Welcome to NHL99, The Athletic’s countdown of the best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.
Once upon a time, the nickname fit. That doesn’t mean it was fair.
Advertisement
Even when Eric Lindros was an OHL locomotive — a teenage blend of skill and speed and snarl and size that, until observed in him, had been observed in no one — history called. Context was needed. Tagging him as “The Next One” made sense. Maybe not fully, but enough.
Wayne Gretzky was “The Great One.” Mario Lemieux was “Le Magnifique.” As Lindros made his way through junior hockey, with an evolutionary toolbox that opened wider by the day, placing him in their lineage must have felt like the only move. Nickname creation, after all, is a tough racket.
So, yes, “The Next One” was a neat bit of business; it contextualized Lindros while setting him apart. It made him of a type, but not the same.
Most of all, it spoke to the sky-high expectations placed upon a kid who, on the day of his first OHL game, was 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds. Those expectations, and that nickname, followed him to the stage at the 1991 NHL Draft with a Nordiques jersey draped over his shoulder, then to Philadelphia, then to New York, then out of the league. They followed him to the Hockey Hall of Fame. They followed him to this list.
And Lindros, odds are, came closer than you remember to fully living up to it all. If some things in 1998 had shaken out differently, maybe his spot in that particular bit of Good Canadian Boy genealogy would’ve crystallized; it’d go Gretzky, then Lemieux, then him, then Sidney Crosby, then Connor McDavid, then…
That’s not how it went down, of course. Injuries and concussions detonated Lindros’ relationship with the Flyers as they chipped away at the skill set that, in his first eight seasons, had him at 1.31 points per game. Five years later, he was done. That — a remarkable but brief peak when he won a Hart Trophy and just may have been the world’s best hockey player — is why he’s 38th on this list of the greatest players in the modern era of the NHL, rather than, say, fourth. So it goes.
Advertisement
But what the nickname couldn’t predict — what it didn’t allow for — was how singular Lindros’ career, on and off the ice, would prove to be. He wasn’t just a size-skill-skating combo platter; he was a media phenomenon with a published autobiography before his first NHL game, a forced trade shortly thereafter and a streak for self-advocacy that the sport rarely sees, even now. In that way, Lindros wasn’t the next anything. He might’ve been the first of something. He might’ve been one of one.
That idea served as part of the framework of Lindros’ recent hour-long conversation with The Athletic. Our talk touched on plenty more, including his legendary post-draft holdout and trade from Quebec to Philadelphia, his hopes for concussion research and the state of his relationship with the Flyers. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
You just got off the ice?
Yeah, just trying to fit the jeans, you know? (laughs)
I wanted to focus on what you did in terms of player empowerment, the trades, prioritizing your health — that to me is what stands out. You were ahead of your time in that regard. Am I barking up the wrong tree there?
You’re not barking up the wrong tree. My first deal — it was a different time. I don’t want to sound pompous. I don’t know how to verbalize this, but I come in, I got my first deal and I’m making $3.5 million a year, which is more than Wayne (Gretzky, who made $3 million a year with the Kings). And that was ridiculous. Wayne should have been way up here. But for some reason, (salaries) seemed to be kind of stagnant for the longest time. I wasn’t part of anything else. I was just coming in fresh.
Now, we’re dealing with the cap and escrow and a different economic climate, but it is funny to see how that’s still a thing, in a lot of ways. Guys like Auston Matthews and Connor McDavid are breaking through, but for years, it was like “All right, Sidney Crosby makes this much. Alex Ovechkin makes this much.” There was an unofficial cap on what individual players could’ve made.
It’s also a choice that a player makes, as well. If you look at what Sidney did and what (Evgeni) Malkin did, they signed contracts that allowed some freedom for their team to have a little (cap space) to play with and surround them with really good players. There’s a little bit extra in the kitty for them. It’s one thing to go out and sign a big deal these days. That’s great. All the power to the guys. It’s also something that’s in the back of your head. What kind of arrangement do you have with ownership or management? “I could get 12 (million) or I could get 13, but I’ll do something at nine or nine and a quarter, and free up a little bit of money.”
Advertisement
I don’t want this to be the focal point, but in the ’90s, were those discussions that you felt like players of your caliber were having?
No! In the ’90s we didn’t have a salary cap. In the ’90s, it was all in. Guys got up in the sixes, and then it started to go to eight, and then guys were doing deals at 10.
Lindros’ parents, Carl and Bonnie, are an elemental part of his public story. In 1990, the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds selected Lindros first overall in the OHL draft. Lindros would never play a game for the team due to its distance from the family’s home in London, Ont., forcing a trade to the Oshawa Generals. Carl Lindros negotiated all of Lindros’ NHL deals, including the one he signed with the Flyers after forcing a trade out of Quebec. Bonnie Lindros also played an important role in her son’s battles with concussions and Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke, a relationship that curdled for good when the Flyers tried to force Lindros on an airplane with a misdiagnosed collapsed lung.
I look back on the way you guys were going about your business, and you specifically. You and your family dictated the terms of your career in a way that we hadn’t seen from hockey players. Especially relative to other sports, in hockey you play the cards you’re dealt, still, for a lot of these guys.
I separated from my (OHL agent) after some blatant issues (laughs). And I went internal with my family. My dad was more than capable of putting deals together. It was over ($9 million annually) in New York, and we did fine in Philly. Not just doing deals, but he made sure that things were being run properly. And he was looking out for me. He didn’t have 300 clients. He had me and my brother.
As an agent, you look out for your people. I went that route, and I don’t regret that at all. It’s an easy thing for people to turn around and say, “Oh, it’s his family.” But if you looked at what my dad would say as (coming from) a different agent — if it was Don Meehan who was saying the exact same words, and he probably would’ve — people would look at it differently. It would be perceived differently.
A lot of that perception had to be the fact that it was your folks, coming from the inner circle of the hockey world.
Right. I had an agent that was all pissed off that he got fired, and he had a lot of ties all throughout hockey to publications and announcers and things like that. You know how the system goes. It’s quite the system. It’s quite the network.
Looking back on it, it’s hard not to think the amount of crap you received was unfair.
It is, a little bit. They weren’t ready for it. I had my mom involved with a lot of things, too. My mom was a nurse and talked with a lot of doctors and did a lot of research whenever there were injuries. The ’90s weren’t exactly wonderful for having a woman in the room. So that was a tricky one, as well. Since then it’s improved, obviously. But at that point, it wasn’t great. There’s a number of things that weren’t sitting quite right, and we were trying to be people who encouraged change within the structures we were in. That’s all.
Was that something you guys thought about back then?
No! It’s hard!
Advertisement
“This system is messed up, and we want to try to change it.”
We wanted an easier route, but it’s hard. We knew it was gonna be a bit of a challenge. I don’t think anyone thought it’d be the challenge that it was, but we got through it. And most of it was really good. It really was. Had I not had the collapsed lung situation and some of the concussion problems, things would’ve been a lot different. I didn’t want to leave Philadelphia, but it just got to a point where it wasn’t a good spot.
Eric Lindros. (Bob Stowell / Getty Images)You mentioned the Soo stuff. It’s tough for me to conceptualize the amount of crap you got for that.
Oh, whatever. They ripped on my family, that’s the hard part. If you’ve got scholarship offers from the University of Michigan and you choose another school, you don’t hear about Ann Arbor getting involved. They may whine, but it doesn’t seem to be the way things worked in the OHL.
Those two things pulling on each other — and I don’t mean to interject all my own stuff in here — but that is, like, the fundamental issue when I look at your career. That is the push and pull. Don’t make waves, but do what’s best for yourself.
And what’s right for you might not be right for others. Everyone’s an individual here. (I was) an immature 16-year-old who, if I went up and played in Sault Ste. Marie, which is nine or 10 hours away from our house — I was not mature enough to be away. It just wasn’t a good fit for me. I wasn’t there. I did not want to play for an owner in Quebec (Marcel Aubut) that was not a good person. I’ll just leave it at that. The guy is not a good person.
You said you had issues with him. But it’s never been detailed all that much. It was just like, “Nope. That guy? Not happening.”
I was not playing for him. I had no time for that. Guy Lafleur was in a lot of our meetings. We’d meet throughout the year, that year I didn’t play. And he said he told (Aubut), “It has nothing to do with the team. It’s got nothing to do with the city. It’s got to do with you, Marcel.” And Guy would tell me that all the time. “I told him. I told him.” But you’ve got to work really hard — you’ve got to work reaaaally hard — to have that many No. 1 draft picks. I mean, come on. Give me a break.
It takes a lot of effort, and it comes from the top.
(Laughter) Right. You know what I mean? You’ve got to work real hard to be that bad.
In 1998-99, despite the collapsed lung and his second career concussion, Lindros had 40 goals and 93 points and finished sixth in the voting for the Hart Trophy. He’d play one more season in Philadelphia, putting up 83 points in 55 games and dealing with multiple diagnosed concussions — including one on a memorably gruesome head-down, across-the-middle hit by Devils defenseman Scott Stevens in the 2000 Eastern Conference finals. A restricted free agent, he refused to sign another contract with the Flyers, largely over what he felt was the mismanagement of his health, and was traded to the Rangers after sitting out the 2000-01 season.
I saw that you recently dropped the puck at Flyers-Penguins. You’ve got the gig with the team, doing outreach. It’s wild to see that the relationship with you and the team is where it is.
It’s a different group there now, right? Things have changed in Philadelphia, and I really have to thank Paul Holmgren for reaching out and being able to confide in him and speak openly about how I felt about the way things ended. It was hours and hours on the phone talking it through. I had a lot of frustration built up, and I was not happy about it.
Advertisement
But at the end of the day, like Homer says, you play for the fans. You play for the people of Philadelphia. To this day, that’s what the players on the ice are doing. We spoke at length about things. Had it not been for him, I wouldn’t be hanging out down there. Right now, I work directly with (Flyers president of business operations Valerie Camillo). I don’t have anything to do with the (hockey side) at all. And she’s been nothing but great. She came in a couple years ago and hasn’t had much of a team to rally around, but hopefully they figure that out.
Do you have any interest in the managerial side of things?
It’s not something you can dip your toe in. But put it this way — if the right situation came up, I think you’d be a fool to say no and to not take a meeting or discuss things. I love hockey. I think hockey is the best game in the world. Once you get older, you (realize) there’s a whole network of how this all works. Who you can rely on. Who knows their stuff and who doesn’t.
When you come in and you’re playing for a team, and you’re 22 years of age, your only focus is the next game. Honestly, you live in a bit of a bubble, and you don’t see the big picture all the time. (Hopefully) you’ve got some good veteran players around you, who advise you about the importance of the Players’ Association and the importance of a fan base and the balance of everything. Really all you hope for is that the team that you really wants to win can accomplish that. That’s what I would love for Philadelphia. To win. Not just do well, but win.
Eric Lindros. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)When Lindros retired in 2007, after a largely disappointing run with the Rangers and one year apiece with the Maple Leafs and Stars, he donated $5 million to the London (Ont.) Health Sciences Foundation — the home of the doctors who treated his concussions.
You’ve been involved with concussion research. Is there anything new there?
Research is incredibly slow. (Developing COVID-19 vaccines) is on a whole different scale than concussion research, in terms of the importance of needing something today, right now, yesterday. But it proves the point that when people work together, and when people have a focus and it’s not fragmented, and there’s communication between people on different ends of the project, anything’s possible. Things can happen quickly. The model right now — to go from an idea to human testing, and then clearance — takes 17, 18 years. And it does not need to take that long to come up with some solutions. It really doesn’t.
You mentioned vaccine development. You see how fast it can happen. It’s like, “OK, this is possible if we want it enough.”
No kidding! We can do this. But dollars are gonna be harder and harder to come by. Everyone is feeling pinched. We’ve got to come up with ways to allow for our smartest and brightest to do their work and to create an environment where that’s what they’re focused on. That’s their sole job. And we have to surround them with the infrastructure to allow them to do that.
How important do you think it is for clubs and leagues to take the lead on that? Because if leagues and teams are playing the long game, if they prioritize this, it’s going to help.
But here’s the thing. Anytime you say, “Oh, I’m gonna help out,” you’re basically saying there’s a problem, you’re admitting that there’s a problem. And yeah, it opens up the legal avenue, (in terms of) what’s the blowback later on? It’s horrible.
Would you do anything differently? Are there things that you would have changed?
The only thing I would have changed would be my level of physicality. If I had known then what I know now, I would have toned it down 15, 20 percent. I think there’s only so much wear and tear that the body can take. And it adds up over time. I think it would’ve been helpful to turn that down.
Advertisement
I guess this kind of brings me back to my original question. This might be too big, but I think I want to know what you want your legacy to be. Whenever people talk about Eric Lindros, what’s the first thing you want them to talk about? Because with you especially, it’s like, ask 10 people, you get 10 different answers.
That I loved playin’. When I was healthy, I loved the game — it was the best. And health is a huge element of playing well. It’s all right not to do the norm. It’s OK. Don’t go looking to make waves, but at the same time, if it doesn’t fit right or feel right, or if you’re not comfortable with it, then change. Ask for something different. Why not?
(Top photo: Denis Brodeur / NHLI via Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k2lnbGloa3xzfJFrZmpqX2d%2FcLrHpXByZZWntqR5y6KlnaqfqHw%3D