Theoren Fleury’s tryout in Calgary captured a city’s sports fans.
Unfortunately, that group did not include his coach and general manager, who together closed the book on one of the NHL pre-season’s great stories this fall.
A few miles west, Michael Grabner was looking to add to the already healthy skill level of the Canucks. He is that '06 first-round pick with two minor-league seasons under his belt, whose development officially slips from "on time" to "slower than we'd hoped" as he hops a flight for the farm team in Winnipeg again this September.
Then there is Edmonton, where Oilers head coach Pat Quinn drove home after practice each day dreaming of a 6-foot-4, 217-pounder who hustles, fights, hits and can handle the puck a little.
All for a cap it of $525,000, if possible.
Inexplicably, a kid named Jean-Francis Jacques gave the coach his wish, a rare pleasant surprise this September in Edmonton for the big Irishman Quinn, who has seen more holes in his new lineup than he anticipated. Quinn inherited more "cream puffs" among his forwards than he’d like.
Or as he said on Sunday, "We've got five or six guys who have no crust."
Then along came Jacques, a big, aggressive winger with decent hands who was always a star in the minors, but finally finds himself healthy enough to play his preferred style in the big leagues.
"This is the one thing I want to do," he said of playing in the NHL, where he attends his seventh Oilers training camp this September at age 24. "I would do anything to make it happen."
Alas, so would Fleury. But where Jacques found surgeons who could fix a bad wrist and a herniated disc, there was no scalpel that could cut years off of the birth certificate of the 41-year-old from Oxbow, Sask.
So Fleury officially called it quits — he says for good — on Monday in Calgary, as reality ruined what would have been a heck of a Disney movie.
Fleury was upbeat though, after making peace with the game he had left on poor terms back in 2003. "How many athletes get to leave the game to a standing ovation?" he asked.
"I could not sign with another team. I retire a Calgary Flame."
The contrast was stark these past couple of weeks, as it seemed that every time you flipped on a highlight package there was Fleury, celebrating another point notched in his comeback. But when you went to the rink each night and quizzed the various scouts who had been through Calgary to see the Flames, there wasn’t a one who would have put down a five dollar bill on Fleury making the Flames regular season roster.
But hockey scouts are cold observers who don’t deal in emotion or good stories. Fleury was too slow and too old, they said, and in the end too small to have the former two attributes.
"It had nothing to do with his heart or his mind for the game," Flames head coach Brent Sutter said when they cut Theo loose. "At the age he's at, the legs just aren't where they need to be. That's certainly not his fault. It happens."
The camp that Grabner had was definitely his fault. In six games he had one point and four shots on goal — not enough for a skilled guy trying to crack the lineup of a team favoured to win its division.
Even after Jannik Hansen busted his hand in a fight with Edmonton’s Gilbert Brule in the Canucks final preseason test on Sunday, Grabner’s name did not surface among the options to fill Hansen’s spot.
"Jannik was supposed to be more of a third- or fourth-liner," head coach Alain Vigneault said. "Are we going to keep a more skilled guy? Are we going to keep a younger guy? Are we going to keep a grittier guy?
"(Tanner Glass) definitely caught our attention," Vigneault noted. "We played him four games in a row in five nights, and he did everything he was supposed to do every night."
Glass barged into camp and passed Grabner by. So, clearly, has Sergei Shirokov, who led the Canucks with seven pre-season points. He makes the Canucks this season as that skilled contributory scorer — exactly what Grabner was supposed to be.
Said Fleury on Monday: "I never dreamed I’d get the opportunity to say goodbye to the game."
Jacques almost said goodbye, but in his seventh training camp managed to find himself at the intersection of Opportunity and Production.
And Grabner? He will have to settle for Portage and Main.
