Both Teemu Selanne and Scott Niedermayer know what Mats Sundin is about to experience, and if you gave Niedermayer a do-over, he would never make a mid-season return.
EDMONTON – Maybe it is all those miles on Scott Niedermayer’s hockey odometer. Or perhaps it is that old adage that says, once you turn the ol’ engine off for a while, it can awfully difficult to get it to turn over again.
Niedermayer, the consummate new-age defenceman and fixture on Team Canada’s blue-line, could not do what Mats Sundin will attempt: to walk into the middle of a National Hockey League season and regain his form of a year ago.
In fact, many people around the NHL have come to the conclusion that Niedermayer has never completely returned to the player he was when he hung up his skates after that 2007 Stanley Cup parade.
It may sound blasphemous, but there are some who truly believe it.
“I’m not eager to do it again,” Niedermayer said, with a wry laugh, when asked about the experience.
He came back on Dec. 16th of last season and played 48 games. Niedermayer finished the year with a minus-2 – his first minus year in 11 seasons. Thus far this season, he was minus-4, prior to Friday’s game at Edmonton.
Sundin is expected to make his debut with the Vancouver Canucks any time after New Year’s Day. He is 37, two-and-a-half years older than Niedermayer, with nearly 200 more NHL games played than the Anaheim defenceman.
“You’re stepping into a season [that is already] underway, where the team has got things going. Strategy-wise, personnel-wise … they’re already set with their D-partners, powerplay, penalty kill,” Niedermayer said. “And physically, there is a lot going on, obviously. Your legs, your hands…”
Here’s the strange part though.
Teemu Selanne did the same thing after the Ducks won the Cup, but he did not play his first game until Feb. 5 of last season. Neither Selanne nor the entire Ducks team had the same stretch run or playoff experience last spring that they had the year before, when Anaheim steam-rolled Ottawa in the Stanley Cup final.
But Selanne, at age 38, has completely returned to form this season. He had 14 goals and 27 points heading into the weekend, is on pace for 36 goals, and his wheels are every bit as lethal as ever they were.
“He has to have patience. His expectations will have to be a bit lower, at first,” Selanne warned Sundin. “It took me three weeks.”
The biggest factor that will determine speed of Sundin’s return to form is how hard he trained in recent weeks, Ducks coach Randy Carlyle said. That is because the better shape a player is in, the less he will find himself on the trainer’s table.
“It depends on how much intensity there has been in his workouts. You can’t know,” Carlyle said. “If it’s a sore hip, a sore groin, a sore back… Without the benefit of training camp, that’s one thing you have to be wary of. In essence, this is his training camp now.”
The No. 1 priority for Sundin?
“Health,” Carlyle said. “If you’re not healthy, you can’t perform.”
Niedermayer recalls being able to play every night, but in varying degrees of comfort. Like Sundin, he had been skating in California during his time off, but admits that it was “not at a very high level.”
Niedermayer said it took five weeks to find his form, with the real grind beginning in Week 2 after the initial adrenalin was gone.
“That wears off, and then you’re left with stiffness, soreness. Age,” he said. “The timing wasn’t too bad, after maybe the first three or four games. The thing that went the longest was the up and down of how you felt physically. Maybe it was the mental part, having that focus and being ready to go [every night].
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea [at the time.]”
Selanne doesn’t play the same physical, inside game that his lifelong Swedish rival Sundin does. Getting his incredible speed up to, er, speed was the Finn’s biggest challenge.
“I had, like, eight months that I didn’t even touch the gear. I remember, the first couple of games, your breath seems so short,” he said.
What came to him the slowest?
“Legs,” Selanne said. “All the timing, how you read the game, it comes when you play the game. But it’s a terrible feeling when, after 10 seconds, your legs start burning. You know, it doesn’t matter what you do off the ice in the summer. You run, bike, whatever,. When you step on the ice, there is no comparison for skating.
“It is never easy – even training camp. When you don’t have legs, you don’t have timing. All the battles you haven’t done for a while? It will take [Sundin] time.”
