October 16, 2000 Chain Of Command Unlike in other leagues, a captain in the NHL not only wears his rank on his jersey but also can wield as much influence over his teammates as the coach Michael Farber There was a trickle down that Easter Island statue of a face, tears that illuminated Mark Messier more than any smile could. The block letters RANGERS ran diagonally across the sweater that Brian Leetch handed to him, but it was the red C in the top left corner that made one of the fiercest hockey players of his generation weep. "Maybe it was great theater," New York Rangers president Glen Sather said of Messier's tears, "but it was no act." The day before the July 13 press conference to announce the 39-year-old Messier's return to New York, Leetch volunteered to turn over the Rangers' captaincy and not, as he would joke during the press conference, because he was concerned Messier would be a problem in the dressing room if he didn't. Leetch, a Norris Trophy-winning defenseman and Messier's teammate on the 1994 Stanley Cup champion Rangers, New York's first such championship in 54 years, would not presume to deny a title to a man for whom it's not an honorific as much as a birthright. The Rangers didn't sign the Messier whose Vancouver Canucks missed the playoffs each of the past three years, the Messier who averaged only .78 points per game in his three seasons away from New York, the Messier who had a team-worst-15 rating last year. They signed the Messier who rearranged some furniture in the New York dressing room when he arrived in a trade in '91 so that nothing would obscure his teammates' view of his eyes, the Messier who guaranteed a win against the New Jersey Devils in Game 6 of the '94 Eastern Conference finals and delivered a hat trick in the 4-2 victory. The Rangers coveted Messier, a six-time Stanley Cup winner, because he might be the only player strong enough to blend the disparate elements of a slovenly team and restore its pride. NHL leadership, symbolized by the C, is supposed to be an intangible, a commodity with no price tag. The Rangers paid retail—$11 million for two years. "The captaincy in hockey is so important because of the history of it," Sather says. "It's like knighting someone. The captain is the one who carries the team crest, the leader on and off the ice, the one who has the respect of the players, the one on whom the performance of a team might rest, the one who has as much, or more influence, than the coach." Every team has one captain and two alternates, each of whom wears an A. If no other sport requires such a well-defined leadership structure, maybe it's because no other sport is so dependent on individual displays of physical courage and channeled emotion, the pillars of leadership since the last ice age. The most talented team in hockey wins championships only some of the time: The best regular-season team in the NHL has won the Stanley Cup twice in the last 11 years, compared with six in the NBA and five in the NFL in that same span. Unless a team can rally around a totem the way the 2000 champion Devils did captain Scott Stevens, a granite block of a defense-man who physically dominated the playoffs, it's likely to falter. "It's the collective nature of hockey," says Dallas Stars general manager Bob Gainey, a former Cup- winning captain with the Montreal Canadiens. "You have to create a certain mentality to be successful, and you need a leader to do that. There's no stop to hockey—you can't pause and recharge your courage." In an era when teams are a Babel of nationalities and the vast disparity in salaries has created a class structure in the dressing room, an NHL captain must be blessed with a keen sense of inclusive-ness. He must also be a social director, a liaison between coach and players, a link between rookies and veterans, a prod, a problem solver, a fulcrum, the public face of the team and an effective communicator with referees, the only formal on-ice function he has. He must do all this while being his team's best (or second-, third-or fourth-best) player and almost certainly its most dedicated. As Philadelphia Flyers right wing Keith Jones says, "It's not easy to get in someone's face, challenge him to bring his game to a new level, while keeping your game on a level where he can't say, 'What about you?' " Though different captains have different styles—from the paint-blistering of a Messier to the muffled approach of the Colorado Avalanche's Joe Sakic, a man so quiet he might have been raised by deer—they possess one nonnegotiable quality: integrity. "Be honest, be yourself," says Guy Carbonneau, another former Canadiens captain who is Montreal's supervisor of prospect development. "Not many people will be like Messier and guarantee a win. You hear a captain say that and you know he's putting his neck on the line. Yet the test is not a captain saying it, but how his teammates respond to it. That will tell you if he's a real captain or a phony captain." "To me a captain is like a father figure," says the Washington Capitals' 38-year-old captain, Adam Oates. "You don't do the Knute Rockne speech. It's like being a good parent, and you do that by giving examples every day, by showing yourself as a solid citizen. Anyway, what do you say to a guy making $5 million a year?" Oates's softly-in-your-ear approach is a nice fit for the Capitals, a usually reserved team that often leaves the oral pyrotechnics to coach Ron Wilson. In another telling way, however, Oates is a hopelessly old-time, and old, captain. He didn't become a captain until he was in his 30s, just as Maurice Richard and Gordie Howe did in the 1950s, when the C was passed on not to the callow but to the mature and committed. Oates is beginning his second season as captain, having studied for a little more than two years in Washington under Dale Hunter. Before that he had apprenticed under the venerable Raymond Bourque with the Boston Bruins. Oates's first captain might have been the most historically significant. Oates began his NHL career in Detroit with Steve Yzerman, who was barely of drinking age in 1986 when the Red Wings named him captain. Not that Yzerman's newly acquired right to legally guzzle champagne from the Stanley Cup was a factor—Detroit was mired in its Dead Things era and Yzerman wasn't given the captaincy as much as he had it foisted upon him. General manager Jim Devellano realized Yzerman was a player capable of regenerating the Wings. The job might not have fit him at first, but like a sport coat for a 12-year-old, you buy it a size too large and let him grow into it. At that time Yzerman was the youngest captain in league history, at 21 years and five months, supplanting Dale Hawerchuk, who was a month older when he became the Winnipeg Jets' captain in 1984. (Brian Bellows was 19 when he served as temporary captain of the Minnesota North Stars in '83-84 while teammate Craig Hartsburg was sidelined with an injury. Vincent Lecavalier of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who became captain at 19, is the NHL's youngest to be given that honor.) Fourteen seasons later, with two Cups and the team with the best cumulative regular-season record over the past nine seasons, Yzerman is recognized as one of the NHL's best leaders. His captaincy began the evolution of the C from a reward for sage leadership into a tool for establishing a new dressing-room order. Of the 10 youngest NHL captains in history, six are active players and only two, Wilf Paiement of the egregiously awful Colorado Rockies of 1977-78 and Ryan Walter of the equally execrable Capitals from '79 to '82, were appointed before '80. Trevor Linden became the Vancouver captain as a 20-year-old before ceding the post to Messier seven seasons later. In '96 the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim turned to hyper-conscientious Paul Kariya, no coward on the ice and unfortunately, given his lack of dressing-room social graces as a 21-year-old, hardly Noel Coward off it. More prominent Cup aspirants were naming young captains, too. St. Louis, which had rotating captains in 1996-97, passed over veteran Al MacInnis the next season and appointed 23-year- old defenseman Chris Pronger. At that time Pronger was only three years removed from his drinking days as a Hartford Whaler (he had been arrested during a barroom brawl in Buffalo) but, as it turned out, only three years from the Hart and Norris Trophies. Derian Hatcher was 22 when he became the Stars' captain, picked over other notable—and older—players like Mike Modano. "The first two years Hatcher wasn't the guy I would have put in there," says Carbonneau, who retired in July after playing his final five seasons in Dallas. "He was a great team guy, always looking to organize things. But he didn't know what to do in the room. He got better. Now he's the type of leader they were looking for." Gainey appointed Hatcher, coming down firmly on the side of autocracy in the debate over the most suitable method for naming a captain: election or selection. "The captain is the player who creates the culture of your club," Gainey says. "You don't want a player who's going to be with you for only three or four months having a say in determining your next 10 years." Wilson, the Capitals coach and also a devotee of the chain-of-command theory, concurs. "In the military," Wilson says, "privates don't elect their sergeants." The admonition should be heeded in Montreal, the erstwhile model franchise that has had nearly as many captains (seven) in the last 11 years as Italy has had governments. Not surprisingly the Canadiens, winners of a record 24 Stanley Cups, won only one during the captaincy's Gilbert and Sullivan years, which didn't end last season with the election of the NHL's first Finnish captain, Saku Koivu. Last season Shayne Corson, who briefly had worn the C in St. Louis and Edmonton, campaigned for the job and was devastated when he lost what Montreal coach Alain Vigneault says was a close vote. Corson, who bolted for the Toronto Maple Leafs as a free agent over the summer, told a friend the ballots might have been tampered with, a charge Vigneault denies. That's not to say it couldn't have happened. Not only has the NHL imported Russians, but, in at least one case, it also imported Soviet-style election techniques. In 1990, the last time, incidentally, that St. Louis players voted for the captaincy, coach Brian Sutter supervised an election to replace Rick Meagher, who was recovering from reconstructive knee surgery. The winner, Sutter announced, was Scott Stevens, who had signed as a free agent in the off-season, a superb choice even if the players never made it. Turns out only one player voted for Stevens. "The vote does have to go a certain way," says Sather, a proponent of democracy to a point. "The ballots have to go to the general manager, and although I've never done it, I can see the manager overruling the choice. You have to end up with the right guy." If a team doesn't, it's an embossed invitation to chaos. Few incidents are more traumatic to a team and none is more humiliating to a player than when he's stripped of his captaincy. When coach Mike Keenan yanked the C from Brett Hull in St. Louis in 1995-96—Hull had criticized Keenan's decision to scratch Hawerchuk for a game in Buffalo after Hawerchuk's grandmother had made the trip from a Toronto nursing home to see him play—it was the biggest scandal over a letter since Salem gave an A to Hester Prynne. Hull called it "a complete slap in the face." In other words, it was comparable to the knee in the groin Eric Lindros took from Philadelphia last March. The humiliation of Lindros came with television pictures. Comcast, the cable TV company that owns 66% of the Flyers, got a nifty shot of equipment man Turk Evers stitching the C on Eric Desjardins's sweater after Lindros, who had questioned the diagnosis and treatment of his concussion by Philly medical personnel, was removed in a putsch organized by president Bob Clarke. Lindros had been many things to the Flyers—in particular, their best player and marketing tool—but he'd not been an effective captain since his appointment in 1994 as a 21-year-old by Terry Murray, Philly's coach at the time. Lindros lacked the common touch. His affliction was being bigger, stronger, richer, more handsome and more famous than his teammates. They knew it, and he knew it. Nor did Lindros shine in moments of crisis. When Murray said the Flyers might be in "a choking situation" after they lost the first three games of the 1997 Stanley Cup finals to the Red Wings, Lindros bolted from the arena without speaking publicly. Captains also are supposed to be a buffer between players and management, an impossibility for Lindros given his well chronicled feud with Clarke. After the Flyers started a franchise-worst 0-5-1 last season, Lindros apologized to teammates for having dragged his spat with Clarke into the dressing room. The gesture was a grand one, albeit belated, but a captain's small gestures often matter most. Perhaps the NHL's greatest act of leadership in the past 20 years occurred without a word being said. After Edmonton defeated Philadelphia in Game 7 of the 1987 finals, Wayne Gretzky took the captain's perfunctory spin with the Stanley Cup and then bypassed stars Messier, Jari Kurri, Paul Coffey, Grant Fuhr and others to hand the trophy to a 24-year-old defenseman named Steve Smith. The previous year Smith, then a rookie, had inadvertently deflected the puck off Fuhr's pad and into the Oilers' net in Game 7 of the quarterfinals against the Calgary Flames, an own-goal that had eliminated Edmonton and kept it from a chance at winning a third consecutive Cup. Gretzky's message was brilliant in its clarity: No matter how many future Hall of Famers we have, we win and lose as a team.