Classics on Ice

BRETT HULL, The 1990s

TM

Some skills can’t be taught; like the power of a Brett Hull slap shot, for one. Brett pos- sessed one of the highest velocity shots the NHL has ever seen. His father Bobby’s shot was once reportedly recorded at over 118 miles per hour. Brett and Bobby utilized that powerful part of their game to become the first father-son pair enshrined into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Both reached 600 goals and more than 1,000 points in their NHL careers. Even though he grew up with a hockey superstar as a father, Brett wasn’t always certain there was hockey in his future. “People saw me as a pudgy, fun-loving, music- crazed bum,” Brett says in his autobiography. “It wasn’t surprising when no Junior team showed the slightest interest in Vancouver’s only right wing who came with love handles. At that point in my life, any thoughts about the NHL were merely fantasy.” Brett did get picked up by the Penticton Knights, a Canadian Junior A hockey team, though. In his second season with the Knights, in 1983-84, Brett began to think the NHL might not be a fantasy after all. That year he scored 105 goals in just 56 games for the Junior club. After a two year record setting collegiate career at Minnesota-Duluth, Brett joined the Calgary Flames and shortly after became a member of the St. Louis Blues in March 1988. In a professional career that spanned 1986-2005, Hull scored 741 goals and added 650 assists. Most of his career was in St. Louis, 1988-98, where he scored 527 times with 409 assists. Only Bernie Federko recorded more assists with the Blues, at 721. Hull’s 527 goals are 175 more than Federko for the team’s all-time record. Hull played on eight NHL All-Star teams, twice won a Stanley Cup, in 1999 with Dallas and in 2002 with Detroit, and was voted as the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1991 with the Blues. In 2006, the franchise retired Hull’s No. 16. When Brett first joined the NHL, his coaches in Calgary and St. Louis worked with Brett to improve his conditioning. Brian Sutter, his first coach for the Blues, saw a marked improvement after the summer of 1989. There’s no question that his long career benefitted from the proliferation of year-long conditioning, full-time trainers and nutri- tionists. Two Blues greats who preceded Hull, Bernie Federko and Bobby Plager, both agreed that part of the game was certainly different during their years in the NHL. “It’s a full-time job now,” said Federko. “In the off-season, we took time off and when we came to training camp, we trained so we could get in shape. Now, the players are in shape 365 days a year and they don’t take any time off.” “The conditioning of the players now, we were never in that type of condition,” added Plager, who expressed his appreciation and amazement to the full-time commitment by hockey players in this era. “We played hockey during the season and we all went home in the summer because we had jobs. Now, when you go down in the dressing room and you see the weight room, and the guys who watch what they eat, and some guys have personal trainers …. the machines and the equipment, it’s unbelievable.”

Written by Mike Kern

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In 2016-17, the Blues are celebrating the 50th anniversary season of the franchise coming to St. Louis, and we are helping them celebrate by visiting with some of the greatest names in Blues hockey history – one from each decade and tracking the changes of the game.