Don’t know if this has been posted, but this was a special moment. I remember arriving at a friend’s house to play cards after hockey practice and he excitedly told me the Canucks had gotten Linden back. I was so jacked - never felt right watching him play for anyone else.
Next day I was at another friend’s house and told him about “the Canucks’ latest trade” and his Mom was passing by going “jeez, you’re always yammering on about the Canucks”. So she went about her business and I told my friend they’d gotten Linden, and his Mom ran back in going “WHAT?! I LOVE LINDEN!”
I know dealing him away set this franchise up for a long time - but getting him back just felt so right, too.
i still remember the gary mason article in the sun after that trade. made me feel all emo —
Trevor Linden shows that you can go home again
Gary Mason
December 8, 2001
Trevor Linden could tell by the look on his coach's face that something was wrong.
"Trev," said Ron Wilson, catching Linden before he got to the dressing room after the pre-game skate. "You're not playing tonight. I can't tell you why."
Linden was stunned for a second. Wilson, the Washington Capitals' longtime coach, was a renowned prankster. But Linden, scheduled to play against Atlanta in half an hour, could tell this was no joke.
"Are you serious?" Linden asked.
"I'm serious Trev," said Wilson. "Sorry."
Linden found a room in which to take his equipment off. He didn't want to go into the main dressing room where his teammates would all be wondering why he wasn't playing. They didn't need that distraction, he figured. So he found another room and took off his gear and then stopped when he got to his skates. He leaned back for a second and tried to calm down.
What could it be he wondered? Had something happened to a member of his family? His wife, Christina? His parents? One of his brothers? No, Wilson would have said something Linden figured.
Did he do something wrong the night before? He hadn't missed curfew. There were no team meetings he could have been late for. And then it hit him.
"What are you doing?" said a trainer who stumbled upon Linden half undressed.
"I think I've just been traded," came the reply.
"No, Trevor, there's no way."
Five minutes later George McPhee, the Capitals' general manager, walked into the room. He wore the glum expression of someone with an unpleasant task at hand.
"Trev," McPhee said. "You're going home."
———
"Oh my God."
That's all the 31-year-old Linden thought as he lay on his bed, trying to get some sleep. A taxi would be arriving at five o'clock in the morning to take him to the airport. He'd close his eyes but it was hopeless. "Oh my God." All Linden could think about was where he was going and everything that came with it; the pressure, the expectations. Linden knew he wasn't returning to Vancouver at the top of his game. What if he sucked? What if after a few games the fans turned on him? What if everyone started thinking it was a bad idea that had more to do with nostalgia than improving the Canucks?
What if?
And it wasn't like Trevor Linden hadn't thought about this before. He was well aware of that saying, you can never go home.
There were lots of summer afternoons when he was an Islander or a Canadien or a Capital when his mind would drift and he'd start thinking about his career, which was starting to drift too, and he'd find himself wondering what it would be like to go home, to his first team, the team he'd always be identified with. And before he could get too sentimental he'd shake himself out of that dream and think more practically.
"I had 10 great years there," he would remind himself. "It's probably better to leave well enough alone. People remember me for some good things. Would it ever be the same? Could it ever be the same?" Probably not, Linden thought. Probably not.
Now here he was, looking at his bedside clock, 1:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3:30 a.m., and pretty soon it was 4:30 a.m. and he didn't need to let the alarm sound because he was wide awake. He got up, had a shower, packed as many clothes as he could because it would be a long time before he was back in this apartment.
"Oh my God."
Soon his cab was pulling up.
———
Linden is sitting in a Kitsilano cafe. It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon but it's dark already. You can hear the rain. It feels like winter. It's one of those days when people instinctively stamp their feet when they come through the door. We're talking about being a Canuck, the first time, but more specifically, the last miserable season.
When he looks back now Trevor Linden can see things he couldn't see before. Like when Pat Quinn was fired as general manager. And Linden lost his biggest fan, his No. 1 protector, and suddenly he was on his own. Others would argue that Linden's status as a Canuck changed the day Mark Messier came to town and he felt compelled to take the 'C' off his jersey and hand it to someone else.
The exchange happened in Tokyo where the Canucks opened the 1997 season against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. At the time Linden said all the right things. It was the proper thing to do, he insisted. Messier was the greatest leader in sports. He could still be a leader on the Canucks without the 'C.'
Still, I always wondered whether Linden really meant that. After all, he was as identified as a captain in Vancouver as Steve Yzerman was in Detroit. When it came to hockey, in this town at least, Linden was king.
Now he was handing his crown to someone else.
"It was just something I had to do," Linden says now, leaning on our table. "If you looked at it, if I remained the captain, bringing in a player with [Messier's] history and his leadership qualities, if things did go wrong I was going to be second-guessed the whole time. So my only option was to say, 'Mark, listen, I think this is the way it should be' and Mark accepted it, so we moved on. Obviously, he felt that was the way it should be.
"I think he felt being captain would maximize his presence on the team. He's a great leader and if he was going to be the best he could be he felt that was something he needed, which is fine. I don't fault him for that. I was fine after that. I always felt it doesn't change the way you play or the way you are."
Right or not, it hurt, and you can read Linden's words different ways. He felt he had to offer Messier the captaincy. Messier didn't have to accept it. He could have said, 'Trevor, I don't need a 'C.' I'm here to support you. You were here long before I was. You're the captain of this team and if you can use my leadership abilities I'm there for you." But he didn't.
Maybe, just maybe, Linden remembered how he felt in Tokyo when he returned to the Canucks last month. And he shook the hand of captain Markus Naslund for the first time. But we'll get to that in a minute.
The fact is, even if Linden hadn't offered the captaincy to Messier, he probably would have had it stripped from him when Mike Keenan took over two months later. Such was Keenan's desire to create a dressing room that was Messier's and not Linden's any more.
Linden doesn't enjoy talking about those last days under Keenan, the famous tirade in St. Louis that Messier sat and enjoyed listening to rather than do anything about. Those were the most miserable days of Trevor Linden's life.
He cried. He prayed to get traded. Yes, he would have to leave the city he loved but he couldn't continue living like this. It wasn't a life he had. It was hell on earth.
And so, when the day finally arrived, there was more relief than sadness. That would come later.
"The few days after the trade were the strangest," Linden recalls, smiling. "I was trying to get ready for the Olympics. I had injured my knee and it was touch and go whether I was going to be able to play in Nagano. They let me work out on the ice at GM Place and set me up in this room downstairs sort of at the end of the hall.
"It was so weird. Darren Granger [a member of the Canucks training staff] would come down and bring me tape and stuff. I remember that. And I'd go out and skate and then return to my little room. Man, I think about that now. I went to the Olympics and played and flew back to Vancouver after it was over. I remember driving back from the airport to our condo thinking, 'Wow, this is strange. I feel like a stranger. Like I've been kicked out of town or something. You know what I mean?'"
Linden thinks for a minute.
"It just didn't feel like my city any more. That was the hardest part."
———
His new team made him the captain. But the New York Islanders were awful.
Worse, the whole ownership picture there was a mess. There were owners buying the team, then being charged with fraud, and then unbuying the team. There were reports the arena was going to collapse. They were going to move the team to Hartford.
"I had always been used to a first class organization," Linden recalls of that period. "The Canucks were always top of the line. All of a sudden, we couldn't get sticks, skates. I had never experienced anything like it."
Luckily, for Linden, his stay on Long Island didn't last long. Mike Milbury cleaned house and Linden was sent to Montreal. He was happy. Mostly to be returning to Canada but also to be playing for such a storied franchise. The Canadiens. What could be better? Well, maybe a team that didn't lose 500 man-games to injury every year.
Linden had never seen a team so jinxed. Every night another player was going down. And every time a player did Linden's stock rose. The team had already lost Shayne Corson and Mark Recchi to other teams. All of a sudden, a veteran performer like Linden became indispensible. And his contract just happened to be up.
The stars were aligned perfectly.
The Canadiens signed Linden to a four-year deal worth $15 million. It was a staggering amount for a player who hadn't had a standout year in some time. But such was the NHL in 1999. And it wasn't like Linden was exactly Steve Staios. He was a former Olympian. He was a proven playoff performer — if he could ever get to the playoffs again. And he was a stellar character.
Montreal thought so much of him they traded him the next year. And soon Trevor Linden was playing for his fourth team in as many years.
"It was weird, again, because I had been kind of spoiled being tied to one organization for 10 years," Linden remembers. "I had deep, deep roots. Now I was on the move again. The good thing was I was going to a playoff team. I really missed the playoffs."
———
Linden thought Washington was a good fit. But then McPhee signed Jaromir Jagr over the summer and suddenly everything changed. There didn't seem to be a role for Linden. Not a prominent one anyway. And soon he found himself sitting on the bench as much as he was playing and that was hard.
So when, on Nov. 10, McPhee told Linden he was going home, he was happy to be going to a team he knew needed help. The kind of help a big, strong centre who was good in the faceoff circle could provide. He also knew, this was a different Canucks team than the one he left. He knew Markus Naslund was the team's popular new captain. And he knew the team was Naslund's in every way, shape and form.
He wanted to make sure Markus knew that too.
"I said to Markus soon after I got here, 'Markus, tell me what's going on,'" Linden says now. "'Are you okay with all this? I'm here to support you in any way I can. The 'C' is absolutely not an issue. I just want to help out on the ice but will help out in the room and say something if you want me to.' He was totally good. We both want the same thing and as I said, you don't need a letter to be a leader."
Naslund had been primed for Linden's return months earlier. When Canucks' GM Brian Burke visited his captain in Sweden to first broach the subject of a contract extension, he also mentioned that he was considering pursuing Linden. Burke wanted Naslund to know there was no leadership issue. This was Markus's team. The captaincy would not even be discussed.
In fact, Linden even balked at accepting an 'A' from Marc Crawford. He felt the team had excellent alternative captains already. But the coaching staff pressed the issue and Linden finally accepted. The whole thing was so different than what Linden had to go through four years earlier.
This time it would be handled the way it should have been handled the first time.
———
His legs were shaking. For a regular season game against the Chicago Blackhawks. Trevor Linden couldn't stop his stomach from churning. You'd have thought he was back in New York for game seven of the Stanley Cup finals.
"My first game back home after the trade was just the worst," Linden says now, laughing. "I could barely breathe, honestly. All I could think of was, 'What if I stink the joint out? What if I'm just brutal? What are people going to think?' This could be just awful."
He need not have worried. Linden was good. Make that great. Just as he has been almost every game since his return. He has helped the Canucks in the faceoff circle, on the penalty kill, power play. And in the dressing room too.
"For me," he says, zipping up his sweater, "there's a whole lot of pent up, I don't know the word, loyalty, ownership. I feel like I know the people in the building. I played here 10 years. It's important to me. I came here as an 18-year-old. I've got a lot invested in this city. This is where I'm most comfortable for whatever reason. This is where I want to stay."
Some nights he looks like Trevor Linden in his prime. Some days it's just like he never left. Open the paper and there he is, with his arm around some child at Children's Hospital or Canuck Place, where he always felt so comfortable. And so loved.
It is time to go. Time to head out into a dark, miserable night. But for Linden it might as well be summer.
"You know," he says, before opening the door and heading for his car. "I had a lot of people tell me I never looked right in any of those other uniforms. I know what they mean."
"What?" I ask.
"This is home."
Different times.
