Mats Sundin's comeback road won't be smooth, plus more notes

Mats Sundin found out pretty quickly that regaining his old playing form is going to be a pretty tall order. Ian Jackson/Getty Images Jim Kelley's Mailbag Submit a comment or question for Jim. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

Mats Sundin, the not-so-accidental rental player, made his season debut with Vancouver on Wednesday night. He played about 15 minutes, had no goals or assists and looked, for the most part, like a guy who hadn't played a game since last March.

In other words, he looked like a Derek Jeter baseball glove: rust-colored and not very effective.

In fairness to Sundin, and with apologies to Jeter, that was to be expected. Sundin, the former Maple Leaf whose decision as to where and even if he would play was on a par with elephant gestation, looked a lot like Dumbo learning to fly. He was on the ice with mid-season-form players from both the Canucks and the Oilers, but he was hardly playing at their level.

"You miss your hands, your timing," Sundin said after spending an evening creating off-target passes, making unforced mistakes and losing half of his faceoffs. He skated short shifts that half the time appeared to be devoted to calculating how to get off the ice without costing his teammates a goal.

"You just want to make sure you don't get caught out there..." he said afterward.

Funny, I would have expected more from a guy making an estimated $5 million for half a season's work.

Still, first-game survival is not the issue for the soon-to-be 38-year-old. It's expected that he won't be the No.1 center on his new team and he's certainly not going to be captain and leader. What the Canucks management and players are hoping for is a close resemblance to the player who was once good for somewhere close to a point a game, capable of a clutch goal now and then, and able to anchor a second line that will take some of the scoring pressure off their other Swedish marvels, the Sedin twins.

The view from here is that's asking a lot.

I'm always wary of players who come back after a long battle with retirement contemplation. Even the ones who come back with every intention of being their old hockey selves struggle against players who have reached peak form. That might not bother the Canucks through the regular season, but if Sundin isn't close to what he used to be come playoff time, this will be a fiscal and public relations disaster.

History says that's more likely than not.

Peter Forsberg has been limping around for years trying to recreate his game. Scott Niedermayer, who took half a year off after the Ducks won the Stanley Cup, spent nearly twice that amount of time finding his game again. Teemu Selanne, one of the most gifted goal scorers of all time, struggled in his initial comeback after a similar time away. He's been hurt for long stretches of time since and one can easily argue that none of these players have truly regained the form they had before their lengthy sabbaticals.

It could be different for Sundin. The Canucks aren't expected to win the Cup this season, but they are a better team than they were a year ago when they didn't have him. They have kept a competitive position despite the loss of all-world goaltender Roberto Luongo to what may be a season-long groin problem. They are reasonably deep and they seem to have developed some team character that wasn't in evidence last season.

All that bodes well for Sundin who likely won't contribute much for weeks, maybe longer, but like Wednesday night's 50-50 faceoff ratio, his chances of making a long-term, meaningful contribution are about the same.

You could see that at the end of each of Mario Lemieux's many comebacks. He was always brilliant at the start. The problems came during the every-other-night action of the playoffs. That's where the oldest guy on the team came to realize that the other players were passing him by.

Taking a bite out of crime

Look hard and you can see a resemblance between McGruff the Crime Dog and NHL Prefect of Discipline Colin Campbell. We're not talking physical resemblance, but Campbell did put the bite on Jarkko Ruutu of the Senators with a two-game suspension for biting the thumb of Sabres forward Andrew Peters. [Video here.]

It might be the first case of the NHL putting some bite in its bark.

Still, it seems a little light for a guy who gave a fairly accurate rendition of Bill the Butcher form Gangs of New York. Peters was by no means innocent when he face-washed Ruutu along the boards during the Sabres' 4-2 win on Tuesday night in Buffalo. Ruutu apparently felt Peters was going to "fishhook" him (an old street-fighting technique where the thumb is hooked team into an opponent's mouth in order to yank his head around to a punching position). The Ottawa forward then bit on the perceived threat, literally.

All and all it was an expensive cut of digit beef. Ruutu, who has gotten under the skin of some Sabres in other ways (he had Adam Mair calling him out at the door to Ottawa's locker room the last time the two teams met in the HSBC) was basically docked $31,707.32 in wages for not exercising wisdom in regards to his teeth. Most importantly, this looks bad for the NHL, maybe worse than the Sean Avery incident in that Avery got six games for words that rolled over his choppers while Ruutu only got two for something much worse than an unsound bite.

Chomping-at-the-bit players are something you see in wrestling or on Mike Tyson's block, but it's not like it never happened before in hockey. Marc Savard, then a forward with the toothless Thrashers, once got a game for grinding his molars on the person of Darcy Tucker. Other players have complained of Hannibal Lecter-like assaults and Peters' coach, Lindy Ruff, a former player, acknowledged that going Conrad Dobler on a guy is not unheard of.

"There were bites in the '80s," Ruff told the Buffalo News. "I witnessed a few. I saw one teammate get bitten right in the back. Cannibalism was in back then and it's here, too." Most famously, Claude Lemieux of the Canadiens put the bite on Jim Peplinski of the Flames in the 1986 Stanley Cup Final.

A strange way to leave your mark on the game, eh?