What if the Rangers had won the Eric Lindros sweepstakes?
By Steve Paulus
What if?
Suppose that Bertuzzi had ruled in the Rangers’ favor? What would have happened in 1992-93 when the Rangers missed the playoffs and what about the Stanley Cup championship in 1994? Would giving up that king’s ransom have made the Rangers a better team than the one that won it all two years later?
First off, Eric Lindros was everything he was advertised to be. What nobody could have predicted was how injury prone he was. In his rookie season he missed 23 games with a knee injury. Despite that, he still scored 41 goals and had 75 points.
Everyone knows about Lindros’ history of concussions, but he didn’t suffer his first concussion until 1998. Before that first concussion, he missed 90 games in under six years due to an assortment of injuries, mostly due to his physical style of play.
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When he was healthy he was dominant. In the strike-shortened 1994-95 season, Lindros played in 46 of 48 games and led the league in scoring with 29 goals and 70 points.
The key question is whether the addition of Lindros would have made up for the loss of the players the Rangers were willing to give up. James Patrick was part of the package that went to Hartford for Steve Larmer. Tony Amonte was traded at the deadline in 1994 for Stephane Matteau and Brian Noonan. There is a question about which goalie the Nordiques would have taken, the veteran Vanbiesbrouck or the younger Richter. Kovalev and Nemchninov were key pieces of the Stanley Cup puzzle. The next three first round picks for the Rangers were Peter Ferraro, Niklas Sundstrom and Dan Cloutier so they definitely wouldn’t have been mortgaging their future.
Here’s what Lindros did in his first six pre-concussion years as a Flyer. In 360 games he scored 223 goals and totaled 507 points. He led the league in scoring and won the Hart Trophy in 1994-95. He was a first team All-Star twice and every year was among the team leaders in penalty minutes.
In 1992-93, with Mark Messier and Lindros, the New York Rangers would have had he most imposing one-two punch at center in the NHL. They still would have had Adam Graves, Mike Gartner, Darren Turcotte, Doug Weight, Esa Tikkanen and Ed Olczyk at forward. The defense corps would have featured Brian Leetch, Sergei Zubov, Jeff Beukeboom, Kevin Lowe, Mark Hardy and Jay Wells. 29-year old John Vanbiesbrouck was still in his prime as an NHL goalie if they had lost Richter.
They would have given up the 76 goals scored by Amonte, Nemchinov and Kovalev, but the addition of Lindros at center would have made his linemates even better. And who can even ponder what it would have meant to Lindros to have Mark Messier as his teammate and mentor.
The most significant factor was that the 1992-93 Rangers probably wouldn’t have finished out of the playoffs, wouldn’t have fired head coach Roger Neilson and wouldn’t have had the depth to make the 1994 deadline deals that got them to the Holy Grail.
The Flyers ended up giving up Peter Forsberg, Steve Duschene, Mike Ricci, Ron Hextall, Chris Simon and Kerry Huffman. Would they have been better off with future Calder, Hart and Ross Trophy winner Forsberg instead of the injury prone Lindros?
Let’s not forget that the players acquired in the deal led to the Quebec Nordiques winning the Stanley Cup in 1996 after their move to become the Colorado Avalanche.