First, a bit of an apology for writing very little over the last few months. If you saw the number of posts I’d gotten half-way through then decided, “well, this is rubbish,” and deleted, you’d probably understand. That, plus all the other writing assignments I’ve had, has made it understandably difficult to keep posting, but hopefully, I’ll be able to squeeze in a little more this time around, and perhaps a more consistent style, rather than trying on different blogging hats and deciding none of them fit me worth a damn.

James Mirtle has been writing a series of excellent articles on the recent summer NHLPA meetings. One of them is about current Dallas Stars player rep Eric Lindros, who is widely rumoured to be retiring as soon as the current process of selecting a new executive director and drafting a new constitution is completed. In the last couple of paragraphs, Mirtle laments the fall of Lindros’s star, and after reading it, I started to wonder if there was a valid case for Lindros as his decade’s Cam Neely. No, he never scored a 50-50 (50 goals in 50 or fewer games), but take a look at Lindros’s numbers vs. Neely’s. While the highs are higher and the lows are lower with Lindros, both had several highly productive years as elite power forwards before injuries cost them significant time, and both were forced to retire early from the game because of those injuries. On the surface, anyway, they look to have similar career arcs.

The next question then becomes, does Lindros qualify for the Hall of Fame? If you look at the argument for Cam Neely’s induction, it basically says that even though he had his career cut short due to injuries, and therefore didn’t put up the counting numbers of many others of his era in the Hall, he displayed an elite level of gameplay, backed up by some form of statistics as well as testimonials of his play from those who saw it, for enough time that he surely belongs among the game’s greats, even if he wasn’t able to play for as long as many of his bretheren in the Hall. This same argument comes up for a very different kind of player, Pavel Bure, who twice managed nearly 60 goals in the depths of the Dead Puck Era, yet is now GM of Team Russia at age 36 thanks to busted knees.

In order to examine this more thoroughly, I looked at the production of Neely, Lindros, and Bure over the course of their careers, and tried to split their statistics in order to highlight the distinctions of pre- and post-injury, selecting the most “famous” injury (for want of a better term) as the breaking point. The results show a stark contrast that might hurt Lindros’s chances at the Hall.

First up is Cam Neely’s table:

Major Injury: Victim of a knee on knee hit from Pittsburgh’s Ulf Samuelsson, May 11, 1991, during Game 6 of the Wales Conference Finals. Suffered from myositis ossificans (calcification in injured muscle) the rest of his playing career.

I included a summary of his Boston years just to show that he really didn’t do a Goddamned thing in Vancouver. Funny enough, neither did Barry Pedersen, for whom he was traded in 1986. Sorry, Canucks fans! But anyway, you can kind of ignore those numbers and focus on his Boston years (much as you focus on Lafleur’s post-1974 numbers, because the first three years were less than legendary), and as you can see, his production really didn’t suffer in the latter stages of his career (it actually went up slightly on a per-game basis), despite only playing two full seasons’ worth of games in the last five. As a side note, how awesome was Cam Neely in the ’90 and ’91 playoffs? You have to think that if the Bruins had won the Cup in either year, he’d be a strong contender for the Conn Smythe.

Up next, Pavel Bure:

Major injury: Torn ACL suffered against Chicago, November 9, 1995.

I initially thought for some reason that, like Cam Neely, Pavel Bure came back from injury in his shortened season, but that’s actually when he was injured. It should be noted that while his worst season is the one immediately after the injury, the 1996-97 Canucks were also not that good (though still better than the subsequent two years’ versions). If not for that year, his post-injury numbers actually average out better than the pre-injury ones. Also worth mentioning is that his 11-game season in 1999 was a result of a lengthy contract dispute and trade request with the Canucks, not another catastrophic injury.

And finally, Eric Lindros:

Major injury: Numerous concussions throughout his career, most notably one suffered during the 2000 Eastern Conference Finals at the hands of New Jersey’s Scott Stevens.

Look at how utterly consistent Lindros is in the first five years of his career. His goals per game is rock solid, a fifty-goal pace every year, and his assists (and therefore points) keep going up every year. But come about 1998, injuries, specifically concussions, started to affect his game, and his numbers noticably tailed off. He never returned to peak form the rest of his career, and after taking that brutal Stevens hit, and subsequently sitting out 2000-01 in a trade dispute with the Flyers, he became somewhat of a journeyman, his production in a tailspin that it’s never recovered from.

So again, the question is, how much will the selection committee ding him for failing to continue producing after injuries? On the one hand, look at the numbers Neely and Bure put up despite working on bum knees for half their careers. On the other hand, a concussion is a very different thing from a wrecked knee, especially when your production relies on your ability to bull through everything and everyone. A glass skull makes that almost impossible, but at the same time, can you justify an induction on an if-only? It’s not an easy question, but one thing is certain: if Eric Lindros gets in before Pavel Bure, it will be yet another example of the Hall of Fame selection committee completely missing the point.