He was one of my favourites when I was a kid. A rock in his own zone who had tremendous hockey sense and a physical presence to boot.
I was going to discuss his impact on Lidstrom's career, but reck beat me to the punch.
A few things about McCrimmon that stand out:
1) He was part of the infancy of what might be the greatest dynasty in North American junior hockey history: the 70s and 80s Prince Albert Raiders. He won an SJHL championship with PA in 1976 - the first of seven straight SJHL titles for the Raiders. He missed out on the Raiders teams that won four national Junior A titles in five years from 77 to 81.
2) McCrimmon had a heck of an alibi. He was trying to win a Memorial Cup with the Brandon Wheat Kings. He came close; the Wheaties lost in the tournament final. Gord Miller had a great tweet earlier today: in that final, McCrimmon played the entire game, including overtime. That was a competitor who understood the significance of the Memorial Cup, and how difficult it is to win.
3) His plus-minus record was incredible. I know some of you guys don't buy into plus-minus, but it can be very telling. McCrimmon was a minus player twice in his career. One of those years was his first season in the Show. The other was on a bad Hartford team in the mid 1990s. He had some great plus-minus numbers, but one of the best might have come in the lockout-shortened 1995 season. On a bad Hartford team, McCrimmon was a plus seven, even though he only had one assist. That takes skill.
I always thought he would have been a great NHL coach. Tenacious, hard-working, a great competitor who had a great eye and mind for the game.
It's an incredible tragedy. It's one of those things that's very rare, but at the same time, it's inevitable that it will happen somewhere. Maybe we should be surprised that it doesn't happen, when you consider all of the travel for sports teams around the world, and the substandard conditions that some teams have while travelling. But it's just a shocking story, probably one of the saddest hockey stories I've ever seen.
(In one of Brian McFarlane's "It Happened in Hockey" books, there's an account of a near miss for the Habs in the 1970s. You wonder how many of those incidents have happened over the years).