Goons with spike seasons, and how they happened.

[sr edler]

Gino Odjick

1993-94: This was obviously Bure. 9 of his 16 goals assisted by Bure, 7 of his 13 assists also involved Bure. And of course it's a well known story that they played together and were good friends. I'm always wary of stories like these when they involve players who should have a massive disparity in their roles - Bure couldn't have been playing all or even a big chunk of his time with Odjick, could he? But in this case it seems more true than usual, at least for a period of time. Odjick is also the most frequent scorer on Bure's assists this year, and Odjick's other frequent collaborators are real hockey players - guys like Ronning and Adams. Lastly almost all of Odjick's scoring is crammed into the first half of the year, which tells me that 1) a decision was made to quit using this arrangement so much and 2) Odjick was on a 30-15-45 pace by January 12th, which he'd absolutely have to be getting real time with skilled linedmates to pull off.

I remember being told by someone on this board that this never happened. But yeah, Odjick was a regular roster player in the RS, but then also only played in 10 (of 24) playoff games. Pat Quinn ran a hybrid goon-line for the playoffs with Tim Hunter and Shawn Antoski centred by John McIntyre, it's possible he (Odjick) just got out-duelled by Hunter's experience.

Yeah, that's on me for deviating from the definition of goon I used in the original post (because if you don't define it, it just becomes "tough guy who you don't like"). Still interesting that both he and Kypreos scored an uncharacteristically large amount that season (while getting in at least a dozen fights, along with the other things he usually did).

Kypreos was a fairly prolific junior scorer, scored 111 goals in 110 games over his last two OHL seasons. If the NHL had had 32 teams back then, who knows perhaps he could have come up on a second or even first line somewhere and tailgated on a strong playmaker.

 

[The Panther]

Yeah, because of the era back then, some of these guys (Kypreos, Domi) I think basically "chose" to be goons. That is, they could play and might have made a bad NHL team's roster anyway as a fourth liner, but I think they realized at some point that their path to a regular NHL career was by being an enforcer.

 

[GMR]

Dave Brown scored 45 goals in his career but 22 of them came in two different seasons. He played like 13 years total. I always thought that was strange.