This is an interesting note from the Boston Globe’s Matt Porter, who filed his weekly NHL Notebook earlier today. The link comes from Paul Kukla of Kukla’s Korner:
Highest recommendation for the new ESPN documentary “Unrivaled,” which recalls the Avalanche-Red Wings battles of the mid-to-late 1990s. Compelling tales of a fantastic rivalry. The footage of Vladimir Konstantinov, both of his all-world playing days and compromised present day, is alone worth the view.
Those of us who grew up with newspaper and TV accounts, rather than the information overload of the Internet age, may not have realized just how nasty Claude Lemieux’s hit on Kris Draper was.
The reveal at the end — spoiler alert — that Draper still has not forgiven Lemieux was no surprise to former Red Wings GM Ken Holland.
“The emotions were real. They were very real,” said Holland, now the Oilers’ GM. “Drapes is really intense. It wasn’t like it was one year, it was six or seven years of that rivalry. His face was rearranged. I don’t blame him.”
Holland hasn’t seen the doc itself. “I’ll watch it someday,” he said. “It was pretty epic when we lived it.”
Continued; put bluntly, you can still see the difference between Kris Draper’s “regular” cheekbone and the cheekbone that is held together with titanium plates. I’ve never seen any reason for him to settle grievances with Claude.
Claude Lemieux is no monster–he’s a successful agent and an NHL parent–but he did a really shitty thing, and it’s not incumbent upon the person to whom he did the shitty thing to make amends…
And it’s also worth noting that yes, in today’s game, the Lemieux hit would never have been given a 2-game Stanley Cup Final suspension, because there would be multiple camera angles instantaneously uploaded to the internet and commented upon via social media. There’s no way that it would have been dismissed as a pure “hockey hit” that was accidental and nothing more.
