Welcome to NHL99, The Athletic‘s countdown of the best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.
Stop for a moment and picture the most iconic Jarome Iginla moment. Not your personal favorite, or even the most important, but the one that best represents who he was to you. If a brand new hockey fan showed up and wanted to know why everyone — not just Flames fans, but everyone — seems to love this Iginla guy so much and you had time to show them one clip, which one would it be?
You’d have a ton of choices. You could show them a goal. Counting the playoffs, you’d have more than 650 to choose from. You might go with a milestone moment, like his 500th goal or 1,000th point, or when he became the Flames’ all-time leading scorer. His epic overtime shift in the 2004 Stanley Cup Final would have to be way up there on the list. You might choose one of his Team Canada highlights, like his laser beam one-timer late in the 2002 Olympic gold medal game, or the time that he and everyone else heard the infamous IGGY. You might even go off the board and choose the time he led the Flames in paying respect to Trevor Linden after his longtime rival’s final game, the sort of pure-class gesture we don’t see often in sports these days.
Any of those would be great choices. But I’m guessing they may not be what came to mind first. Instead, there’s a good chance you thought of this:
That’s Iginla and Tampa’s Vincent Lecavalier dropping the gloves early in Game 3 of the 2004 Final. Iginla is Calgary’s biggest star and their captain; Lecavalier is the franchise player the Lightning have been building around. A fight between two superstars, in a crucial playoff game, just isn’t supposed to happen. But it does because this is a battle for a championship and neither player is willing to give an inch.
You don’t have to like fighting in hockey or even understand it to get what’s happening here. There’s nothing dirty, and it’s not some staged production between two guys with nothing better to do. It’s just two stars on a collision course, staring each other down and saying, “I’m not going anywhere and I know you’re neither, so what do you want to do about it?”
Iginla wins the fight, of course, because he almost always did. He didn’t fight often, maybe a handful of times a year, because he didn’t have to. But if it needed to be done, he was there. That was what made Iginla such a special player — he could do just about anything his team needed him to do. A goal? Of course. A dominating shift? Yes. Win the crucial battles in his own zone? Often. A crushing open-ice hit to flip the momentum? More than a few. And yes, if somebody needed to step up and trade punches, putting themselves at risk just to make it clear that this team wasn’t backing down from anyone, Iginla was willing and able to do that, too.
Jarome Iginla kicked ass. Sometimes, literally. And there’s a very good chance that we’ll never see a player quite like him ever again, and that’s why he is No. 34 on our list of the greatest players of the modern era of the NHL.
In one sense, there’s nothing unique about the concept of a power forward. Hockey has them, sure, but so do other sports. Basketball does, and in fact, the term shows up in that sport more than it does in hockey. And other sports have their own version of the concept, even if they call it something different. It’s a combination of skill and strength, the star who’s just as likely to overpower you as outplay you. They’re hard to stop, and you might even be too intimidated to want to try.
But there was a time in the NHL when the power forward was a very specific type of player. Gordie Howe was probably the first, although some fans might count Rocket Richard. The shifting game of the 1970s brought stars like Clark Gilles and Terry O’Reilly. But the concept really crystallized some time in the 1980s, with the arrival of guys like Mark Messier, Rick Tocchet, Gary Roberts and Brendan Shanahan. For many fans, Cam Neely was the ultimate power forward. For others, Wendel Clark. Eric Lindros probably could have been the greatest of them all if he’d stayed healthy.
The old-school power forward could beat you on the ice or in the alley, and sometimes both at the same time. They weren’t enforcers — that was a different type of player, the one-dimensional guy whose main purpose was dropping the gloves. The power forward would play on your first line and make the All-Star team. They could also cave in your face.
If you’re young, or a relatively new fan, it can be hard to describe what it was like to watch that kind of player. You were never quite sure if they’d score a hat trick or run a goalie, but you knew with absolute certainty that they were going to do something. If your team had one, he was probably team captain, and he was definitely your favorite player. If they didn’t, you were terrified of the teams that did and spent those games praying that nobody made the scary man angry.
Do those players exist anymore? I’m not sure they do. The shift in the way the game is played, including dramatic declines in fighting, have made the sport safer and more skillful, and (for some fans) far more entertaining. There’s still the occasional scrap or big hit, and intimidation will always be part of the game. But the idea of a superstar who could lead his teams in goals scored but also run over a defenseman and then meet the other team’s toughest player at center ice to discuss it… I’m not sure that’s a thing anymore. It doesn’t have to be. Milan Lucic was that guy for a bit, and maybe you still count Tom Wilson if we’re really stretching the definition of “star” about as far as it can go. But is there a Cam Neely or Wendel Clark or Brendan Shanahan in today’s NHL? Could it be there?
I don’t think the old-school power forward role exists anymore. It probably never will again. And that means that hockey fans will quite literally never see another player quite like Jarome Iginla.
Jarome Iginla. (Gerry Thomas / NHLI via Getty Images)
Iginla’s NHL story begins at the 1995 NHL Draft, where the Stars grabbed him with the No. 11 picks. But it really kicks into gear later that year, with what may be the greatest win-win trade of all time.
Joe Nieuwendyk was nine seasons into what became a Hall-of-Fame (and top 100) career. He was 29, still considered a forward’s prime back then, and was coming off two straight years of point-per-game production and eight straight with at least 20 goals. But as the 1995-96 season began, he was holding out in Calgary, looking to force a trade. That was business as usual in the pre-cap NHL, and eventually the rebuilding Flames found a trading partner that was looking to add immediate help, and that had a decent prospect to offer. The Flames traded Nieuwendyk to the Stars, getting back Corey Millen and the rights to Iginla.
Somewhat laughably in hindsight, the deal was panned in some quarters as a steal for Dallas. Blues star Brett Hull’s take on the Flames return was that “they got nothing.” Former Flames star Al MacInnis went even furthersaying “I don’t know what Calgary was thinking” and that “Dallas didn’t have to give up anything to get him.”
And at first, it may have felt that way in Calgary. Iginla was still toiling in the WHL, while Nieuwendyk fit in well with Dallas and eventually played a key role in their 1999 Stanley Cup win. But it didn’t take long for Flames fans to see that maybe they had a little bit more than “nothing” in this new prospect. Iginla made his NHL debut with two games in the 1996 playoffs, scoring once. By 1996-97 he was a regular, putting up 50 points and finishing second in Calder Trophy voting. He’d barely slowed down over the next 20 years, becoming the NHL’s poster boy for consistency, heart, leadership and class.
We can run down the list of honors, including three first-team All-Star picks, a second-team nod, two Rocket Richards to go with an Art Ross. He was a Hart finalist three times, won the King Clancy and the Messier Leadership Award, and even appeared on Selke ballots. In what may have been even more of a low-key sign of respect from award voters, Iginla often got votes for the Lady Byng despite posting high penalty-minute totals every year. The message seemed to be: Yes, he’s out there crushing guys, but count your blessings because we all know he could do even worse if he ever decides he wants to.
And look, let’s just say it: Iginla absolutely should have won the Hart Trophy in 2002. Sure, Jose Theodore had a great season to drag a bad Montreal team into the playoffs, and we’re not here to dump on anyone’s career year. But Iginla posted a league-leading 52 goals and 96 points at the height of the dead puck era on a terrible team whose fourth-leading scorer was a defensive defenseman with 34 points. Iginla was the league’s best player that year and also its most valuable, by any definition you want to try to use. He tied Theodore in Hart voting, the only time that’s ever happened, but finished second because he had fewer first-place votes. It was the wrong call at the time, and with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, it looks even worse.
Then again, maybe that’s the theme of Iginla’s career. Whether you’re a writer with a Hart vote, or a Hall of Famer like Brett Hull or Al MacInnis with a trade take, or roughly 650 goaltenders, or a defenseman trying to get in his way — he made you look bad. You couldn’t stop him with the game on the line unless you were a fan throwing a jersey, and you couldn’t ignore him unless you were a local Boston reporter. If you had the bad sense to drop the gloves with him, you’d end up looking bad in more ways than one because your face wouldn’t be symmetrical anymore.
He was just a joy to watch, in part because he often seemed like he was having so much fun. He was also a Black star in a league in which that remains rare, and an active member of the Calgary community and charity scene. If you weren’t a Flames fan, you desperately wished you had a guy like Iginla on your team. Maybe you did, eventually, as he spent the last few years of his career bouncing around in search of a Cup that never came. But that final stretch was still a testament to the man and the leader because even when the skills had diminished, teams were lining up just to have him in the room.
Will we ever see another Jarome Iginla?
In an obvious sense, no, because players like this are one-of-a-kind. But in the bigger picture, maybe it’s just not possible to ever have another Iginla — the power forward who has the skill to go around you or the mean streak to run over you. Today’s NHL is all about beating you on the ice, and nobody gives much thought to the alley anymore. You can decide if that’s a good thing or not, but it’s the reality of the league today, and there’s no sign of it ever going back.
Jarome Iginla took the torch from Howe and Neely and Shanahan and became the prototype of an NHL power forward. He may well have played the role better than anyone else in the league’s modern history. There’s an excellent chance that he’ll be the last superstar to do it. And he did it all with a snarl mixed with a smile, all class all the way.
(Top photo: Ian Tomlinson/Getty Images)
.