A bit of Fedorov scuttlebutt for your Saturday evening reading

Now I have a story to tell, and I’m gonna tell it after this note from the New York Post’s Larry Brooks:

So maybe the Red Wings will never erect a statue of Sergei Fedorov outside their arena, but have not the statute of limitations run out on the transcendent center’s 1998 perceived offer sheet transgression with Carolina? 

It is surely past time for Detroit to retire Fedorov’s No. 91. 

Brooks continues; and here’s the story that I have been told (and it’s late July, so you get this one, but I do NOT like to tread in this kind of talk of, “Lies, rumors and innuendo” any more):

My understanding of the situation is that the offer sheet-signing is what cost Sergei Fedorov the alternate captain’s “A” on his jersey, which went to Nicklas Lidstrom, but that’s only Chapter 1 of a two-chapter tale.

Chapter 2, of course, is the contentious departure of Sergei Fedorov from the Red Wings in the summer of 2003, in which, if you followed the Russian newspapers at the time (and I did), the now-deceased Viktor Fedorov, Sergei’s father, insisted that he had a contract with the Red Wings for a few less million dollars “on the table,” but yanked out from under him by the Red Wings’ management…

While the Red Wings’ management, including Ken Holland, Jimmy Devellano, and one Mr. Mike Ilitch himself, felt that Fedorov did indeed have a contract on the table for a few less million dollars that the Ducks had offered him, and that Fedorov had agreed to sign it before he and agent Pat Brisson inked a 5-year, $40 million contract with the Anaheim Ducks instead.

It’s my understanding that the Red Wings’ offer was somewhere in between the $32-36 million range for 4-5 seasons, but dad, who was pals with the one-time Sport-Express scribe Igor Larin, felt that the family had been crossed, and that the Red Wings’ actions forced Sergei to sign with Anaheim.

That is the story as it was told in Sport-Express and Sovetsky Sport. Whether it is accurate or not is up for serious debate, as the Russian press often cast a sympathetic eye toward players who they insisted were never given enough ice time or paid enough money for their wares…

But Ken Holland and the deary departed Mike Ilitch are gone, and there is a strong undercurrent suggesting that the figures that remain from the 2003 debacle remember both 1998 and 2003, and that the contract dispute that led to Fedorov leaving for Anaheim is the source of the lingering bad blood between the organization and Fedorov…

So much so that there was some talk of bringing Fedorov back in the spring of 2008 to play defense for the Red Wings, but that management was talked out of trading a prospect to the Capitals for Fedorov very specifically because he was Sergei Fedorov.

Again, that’s what I’ve been told. Both urban legends? Perhaps. But there is no #91 in the Red Wings’ rafters, even after the bridge-mending of the 2014 Winter Classic and Fedorov’s Hockey Hall of Fame induction in 2015, when he famously said that, “I got some bad advice from my agent.”

That’s the story as I have been told it. Whether there are grains of truth within, I do not know for certain.

[edit/addition: Please also remember that the Red Wings went to great expense and great risk to send Mr. Ilitch’s private jet out to Seattle, Washington to help Fedorov defect during the 1990 Goodwill Games, and the team felt particularly betrayed by a player who they’d quite literally given house, home and maroon Corvette to during his early days chose to leave them. /end edit]