ALL FOR ONE
Naming the all-time team of rare players who stuck with it for just one franchise
I’M NOT sure that seeing a picture of Steven Stamkos in a Nashville uniform the other day struck any sense of discord other than being blinded by the garish-looking jersey — and this is not a commentary on Fanatics, by the way.
We’ve just become so anesthetized to players switching teams after lengthy careers with an identified franchise. It didn’t take long to acclimate to seeing Marty St. Louis in a Rangers uniform after personifying the Lightning for so long. At first it was impossible to envision Raymond Bourque playing somewhere outside of Boston and now all people remember is that he won the Cup in Colorado in 2001.
It is too early to project Connor McDavid’s career arc and it is safe to say that if you believe that Auston Matthews will play his entire career in Toronto, that would make one of us. It seems impossible to believe that Nathan MacKinnon would play outside of Colorado — equally impossible that Adam Fox would renounce his lifetime membership in the Rangers Fan Club — but never is a long time.
At this moment, though, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty, Victor Hedman, Kris Letang and Marc-Edouard Vlasic are among the last of the career one-teamers. Loyalty and sentimentality went out with the hard cap, though the likes of Ed Giacomin, Jean Ratelle and Phil Esposito might want to have a word about loyalty and sentimentality in the mid-1970s, as well.
So who makes up the all-time one-team All-Stars?
The all-time, first-team, oneteam goaltender is Ken Dryden, who may have played only 397 games in his NHL career but won five Stanley Cups in seven full seasons with Montreal. If you want to make a cutoff of 500 career games, fine, but there was never, ever a better money goalie than the product of Cornell, and that includes Billy Smith and Patrick Roy.
Do you want your second-team, one-team goaltender to have an asterisk next to his name? What do we do with the knowledge that Henrik Lundqvist, who played all of his 887 NHL games with the Rangers, had signed to play with the Caps before the King’s heart condition would not allow him to continue his career?
Technically, Lundqvist is the all-time one-team goalie. If, however, you insist on a pristine one-franchise netminder, the second-team honor goes to Carey Price, whose contract probably prevented him from being traded at the end, but played his entire 712-game career with Montreal.
Our all-time, one-team, firstteam defense pair consists of Nicklas Lidstrom, who played his 1,564 game NHL career with the Red Wings and Denis Potvin, the four-time winning Cup captain who played his entire 1,060 game career with the Islanders.
And by the way, could there ever have been a more dramatic example of Worlds Colliding had Potvin taken up Mike Keenan’s invitation to join the Rangers in 1993-94, five years after the Hall of Famer had retired? Would have been as insane a concept as Bryan Trottier actually coaching the Rangers, for goodness sakes. Who’d have believed any of it?
Anyway, it’s Lidstrom and Potvin on the first team with the still-active Doughty 1,177 games into his Kings career paired with Jacques Laperriere, whose 691-game career with the Canadiens included five Cups.
You know, Laperriere’s stint behind the Bruins bench as an assistant was as bizarre to the eye as seeing, I don’t know, maybe Trottier, or Terry O’Reilly or Ted Green ( !!!! ) for goodness sakes behind the Rangers bench as an assistant. Wayne Cashman? It’s as crazy as if Derek Sanderson actually played for the Rangers.
Our all-time, one-team, firstteam center is Mario Lemieux, who might have owned every meaningful offensive category had he been in good health throughout a career that is unparalleled in his 8915 games with the Penguins.
Maurice Richard, 978 games with the Canadiens, is on the right with Ovechkin, 1,426 matches with Washington, on the left to fill out the first line.
There could have been a Pittsburgh sweep in the middle, but I’m going with Jean Beliveau and his 10Cup, 1,125-game career with the Canadiens ahead of Crosby. The second line has Mike Bossy, 752 games
as an Islander and the greatest pound-for-pound goalscorer in history on the right with Bob Gainey and his 1,160-game career for Montreal on the left.
I went with Gainey and his 1,160 game career with Montreal as the second-team, one-team left wing over Daniel Sedin, 1,306 games with Vancouver and Bill Barber, 903 games as a Flyer.
Honorable Mention goes to Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, Stan Mikita, Malkin, Gilbert Perrault, Henri Richard, Henrik Sedin and Kopitar down the middle.
Martin Brodeur played 99.44 percent of his career as a Devil, 1,259 games with New Jersey before seven with St. Louis. Billy Smith played 99.26 percent of his career with the Islanders, playing in 674 games after starting his career with five appearances with the Kings in 1971-72. Olaf Kolzig played 711 games with Washington, 98.88 percent of his career, before getting into eight contests with Tampa Bay.
The all-time one-team Rangers: G: Lundqvist; D: Ron Greschner, Adam Fox; LW: Chris Kreider; C: Walt Tkachuk; RW: Rod Gilbert.