Jim Kelley

Jim Kelley writes regularly on the NHL for Sportsnet.ca and can be heard on Primetime Sports on the FAN590.

After 19 seasons and over 1,700 NHL games, 42-year-old Mark Recchi has one final role to play.

I owe Boston Bruins forward Mark Recchi.

I owe him for the veritable lifetime of memories he's given over a career that, in my mind and the minds of many, is a Hall of Fame career.

I owe him for proving once again that experience matters and if you don't believe that, go back and review his performance in the first round of the playoffs versus the Buffalo Sabres. He proved, as many have before him, that it's not just about how fast you skate (or as in his case now how fast you no longer skate) or how hard you hit or even how many goals you score. He proved that timely scoring, having a calm persona when everyone around you is jacked up to over-the-top extremes and that making just the right play at just the right time also matter. He's a living, breathing case for anyone who wants to get rid of the old in favour of the new (and usually cheaper) players.

I also owe him this column.

I'm not going to say it's an apology column because I didn't so much as criticize him as offer advice in a piece I wrote on Dec. 14, 2007, shortly after he was shipped out of Pittsburgh and into Atlanta.

Suffice to say I did challenge him.

I challenged him to prove that he wasn't the player that then Pittsburgh coach Michel ("Call Me Mike") Therrien fingered him to be. I challenged him to show that he hadn't lost his commitment to playing winning hockey and that he could do well in the role of a role player, making a commitment to helping the less experienced players by accepting age-related shortcomings and overcoming them with age-defined smarts. I talked about the need to prove himself every night on the ice with good two-way play and sound defensive responsibility. I mentioned the need to make a commitment to team winning above scoring or which line he might be on and that kind of effort is the best way of proving Therrien and others wrong.

Now I won't be so presumptuous as to say that the 42-year-old took my advice, but after getting over the hurt of being pushed out of Pittsburgh, Recchi has done everything necessary to stay in the game, find a home and a role in Boston and contribute to the Bruins having success in the playoffs this spring.

In many ways he was the player the Sabres had no answer for and not just because he scored one goal and set up another in the Bruins Game 6 clincher. It wasn't because he muscled Sabre forward Tim Kennedy off the puck to set up a game-winning goal earlier in the season and then, showing class beyond what was expected given the moment, took the smaller Kennedy off the goat horns by mentioning that the rookie had played well and that the play could have gone the other way had he (Recchi) not had a positioning advantage.

"He's a veteran guy," said Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, a player who wasn't always as in control of his emotions as Recchi was during the series. "He's that kind of a player that, the playoffs, it's an even better suiting style for him. He's such a veteran guy that he knows exactly how to play these kind of games in a series."

Recchi scored five points in that series, three of them goals. That's no small accomplishment for a team that has a very limited offence and was playing a strong defensive team with perhaps the best goaltender in the NHL over the regular season.

His performance wasn't lost on head coach Claude Julien, nor were the intangibles that so often rub off on players who maybe haven't been able to deal with the pressure of performing in the playoffs and producing when it matters most.

"He's been a good influence on our young guys," Julien said in recapping a series many thought the Sabres were destined to win. "With the way he competes every night, you can't ask for a better example.

"He's played well. He's played hard. And like I said, he doesn't look like a 42-year-old. He looks like a veteran, but a young veteran."

Okay, that last part, "a young veteran" is a stretch. Recchi hardly resembles the young man who had such tremendous impact virtually everywhere he played. The tremendous speed and first-step quickness are no longer in evidence. That quick shot isn't always in evidence either.

If you look at the points he scored in the Buffalo series, nearly all of them were scored via smarts rather than raw talent. He had a knack for positioning himself at just the right spot and at just the right time. He also had the "smarts" to find other players in traffic and the patience to get them the puck when and where they could do something with it.

Recchi doesn't just draw on his own experiences to make plays like that. He draws on the memory of mentors who showed him how to be at his best under pressure.

He talks openly of the time spent playing with Bryan Trottier and Joe Mullen back when he was young and they were aged veterans finishing out their time in Pittsburgh.

Trottier had cemented his Hall of Fame credentials with the New York Islanders and was pretty much playing out the string in Pittsburgh, but the Pens got him for many of the same reasons the current management in Boston ransomed him out of Atlanta. Same with Mullen, who had stints in St. Louis and Calgary before joining the Pens for a championship run.

"I was just a young guy," Recchi told the Boston Herald after dispatching the Sabres. "But it helped to have guys like Bryan and Joe. I was fortunate, because I won in juniors, and I won in the minors. I knew a little bit of what success is about. But still, you get to that level and you need guys like that."

Recchi, with 19 NHL seasons in the book, is "a guy like that" now.

The Sabres had no one like him and it showed.

The Bruins had no one like him and they shone because of it.

There's a message in that and Recchi delivered it.