Devils Preview: Claude Lemieux Autographed Card

This will likely be the preface to all of this year's Season Preview posts: 2020 is a different beast and requires adaptability; in my case, it means the joint posts with my "main/personal" blog will not be in the "player here/analysis there" format but rather the entire scope of the analysis will take place here and the player will have some sort of direct connection to what's written. Caveats: at this point, despite the season being set to start in Mid-January, several impact players haven't found a team yet and quite a few teams are currently above the salary cap, which means there is much maneuvering left to do.

The New Jersey Devils (team links may bring forth referral money for me) started off with 6 losses, then in December proceeded to lose 10 of 12, leading to the justified and overdue firing of head coach John Hynes, who inexplicably found employment with the Nashville Predators afterwards. Rookie coach Alain Nasreddine was able to garner points in 26 out of the team's final 38 games, but that wasn't enough for GM Tom Fitzgerald, who instead went with Old Boys' Club lifetime member Lindy Ruff to lead the team in a shortened season with little to no real training camp and no pre-season games, which is a huge mistake in my book (and yet another example of a French Canadian getting the shaft uselessly). Playing it "safe" may cost him in the end.

What makes their odds look good:
Oh, boy. There are players who are doing an ok job in a first-line role when they could perhaps be better used on a second line instead (Nico Hischier at this point in his career and Kyle Palmieri), terrific prospects up-front in Nolan Foote (20 years old, 6'4" and 200 pounds, three years from an NHL job and five from his prime), Alexander Holtz (18, 6'1", pro-level shot, needs two or three years in Europe and to add weight), Dawson Mercer (19, dominating in Juniors, three or four years away) and Jack Hughes (19, never should have made the team last year). On defense, Ty Smith (20, best defenseman in the WHL, two years from NHL job, five from his prime) is a great cornerstone to build upon, and P.K. Subban, Damon Severson and Will Butcher can each play much better than they did last year. Mackenzie Blackwood has looked like the real deal, mostly, compared to Cory Schneider.

Question marks:
Well, technically, everything written above was true. But Subban and Butcher could also continue stagnating; Subban in particular seems at a loss when not playing for high stakes (then again, when the guy who acquires you pretty much loses his job over it, the best player on the team wants to leave, and the fanbase is hoping to tank for a high draft pick, it's probably hard to find motivation). Is Pavel Zacha's niche as a third-line center? There are active first-rounders who have thrived after finding a home in the middle of the lineup after aiming for more prime minutes, such as Lars Eller with the Washington Capitals, so it's not unheard of, but it's a far cry from calling him the steal of his draft year, as former GM Ray Shero did. Points given for enthusiasm, (more) points taken for failing to manage expectations.

Outlook:
I thought the team was trending up, I really did. Adding Ryan Murray and Dmitri Kulikov on defense solidifies the back end, Andreas Johnsson didn't cost anything and is a solid second-liner, and adding Corey Crawford to platoon with Blackwood looked like a great idea... until he retired earlier this morning, less than 24 hours after taking a leave of absence for personal reasons. He had yet to play a single minute, and it's still the team's biggest loss since Ilya Kovalchuk. I'll give him a proper send-off later this year.

Prediction:
Eighth in the East.

The Devils have three Stanley Cups (1994-95, 1999-2000, and 2002-03), which they won on the strength of playing the trap and a trio of unique defensemen: the speedy Scott Niedermayer, the punishing Scott Stevens, and the bruising Ken Daneyko. Stevens won the Conn Smythe Trophy in the 2000 Final, and opposing goalie Jean-Sébastien Giguère from the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim won it in 2003.

1995 was a different, special beast. It was a lockout-shortened season, for one, and the first since 1980 where a Canadian team didn't make it to a Conference Final: the most efficient playoff performer of all-time, Patrick Roy, missed the postseason cut for the only time of his career; the first seed in the East, the Québec Nordiques, were ousted in the first round by the defending champion New York Rangers, opting to play rookie Jocelyn Thibault in a high-pressure situation he perhaps wasn't ready for; the Philadelphia Flyers plowed through Dominik Hasek and his Buffalo Sabres before sweeping the Rangers, while the West saw multiple sweeps leading to the Cup Final, but the fast-skating Detroit Red Wings of Sergei Fedorov, Paul Coffey, Vyacheslav Kozlov and Nicklas Lidstrom were unable to get through the wall of D at the Devils' blue line, and a certain Claude Lemieux, who they would get to know much better in the next five years as a member of the Colorado Avalanche, led all playoff skaters with 13 goals, including a couple in the Final, one of them a game-winner.

This is what he looked like wearing the Devils' red (away) uniform:

That's card #258 from Upper Deck's 1995-96 Series 1 set and Mike Milbury's Scouting Report sub-set, because you really want "Mad" Mike Milbury's take on players... here's what he had to say about Lemieux:

I've been prone to hyperbole myself and, sure, a case can be made for Hall Of Fame consideration when it comes to Lemieux, but to deem him to have Hart Trophy potential in prime Jaromir Jagr, Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Dominik Hasek, and Fedorov era, and even compared to his own Avs teammates the following year in Roy, Joe Sakic, and Peter Forsberg is, well, madness.

Two Claude Lemieux Jersey Cards

Sometimes, a series of events ring a bell enough to remind you of a subject, or a person. In my case today, it was the lull between the end of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and the start of free agency, where this year's top available forward will be regular-season average player but playoff (and particularly Game 7 beast), Conn Smythe winner Justin Williams which, coupled with the ongoing Arizona Coyotes saga, making a perfect storm that led me to thinking about Claude Lemieux.

Lemieux is a touchy subject for many - and has been pretty much since he debuted in the NHL in his third attempt, in 1985-86, winning the Stanley Cup with the Montréal Canadiens and a whole bunch of young studs including Conn Smythe record holder (having won it three times) Patrick Roy, as well as youngsters Guy Carbonneau, Gaston Gingras, Chris Chelios, Mike McPhee, Brian Skrudland, Stéphane Richer, Kjell Dahlin, David Maley, Mike Lalor, Craig Ludwig, Randy Bucyk, John Kordic and Petr Svoboda, established stars Bobby Smith, Mats Naslund and Chris Nilan, and seasoned veteran Hall of Famers Larry Robinson and Bob Gainey. Lemieux scored 10 goals and had 6 assists in 20 games that postseason, the biggest goal coming in a Game 7 overtime against the Hartford Whalers.

From the get-go, he had a knack at getting under opponents' skin. Well, opponents and coaches. Pat Burns famously told team medic to not attend to him faking an injury on the ice by saying ''Qu'il crève!'' (literal translation: ''Let him die!'') in the 1989 Stanley Cup Final, just months after a run-in at practice where Lemieux, trying to take on a leadership role, asked Burns to ease up on the powerplay unit which had gone on drills for a while, with Burns retaliating by putting his stick's blade under Lemieux's chin with what seemed like the intention of slicing it.

But the rugged forward was mostly known for infuriating opponents. In the 1986-87 season, the Habs were involved in three bench-clearing brawls in two games, the first two occurring against the Québec Nordiques in the infamous Good Friday (''Vendredi Saint'') game, and the third against the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs.

Lemieux had a habit/superstition of shooting a puck into the opponent's open net after the pre-game skate, and the Flyers, as a tough team trying to mark their territory, had told him to stop. So of course, he and fellow trouble-maker Shayne Corson waited for the Flyers' players to leave the ice and go to their dressing room to get back onto the ice with a puck and shoot it in the net, prompting all 24 Flyers skaters to head back onto the ice and engage in a veritable alleyway fight with the 20 Habs players - with no referee in sight.

Obviously, most people remember him for the dirty hit on the Detroit Red Wings' Kris Draper:

... and his turtling instead of answering the bell when Darren McCarthy went to fight him in retaliation.

And that hit - and his reaction to it - was what brought the Avs-Wings rivalry onto the next level for the next half-dozen years, as both teams were Cup contenders and frequent postseason adversaries. However, we tend to forget that it happened the year the Colorado Avalanche won their first Stanley Cup (the year they moved into town, no less), and that it was Lemieux's second consecutive championship, having won the Cup and the Conn Smythe the previous year with the New Jersey Devils where he scored 13 goals to lead all playoff skaters. He won another one in Jersey in 2000.

He was the fourth player ever to win Cups with three different teams, and the fifth to win consecutive ones with different teams. He has twice the number of Cups as Mario Lemieux (let that sink in... and remember Mario played with Jaromir Jagr, Ron Francis, Paul Coffey, Joe Mullen, Larry Murphy, Mark Recchi, Ulf Samuelsson, and regularly had multiple 100-point scorers on his team), and two major victories with Team Canada, a Canada Cup (1987), a World Juniors gold (1985), and was on the runner-up team at the inaugural World Cup (1996).

He also got a few Selke Trophy votes three times, once finishing in sixth place. But after slowing down while with the Phoenix Coyotes and splitting a season between Arizona and the Dallas Stars in 2002-03, he retired... only to return for a final swan song in 2008-09, playing 18 games with the San Jose Sharks. All told, he ranks third in playoff game-winners with 19, behind Wayne Gretzky and Brett Hull (at 24 apiece), ahead of the likes of Joe Sakic, Maurice Richard, Mike Bossy and Glenn Anderson.

The first time he retired, he became team president of the ECHL's Phoenix RoadRunners, and participated in the Spike TV show Pros vs. Joes; the second time he retired, he participated in CBC's Battle Of The Blades in 2009, finishing as runner-up, and in 2011 became chairman of the board of directors at GRAF, a hockey and figure skating equipment manufacturer from Alberta.

So while most of the hockey world remembers him as the Avs' pest, and people in Jersey seem to have forgotten his stellar play for them, most Montrealers remember him as a member of the Canadiens, a local boy (he grew up in Buckingham, Quebec) who made the big team and won the Cup at home.

I'm halfway, because the Avs were my mid-90s team. So I didn't mind when I pulled card #GJ-CL from Upper Deck's 2013-14 Series 1 set (part of the UD Game Jersey sub-set), though getting two the same day may have been slightly exaggerated:

It shows him wearing the team's white (then-home) uniform with matching game-worn jersey swatches (one seemingly more used than the other), at the old Forum, back when board ads were less prevalent and pervasive.