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Meltzer's Musings: Brind'Amour, Prospect Updates |
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BRIND'AMOUR WAS ONE OF FLYERS' BEST ACQUISITIONS
Longtime Flyers center Rod Brind'Amour, who played 633 regular season games for the team, celebrates his 44th birthday today. With the impending inductions of Eric Lindros, John LeClair and Eric Desjardins into the Flyers' Hall of Fame, Brind'Amour and Mark Recchi become the two most prominent Flyers players of the 1990s who are still awaiting selections.
Brind'Amour, whom the Flyers coveted in the 1988 NHL Draft but were unable to move up in order to select, unexpectedly became available in trade in 1991. After a promising NHL rookie season for the St. Louis Blues in 1989-90, he had a tough second season. For whatever reason, the Blues lost faith in the player.
Flyers general manager Russ Farwell pounced on the opportunity. On Sept. 22, 1991, Philadelphia dealt team captain Ron Sutter and sturdy defensive defenseman Murray Baron to the Blues. In return the Flyers obtained Brind'Amour and offensively skilled but one-dimensional forward Dan Quinn.
The deal quickly turned out to be one of the best trades of an otherwise dark era in Flyers hockey.
Brind'Amour earned a spot in the 1992 NHL All-Star Game, which was played at the Philadelphia Spectrum. That year, he scored 33 goals and 77 points in 80 games and won the Bobby Clarke Trophy as the team's MVP.
The Flyers valued Brind'Amour so highly that they made him untouchable in any of the various trade packages being discussed with the Quebec Nordiques for the rights to Eric Lindros. The Nords asked, but Farwell's answer was always no when it came to including either Recchi or Brind'Amour in a multi-piece deal for Lindros. Everyone else was available.
The Flyers' vision of building around a Lindros and Brind'Amour tandem ultimately contributed to the Flyers reluctantly parting with top prospect Peter Forsberg in the Lindros trade. For Philly, it ultimately came down to whether they preferred to wait for Forsberg, who did not plan to come over to North America for at least another year, or to have the services of a Lindros and Brind'Amour one-two punch at center right away.
Ultimately, Forsberg made his NHL debut for the Quebec Nordiques in the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season. Brind'Amour would spend much of his Flyers career being mentioned in a variety of trade rumors but he always ended up staying put until he was finally traded in January 2000.
Lindros' arrival in Philadelphia put an end to Brind'Amour's brief stint as the team's first line center. However, for the rest of his tenure in Philly, Brind'Amour became one of the NHL's best second-line forwards and he typically moved up to the top line whenever Lindros missed time with injuries. Brind'Amour went on to set a Flyers' iron man streak of 484 consecutive games played.
In his third season with the Flyers, Brind'Amour enjoyed his career-best offensive season. That year, he compiled 35 goals and 97 points while primarily centering a line with Kevin Dineen and assorted left wingers. Although never known as a gifted goal scorer, Brind'Amour had four seasons in Philly in which he scored 33 or more goals.
One of the physically strongest players in the NHL, the muscular Brind'Amour also gained a reputation as one of the league's top two-way centers and top faceoff men. He occasionally shifted to left wing during his Flyers years, but clearly preferred to play center.
Brind'Amour frequently played left wing or moved down to the third line when the Flyers acquired Chris Gratton in 1997. He wasn't too happy about being shuttled around the lineup, but produced a 36-goal, 74-point season. The next year, the Flyers reinstalled Brind'Amour as the second-line center and moved Gratton to left wing. Gratton scored only one goal in 26 games before being traded back to the Tampa Bay Lightning along with Mike Sillinger in exchange for Mikael Renberg and Daymond Langkow.
Brind'Amour produced a 24-goal, 74-point season in 1998-99, which proved to be his final full season in Philadelphia. His iron man streak came to an end the following season, as
a fractured foot suffered before the start of the 1999-2000 season required surgery and kept him out of the line for the first 34 games of the season.
On January 23, 2000, the Flyers traded the 29-year-old Brind'Amour to Carolina in the deal that brought Keith Primeau to Philly. Brind'Amour spent the remainder of his career with the Hurricanes and went on to capture a Stanley Cup as the Canes captain on the Peter Laviolette-coached 2005-06 team. After a rough start to their player-coach relationship, Brind'Amour eventually bonded with Laviolette.
For many years, Brind'Amour was one of the NHL's most underrated players because he so frequently (and understandably) took a backseat to Lindros in his Philly days. It was only in his final couple years in Carolina that people leaguewide started to realize just how good his career was in many different aspects of the game.
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SATURDAY QUICK HITS
* With Flyers general manager Ron Hextall in attendance, 2013 and 2014 first-round picks Samuel Morin and Travis Sanheim played together as a defensive pairing for Team Canada yesterday in a National Junior Team Evaluation Camp mini-tournament in Montreal.
It was a clunker of a game for the entire Canadian team, who suffered a 5-2 defeat at the hands of the previously winless Czech Republic. The two Flyers prospects played neither significantly better or worse than the rest of the Canadian team. Coming off to back-to-back wins over Russia and an earlier win over the Czechs, the Canadian team was both sloppy and undisciplined in yesterday's loss.
For his part, Morin put his team shorthanded three times with unnecessary penalties. His tandem with Sanheim made a few good plays but were also out for a couple of odd-man rushes and goals for the Czechs. Sanheim had the better game of the two, although Morin did earn an assist on an early second-period goal by Connor McDavid that was one of the few highlights for Canada.
Completing the debacle for the Canadian side, St. Louis Blues 2014 first-round pick Robby Fabbri had to be helped off the ice after getting obliterated by Marek Baranek in the neutral zone. It was at that point that the Canadian side completely lost its composure.
* Over in Lake Placid, NY, Team Sweden dropped a 4-2 decision to arch-rival Finland. As with their Canadian counterparts against the Czechs, lack of discipline was the undoing of the Swedes against Finland. The Junior Crowns put themselves shorthanded seven times in the game (compared to four times by the Finns) and also committed the cardinal sin of giving up a goal in the final 20 seconds of the second period.
Neither Robert Hägg nor Oskar Lindblom figured in the scoring in this game for the Swedes. Pittsburgh Penguins 2014 first-round pick Kasperi Kapanen notched a pair of assists for the victorious Finns.
After opening the Lake Placid mini-tourney with impressive wins against both halves of a Team USA split squad, the Swedes stumbled in the last two games. The unified Team USA squad trounced Sweden by a 7-1 count on Wednesday and spent most of yesterday's game against the Finns trying to kill penalties while trying to play comeback hockey from deficits of 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2. A late third-period goal Janne Puuhakka sealed the win for Finland.
Team Sweden now heads to Sherbrooke, Que., to play against Russia in the concluding game of the Canadian tournament. In the meantime, the Czech team is coming to Lake Placid to play Team USA.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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