Trottier’s new goal personal

By Terry Frei
Denver Post NHL beat reporter
DenverPost.com

Bryan Trottier noticed.

Last week, Avalanche captain Joe Sakic passed Trottier to take sole possession of the No. 13 spot on the NHL all-time scoring list.

“Young Joe just doesn’t want to get old,” Trottier said with a laugh Friday from his home in the Pittsburgh area. “I have to send him a little letter, congratulating him.”

Not bad for a couple of Western Hockey League boys who played major junior hockey for the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Broncos.

“I look at it like he has the NHL record for guys who played for the Broncos when they were green and blue, and I still have it for when they were green and gold,” Trottier said.

The soft-spoken Trottier worked with Sakic for four seasons as a Colorado assistant under Bob Hartley before landing the head coaching job with the New York Rangers for the 2002-03 season. The Rangers were a mess before and after he arrived, and Trottier convincingly speaks of a lack of bitterness over his firing at midseason. “Glen Sather probably saved me from a nervous breakdown,” he said of the Rangers’ president and general manager.

In Manhattan, Trottier was fighting a stigma: His best years as a player came with the dynastic Islanders, when there could have been four bench-emptying brawls on the ice and there still would have been more fights in the stands at most Islanders-Rangers games -
especially when they were played on Long Island.

Sometimes this is forgotten, but it also was fashionably avant garde in the early 1980s to proclaim Trottier was a better all-around player than Wayne Gretzky.

Of course, after Trottier won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player in 1979, the final season before Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers entered the league, Gretzky won the award the next eight seasons. But Trottier and the Islanders were winning, and he
ended up playing on two more Stanley Cup champions at Pittsburgh and getting his name on the trophy a seventh time as an Avalanche assistant in 2001.

I ran into Trottier last season during the lockout when we both went to see the Avalanche affiliate, the Hershey Bears – Trottier because he is friends with Paul Fixter, who coached the Bears last season and now is an Avalanche pro scout. A year ago, Trottier was pondering whether to try to get back into the NHL on a bench, and when I again caught up with him Friday, he talked of finding a new and emotionally rewarding challenge – and of rediscovering his Native North American heritage.

“My grandma was a full Chippewa on my dad’s side,” Trottier said. “My dad is pretty much full-blooded and my mom’s Irish. So I grew up with the ‘half-breed’ label, which for me was like, ‘OK, that’s what I am. Big deal.”‘

The general manager for a touring team of former NHL and pro hockey players of Aboriginal descent, primarily from the Ojibway and Cree tribes. He also is making trips to speak and give clinics to native communities in McKenzie Delta of the Western Arctic.

“I brought my skates and talked to the kids about staying in school and making good choices,” he said. “It was an absolutely fantastic experience. It’s wonderful to see the traditions and the culture. It’s all Aboriginal, traditional drum-dancing, and it was amazing to see their social events and their respect of elders. You get into the villages, and you’re amazed by their survival skills. It took me back to thinking about my grandfather and my great-grandfather, when they were living off the land.

“They think they’ve got the world by the tail. But the kids know the NHL because they have TVs and they watch the NHL game. The younger kids don’t know who I am, but their parents and grandparents do.

“The NHLPA, through its Goals and Dreams program, sent up a bunch of equipment, and I felt like Santa Claus.”

The Trottier-organized Aboriginal team will play a series of about 20 exhibitions, and the first is scheduled for Jan. 12 against the Winnipeg Jets Alumni in Winnipeg.

“It’s been called the Aboriginal Alumni Hockey Team,” Trottier said, then laughed. “I think we’re going to have to find a shorter moniker. We go all the way back to Freddie Saskamoose, the first Native Indian-Aboriginal to play in the NHL.”

Trottier said he hasn’t given up on landing an NHL job, but it isn’t an obsession.

“I know that if I don’t get back in the NHL, I know that for the rest of my life, this will create wonderful opportunities to work in Canada and throughout North America with native groups,” he said. “These are things I’ve never been exposed to in my life, and I’m gobbling it up.”

January 20th, 2010