Going to Hull

Golden Brett crashes Edmonton's exclusive century club

Brett Hull, man of the century.

For a player who was once widely regarded as one a team couldn't win with, Hull has helped the Red Wings get tantalizingly close to their third Stanley Cup in six years. In Monday night's 3-0 victory over the spent Carolina Hurricanes, Hull scored his 100th career playoff goal, which would become his 23rd career game-winning playoff goal, thereby joining Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Jari Kurri as the fourth player to hit triple digits for postseason goals.

In this business, a man is known by the company he keeps. But this is not merely gilt by association, the Golden Brett sidling up to the best player in history in Gretzky (122 playoff goals), the best captain in Messier (109) and a phenomenal winger in Kurri (106). Hull is the only top-five player -- Glenn Anderson ranks fifth with 93 -- who wasn't part of the go-go Edmonton Oilers in the go-go 1980s. The game was profoundly different 20 years ago, goalfests with more red lights than the opening shot of the TV program of the era, Hill Street Blues. The 37-year-old Hull, who played 26 playoff games in the '80s, was more a child of the 1990s and now the new millennium, an anachronism who managed to thrive even in the great darkness of the Dead Puck Era. In that sense, Hull really is the man of this century.

"One hundred goals is really quite an achievement," Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman said. "Hockey's getting more like soccer. It's hard to score goals out there."

Hull's Hundred is even more flattering considering he did not exactly play with powerhouses in Calgary and St. Louis most of his career. He never reached a conference final until he signed as a free agent in Dallas in 1998 and subsequently had to hit 100 the hard way (21 fewer playoff games than Gretzky and 51 fewer than Messier). Nor did the Red Wings go out of their way to pad his goal total in his first year in Detroit, playing him mostly on the "Two Kids and a Goat" line with rookie Pavel Datsyuk, who is slick but inexperienced, and 24-year-old Boyd Devereaux, who does not have a great offensive touch. "He's playing with two young players," Bowman said. "That's not a powerhouse line." Still, Hull has managed 10 goals in the 2002 playoffs, which leads all scorers.

Hull, baseball cap tugged over his head, seemed genuinely delighted in reaching the standard as he joined Brendan Shanahan on the dais for a post-match press conference Monday night. His Cup-winning goal for Dallas in Game 6 of the 1999 finals, when he was playing on a wonky groin and a knee that was days away from the surgeon's knife, should have changed the conventional wisdom about Hull. Still, he nodded towards it anyway, saying, "I guess there was a time there was talk that you could never win in the playoffs with Brett Hull, and all of a sudden you win a Cup and ...

Shanahan: "Did you just refer to yourself in the third person? That's cool."

Hull: "I am trying to give myself a pat on the back."

Shanahan: "One hundred playoff goals, you can do that."

And you thought vaudeville was dead.

The 100th was memorable -- Hull knocked down a hard saucer pass from Devereaux on a two-on-one down low, controlled it and swept it into a yawning net past Carolina goalie Arturs Irbe -- but the 99th will go down as the unofficial Stanley Cup winner. Until the instant before he deflected the puck from the high slot with 74 seconds left to force overtime in Game 3, this championship was at least moderately in doubt. Once Hull scored, the Hurricanes were downgraded to a tropical depression. They were rarely dangerous in the three overtimes it took Detroit to finish them off on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Then they were badly outplayed in Game 4, getting outshot 11-4 in the third period as they foundered for the first time. You could see it coming. Not all defeats are created equal, especially for teams primed for an upset. Carolina's letdown after the punch-to-the-gut loss in Game 3 was human nature and often hockey history. Consider the 2000 Pittsburgh Penguins, who had a 2-0 series lead on Philadelphia, lost a five-overtime match in Game 3 and didn't win another game in the series. Or even closer to home, consider the 2002 Montreal Canadiens, who had a 3-0 lead heading into the third period of Game 4 and were seemingly on their way to a certain 3-1 series advantage before blowing the game and, in effect, the second round to these Hurricanes.

The Red Wings should close out the final at home Thursday, a win for the aged. Of course as Hull noted, "Age in today's game has zero to do with anything. You don't have to be swift afoot or super-skilled anymore. All you have to be is very knowledgeable. I think we proved that. We got people who do the right thing with the puck. We go to the right places where you score goals. That's the game today. It's not a great big skilled game."

Hull also shoots from the lip. Unlike 100 playoff goals, the NHL keeps no record of that.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Farber covers the NHL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.

 

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