gold Club twice, a feat shared with only Viacheslav Fetisov and Igor Larionov.

All told, I find he's Hall Of Fame material, and the only reason why it can be debatable is because he didn't play over 1000 NHL games - though he did gather 885 points (in 708 games), and 171 more playoff points (in 151 games), more than a lot of HoFers, and does have an Art Ross, a Hart and a Calder trophy, as well as four important Swedish League trophies: two MVP trophies and two ''best player'' trophies.

With his Swedish team Modo, he has a career record consisting of 87 goals, 135 assists for 222 points in 210 games.

Forever linked to the Avs with whom he attempted two separate comebacks, he did have a 100-game stint with the Philadelphia Flyers (115 points) and 17 games with the Nashville Predators (15 points) that takes away from the romance of being a career-long, one-team guy that his captain in Colorado, Joe Sakic, had.

The card I purchased on Ebay last week shows him with the Flyers:
Like the others from that batch, it's from Upper Deck's 2013-14 Series 1 set from the UD Game Jersey sub-set, card #GJ-JL), and also has UD's post-mortem certificate of authenticity:
Just like for the rest of his career, the only thing that sticks in my mind regarding his tenure with the Flyers is "what if he had been healthy?"...

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