Favorite Non-Capitals of All-Time

I've been a Capitals fan since I started playing and watching hockey back in 1987. My first Caps game was actually in 1986, before I started playing. I think my dad was trying to get the bug planted in me, by taking me to the Capital Centre for a game between the Caps and Winnipeg Jets. I don't remember a whole lot about that game, but the next year, me and my dad started our tradition of always going to the New Year's Day Caps game, this time featuring the Caps and Pittsburgh Penguins. Saw a young Mario Lemieux and current Caps broadcaster Craig Laughlin play, as well as the wonderfully named Pens goalie, Gilles Meloche.

Anyway, digressing. The point here is that just because I've been a Caps fan for so long, doesn't mean I couldn't admire some of the players that did not ever suit up in the red, white and blue. So here now, is a brief list of some of my favorite non-Capitals.

Cam Neely- Boston Bruins

There wasn't much NOT to like about Neely as a hockey player. He could score goals, he hit, he fought, he could do it all. I also remember the badass mullet he sported at the 1991 All-Star Game. How awesome was Neely as a player? Every year at the draft, you still hear commentators talking about some kid being "The Next Cam Neely." My favorite Neely play was one where he went to took a pass in his feet and briefly had his head down. Montreal defenceman Petr Svoboda came up to take him out. Neely saw him at the last minute and dropped Svoboda like a bad habit. He got back in the play and scored a one-timer, top corner on Patrick Roy. It was just the ultimate in "get-in-the-weight-room-cause-you-can't-stop-me!" alpha dog-ness.

Alas, his career was wrecked in the 1991 playoffs by hockey's anti-christ, Ulf Samuelsson. But there is justice in the world. Neely is now in the Hockey Hall of Fame, had his number 8 retired by the Bruins and was the architect of a Bruins team that finished 1st in the Eastern Conference. Samuelsson meanwhile, got knocked the fuck out by Tie Domi and is now the assistant coach of a bankrupt franchise (Phoenix Coyotes).


Doug Gilmour- Lots of teams, most successfully with St. Louis, Calgary and Toronto
Gilmour was a hockey player's hockey player. In fact, if you look up "hockey player" in the dictionary, you should find Gilmour's picture. He had the whole package: the missing front teeth, the mullet, the cool nickname ("Killer").

I myself liberally borrowed a few things from Gilmour. For instance, I started tucking in the right side of my jersey like he used to do (I know Gretzky started that but Gilmour made it look cooler) and I named this here blog after Dougie's number in Calgary.

Two more things about Gilmour. He was part of hockey's first Bromance, between himself and Don Cherry, which was"Daniel-san and Miyagi in Karate Kid III"-level uncomfortable, culminating in Cherry kissing Gilmour (really).

And, he once shattered the glass going into the penalty box. Now that is cool.



Brendan Shanahan - New Jersey/St. Louis/Hartford/Detroit/NY Rangers
I liked Shanny more from his early days with the Devils, Blues and the mighty Whale. He was a big, physical player that could score. He was certainly the missing piece when he went to Detroit and they soon became the Red Wings juggernaut we know today. But Shanny lost a little of the snarl that made me like him. Still, the guy was a warrior and has been a winner every place he's played. Even though he was a bit more of a finesse guy with the Wings, he could still kick ass when needed.



Sergio Momesso - Lots of teams, notably St. Louis and Vancouver
Probably my favorite hockey name ever. After him it would be Garth Butcher and Danton Cole. But Sergio Momesso sounds like an Italian hitman. He even looked like a gangster.

Momesso was always a bit of a disappointment as a player actually. He was a high draft pick by Montreal and looked like he should have fit into that Cam Neely/Rick Tocchet group of power forwards but he never did. Still, I always liked Momesso for his name and the fact that he was a tough, hard-nosed player. As an example, here's a clip of two members of this list having a go.


Milan Lucic - Boston Bruins
Next to Alex Ovechkin, is there a bigger YouTube legend than Lucic? I think not. I won't even bother to write a bunch of stuff, Looch's body of work speaks for itself.





Pavel Bure- Vancouver/Florida/NY Rangers

Before Alex Ovechkin, there was Pavel Bure. The only difference is that Ovie is a little bigger (6'2 compared to 5'10 for Bure) and that Ovie plays with a little bit more of a physical edge. But what they have in common is that both had the ability to make an arena hold its breath in anticipation of what they were going to do once they got the puck and hit full speed. I think Bure's career has been grossly underrated. For a 2-3 year period there was nobody, and I mean nobody, that was more exciting to watch than Bure. When he got the puck in full-flight, literally anything could happen. And remember, he and Kirk McLean carried a mediocre Canucks squad to one game from the Stanley Cup in 1994. I think the reason Bure is not remembered as fondly as he should be is because he was a bit of a diva and he pouted his way out of Vancouver in 1999. He had a couple of good seasons with Florida and then knee injuries wrecked his career for good. He's almost like hockey's version of Shawn Kemp: you remember the other stuff more than how great they were. In Bure's case, the pouting, the injuries and the brief romance with Anna Kournikova. Well, here's a reminder of the awesomeness that was "The Russian Rocket."

Remembering Hockey's Antichrist

I've been involved with the sport of hockey now for 23 years as both a player and a fan. My dad took me to my first game in 1986 - the Caps vs. the old Winnipeg Jets at the Capitol Centre. I've played against and with players of all sizes and skill levels from New Brunswick to Los Angeles. I've seen, in person, just about every great hockey player to come down the pike in that time - from Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Mark Messier to Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby and Jaromir Jagr. And in that time, I cannot remember a player I have hated more than Ulf Samuelsson.

Hate is a very strong word. Often its thrown around in a cavalier way. We don't really hate, we just don't like some people. Hate is not just a really crappy song by the Plain White T's. Hate is the foundation for wars, holocausts and terrorism. Hate can be a scary thing, especially hating someone we've never met.

That being said, as a youngster I HATED Ulf Samuelsson. Hated him. Hated the guy so much, I practically hated the entire population of Sweden just on principle because Samuelsson was Swedish. To me, Samuelsson was the antichrist with a hockey stick. Just an incredibly loathsome player. You see, Samuelsson wasn't just some pest. Guys like Claude Lemieux, Esa Tikkanen, Scottie Upshall, Steve Ott and Sean Avery were/are pests. Annoying yes but never anything more than nuisances. Samuelsson on the other hand, was a menace. He was dirty. He tried to end careers. And then when he would have to answer the bell, he'd turtle. What is turtling? It's hockey parlance for a guy that ducks his head and won't fight. Looks something like this...

That wasn't all. He'd take dives. He'd feign getting hurt and lay there on the ice like someone just stabbed him. Then he'd be miraculously healed, get up and start the power play.

You will notice in the above photo the guy wanting to pummel Samuelsson. That would be Cam Neely, who was and is my favorite non-Caps player ever. By the 1991 playoffs, Neely was the premier power winger in the game. He was coming off back-to-back 50 goal seasons and was one of the game's good guys to boot. And yet his career was never the same after this run-in with Samuelsson in the '91 Wales Conference Finals.

But Neely wasn't the only player Samuelsson put out of hockey. There was Montreal's Pierre Mondou, a talented forward who scored 30 goals 3 times in 8 seasons. Mondou's career was ended by a Samuelsson high-stick to the eye.

All you really needed to know about Samuelsson was the title of a Sports Illustrated piece on him entitled "Mr. Dirty." That's exactly what he was.

The worst part of all this is that the Pittsburgh fans loved the guy. Oh did this infuriate me as a youngster. How could they cheer for this guy? Here was the biggest chickenshit cheapshot artist of all time and these people cheer him? I would have been embarrassed to have a guy like Samuelsson on my team. A guy who recklessly put people's careers in jeopardy, all the while wearing that big Robocop visor and refusing to answer for his crimes.

Soon enough though, the groundswell to get some payback on Samuelsson started not long after the Neely incident. People wonder why Don Cherry seems so xenophobic. Maybe he was born that way but guys like Samuelsson didn't help.


For me, any guy that hammered Samuelsson was good with me. Despite his infamy for his cheap shot hit on Pierre Turgeon in the 1993 playoffs, Dale Hunter will always be a hero for breaking Samuelsson's jaw in a fight. Alas, that clip is not on YouTube but I remember it like it was yesterday. Samuelsson started wacking Hunter in the back of the head in front of the net. Hunter turned around to face him and then Sameulsson punched him. They both dropped the mitts and then Hunter dropped Samuelsson with a straight right to the face. The Cap Centre went absolutely nuts at the sight of Ulfie crumpled on the ice. To add to the indignity of getting his ass kicked, the refs also gave Samuelsson the seldom called "fighting with a visor" penalty. Later that season, I attended Dale Hunter's 1,000th game celebration. They showed a montage of clips from Dale's career and what got the biggest pop? Not Hunter's famous Game 7 overtime goal against Philadelphia in 1988. It was the shot of Hunter KO'ing Ulf.

In 1995 Samuelsson was traded to the Rangers.

I am compelled to admit, my hatred for him subsided a bit. Maybe it was that he cooled the act or maybe it was that he wasn't on the Penguins anymore. Whatever the case, he seemed to stay out of trouble and play a much cleaner style. His most notable accomplishment with the Rangers was knocking out Wayne Gretzky's wife Janet with a pane of glass.


But it was with the Rangers that Samuelsson finally got the payback time I would have killed to see as a teenager. First, there was this hit from behind by Boston's Ken Belanger...

...and then the coup-de-grace, Tie Domi's sucker punch that knocked Samuelsson cold.

...that punch cost Domi 8 games and in the eyes of many, it was well worth it to see Ulfie get his comeuppance. You notice one thing about that clip: there aren't too many Rangers rushing to their teammate's defense. If it had been any other guy, a riot would have broken out with the whole Rangers bench trying to get at Domi. But they knew. Hockey players always know when a guy has something coming. And everybody on the ice knew Samuelsson had something like this coming.

Ulf retired in 2000, having bounced around between three teams in two years. The world of hockey did not miss him. For six years, he wasn't heard from and most assumed he went back to his pit in hell where Satan greeted him with a nice pat on the rear. But no, Samuelsson has reemerged as an assistant coach under Gretzky with the Phoenix Coyotes.

As a kid, I was often asked, "What would happen if Ulf ever became a Washington Capital?" I figure my response would be, fittingly, a line out of a bad movie, in this case "Major League 2." There's a part where Bob Uecker is talking about the character of Jack Parkman, who, in the movie, was a loathsome slugger with Chicago. At one point Ueck says, "It's funny how a new uniform can change your attitude about a guy" before closing his hand over the microphone and saying "He's still a dick." I feel the same way about Ulf Samuelsson.