McSorley breaks his silence on the Brashear incident

[Crosby2010]

McSorley is not anywhere near a HHOFer guys. Nor was he ever being floated as such. Led the NHL in plus/minus in 1991, which was nice, but he was a serviceable defenseman, was on some pretty good teams and certainly was more valuable than his stats show from an enforcer standpoint but he definitely wasn't elite.

One of my issues with how McSorley gets labelled is as if he was intending to do it. I don't think he was, I think he meant to hit high, like the shoulder or something, but not the head. He looked ready, almost prepared for Brashear to turn around, so my thought is that he never wanted to whack him in the head. How often did Marty do cheap shots anyway? Not sure I saw any others of his.

Also, there is a forgotten slash that happened just a month or so later that was worse than this one. Scott Niedermayer slashed Peter Worrell in the head in what looked like from just a scrum along the boards. It was harsh, hard to say that it wasn't deliberate. I'll never forget Worrell's reaction, it was priceless. It was one of those "Are you serious bro?" types of looks he gave Niedermayer. Then he fights him but by then Niedermayer had a lot of his buddies jumping in to help, because he'd have been seriously ragdolled. Anyway, I always thought this one was worse, but Niedermayer just got 6 games. Worrell didn't get hurt which was probably the biggest reason why.

 

[hacksaw7]

McSorley is not anywhere near a HHOFer guys. Nor was he ever being floated as such. Led the NHL in plus/minus in 1991, which was nice, but he was a serviceable defenseman, was on some pretty good teams and certainly was more valuable than his stats show from an enforcer standpoint but he definitely wasn't elite.

One of my issues with how McSorley gets labelled is as if he was intending to do it. I don't think he was, I think he meant to hit high, like the shoulder or something, but not the head. He looked ready, almost prepared for Brashear to turn around, so my thought is that he never wanted to whack him in the head. How often did Marty do cheap shots anyway? Not sure I saw any others of his.

Also, there is a forgotten slash that happened just a month or so later that was worse than this one. Scott Niedermayer slashed Peter Worrell in the head in what looked like from just a scrum along the boards. It was harsh, hard to say that it wasn't deliberate. I'll never forget Worrell's reaction, it was priceless. It was one of those "Are you serious bro?" types of looks he gave Niedermayer. Then he fights him but by then Niedermayer had a lot of his buddies jumping in to help, because he'd have been seriously ragdolled. Anyway, I always thought this one was worse, but Niedermayer just got 6 games. Worrell didn't get hurt which was probably the biggest reason why.

Worrell, basically a giraffe on skates who had no business ever playing the NHL. I remember watching him in pregame warmups that game with some curiosity, he was having trouble receiving passes from teammates, and awkwardly losing his balance trying to shoot a puck. I'd never actually seen an NHLer that would have trouble keeping up in my own beer league at the time. He was basically taking runs at Devils players all game, long after the puck was gone, elbows to the head of smaller guys against the glass and absolutely nothing was being done about it.

Honestly it bothered me that Nieds didnt club him harder. He deserved it

 

[Albatros]

Quite the beer league if an above ppg Q player couldn't keep up there. Of course Worrell wouldn't have made the NHL without fighting, but he had good enough hockey skills to play professionally at a lower level. That can't be said about all fighters in the big league.

 

[Johnny Engine]

Quite the beer league if an above ppg Q player couldn't keep up there. Of course Worrell wouldn't have made the NHL without fighting, but he had good enough hockey skills to play professionally at a lower level. That can't be said about all fighters in the big league.

That's something I've noticed before and kinda wondered about. There are enough guys that fit that description - substantial offense at the junior level, plugs at the pro level - that it's not all that unusual, but Worrell stands out in that the eye test was so bad. Nobody who saw him in the NHL thought he could skate, and accounts like the one you replied to are common.

So what gives? Was there an injury or ill-advised weight gain that took him from a fringe prospect to a clumsy oaf? There are also the kind of linemates and power play explanations like in my thread about goon spike seasons, but for two years in a row? How did these two versions of Worrell exist?

 

[Crosby2010]

That's something I've noticed before and kinda wondered about. There are enough guys that fit that description - substantial offense at the junior level, plugs at the pro level - that it's not all that unusual, but Worrell stands out in that the eye test was so bad. Nobody who saw him in the NHL thought he could skate, and accounts like the one you replied to are common.

So what gives? Was there an injury or ill-advised weight gain that took him from a fringe prospect to a clumsy oaf? There are also the kind of linemates and power play explanations like in my thread about goon spike seasons, but for two years in a row? How did these two versions of Worrell exist?

Doing a bit more of a deep dive into Worrell's career I found that he did have alright stats in the QMJHL. 63 points as a 19 year old. Not great, but certainly showing he can play. Then at 20 years old 27 points in 50 games in the AHL. I looked at his PIM in the QJMHL. Two seasons of 464 and 495 PIM. Still a moderate amount of points so he wasn't just a goon running around. He probably has several more points if he isn't in the box that often, but it made me think that at 6'6" he was a frightening guy to be around. You saw how mad he got when Niedermayer slashed him and with the throat slashing gestures. I am just wondering if that fear gave him a lot more room in the QMJHL to score points. It almost certainly did. Even in the Q as a 19 year old you have to be able to skate and shoot to get 63 points, and you have to be able to do something right in the AHL as a 20 year old against pros to get 27 points in 50 games.

I honestly can't say I have a visual picture of how Worrell skated in the NHL. So maybe he was a bad skater. I don't doubt that. I just look at a couple of things and wonder. Florida had him on the power play more than you'd think. He played 8-9 minutes a game, and in the 2000 playoffs - the only time he played because his teams never made it - he played all 4 games and had 11:17 of ice time. I don't know, usually the really bad goons sat out in the playoffs. Compare it to someone like Rob Ray, who while he did play in the playoffs he only played 3:00 a game or so. And even in the regular season he was always 3-4 minutes a game. I never liked that. This was done a short brief time in the NHL, mostly in the 1990s and 2000s, when a guy would play so little and was just there as a police officer. You have to play the game. Worrell by the looks of it at least had 4th line minutes, and even some power play time. It doesn't surprise me that he didn't play long, but I've seen worse. Andrew Peters comes to mind. Worrell looks closer to Domi than he does someone like Ray or Peters. You don't play someone 9 minutes a game if they can't tie their own skates. There was at least something more he brought to the table.

 

[Jocke1]

Has anyone read McSorley's book? Has it ever been possible to purchase it?

Its one of lifes greatest mysteries to me how this book is so elusive.

This book can be found on the amazon store pages and other warehouse pages online
but ever since the beginning they have never been in stock.

It says HarperCollins Canada released it on 15 Sept 2018 as a Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages.
I have been on the hunt for this book ever since hearing about it in 2018-2019.
Feel like I'm going crazy.

The author Kirstie McLellan Day is the same person who wrote the Bob Probert autobiography.
And I remember that she had completed Lanny McDonald's autobiography but just before it was about to be released McDonald pulled the plug and didn't allow her to publish it. I think I remember her suing McDonald over it and then I didn't hear anything else.

So did something similar happen with McSorley? Did he not allow this 336 page book to be released?
Or does anyone know the truth about this whole thing?

 

[MeHateHe]

Anyone catch McSorley on the latest season of Shoresy? Looks less like a former professional athlete and more like a guy who ate a former professional athlete. Doug Gilmour and Sean Avery have also made cameos and they have not let themselves go by comparison.

 

[Johnny Engine]

I mentioned in the Goons With Spike Seasons thread that it was inspired by the Donald Brashear talk, but something funny happened when I went to look at the 30 point season Brashear had - it started to look like there was no spike season for Brashear, and he's just an unusual third liner who peaked at age 30 and fought like a player in a much smaller role.

Between 1999 and 2004, Brashear played over 11 minutes a game every year, peaking at 13:27. In each of those years, he's either among his team's 9 most used forwards, or has a couple guys ahead of him who played partial seasons pushing him down to 10th or
11th, meaning that in almost every stage of the season, he'd still be in a top 9 spot in the lineup on teams that were usually decent.

There are 145 players who played at least 100 games with a TOI between 11 and 14 in those years. He's 17th in points among that group. He's only 84th in points per game (the filter includes some scoring forwards at the start or end of their careers who'd partially explain this.) Brashear is second in PIMs in this group, with a large lead over third, so he's fairly unique in his goon-like qualities here (Barnaby is first, another guy who you'd call "uniquely goon-like"). To further underscore how much this group is not the domain of enforcers, Nik Antropov is 26th in PIMs in this group.

Here's the kicker: guess who leads this group in even strength ice time per game? If you guessed "Taylor Pyatt", that'd be sensible but he's second and the winner is Huggy Bear himself. The most surprising thing about all this is that he's not making up time by playing net front on PP2. It really does look like, in the peak years of the dead puck era, Donald Brashear was the statistical model of the third liniest third liner in the entire NHL...except he fought all the time.

It's actually quite impressive, because I'd be shocked if anyone saw his career going this direction as of 1996 or so.