Eric Lindros' Rookie Season

[vadim sharifijanov]

some half-remembered memories from a 1992-93 season preview magazine issue, with awards predictions

art ross

1 mario
2 stevens
3 jagr (comment was “how many Ys are there in dynasty?” which i remember surprised me because while he oozed talent and flash, projections on jagr were nowhere near where the player he would turn out to be several years later)

darkhorse: lindros


calder

lindros
lindros
lindros

dark horse: anyone else


that said, i look back and it’s still silly to me that lindros was not a calder finalist. and if you look at the voting, he, juneau, and potvin were very close. honestly, i think lindros was “punished” by voters at least a bit because he was a giant dbag. there were more than a few very gleeful articles about how “he wasn’t even a finalist.”

even with the points discrepancy juneau should not have finished second, nor third for that matter. yes, 100 points. but 100 points on a line with peak adam oates scoring 40 more than him. i know there is as a big gap between recchi and lindros too but the difference between lindros and juneau was clear to anyone with eyes.

potvin, in hindsight we all probably overrated, in the way that lundqvist in his early years was probably overrated due to being given a little too much credit for his prestige team’s turnaround (relative to jagr, gilmour, respectively, and also just that both guys’ teams were horribad before in a way that a solid and dependable goalie would look like a godsend/brodeur by comparison). but given that i’m comparing potvin to lundqvist, that gives you a sense of how legit he was as a high end rookie.

were we underwhelmed? absolutely not. watching rookie lindros you knew you were watching something very special that you might never see again. did the results fall short of expectations? of course. but he would have had to put up selanne’s rookie season to live up to expectations. i mean, even mario’s rookie year would have been a disappointment given the hype lindros came in with.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

also fun fact: selanne was an older rookie, being a year older than bure but coming over a year later. for reference, selanne was a year older than rookie brodeur and forsberg too.

but juneau was a really really old rookie. he and recchi were drafted in the same year (with rob blake, mogilny, modano, linden, roenick, and yes selanne). but like recchi he was two years older than the youngest guys in the draft. both should have been in the 1986 draft, with joe murphy, jimmy carson, damphousse, and leetch.

perspective: mark recchi was already one year into his second contract. even as a late bloomer, he already had three full seasons under his belt, plus another in the minors.

more perspective: jimmy carson’s career was basically already over by this point, and he was six months younger than juneau and recchi.

and: the two best players of 1993, mario and roy, were only 2.5 years older than juneau and recchi.

that, my friends, is a laaaaate bloomer.

 

[Troubadour]

I guess you can say he was just about anything to make your point that he was underwhelming.

In terms of him as a prospect with reasonable expectations, Crosby should have been viewed as the better offensive prospect, or at least had the more impressive junior career offense-wise.

Well, you can try and disprove it or offer a different perspective altogether.

Sid's and Eric's junior careers were fairly similar as far as the offensive stats suggest, with Eric having a far better WJC stats (at least that's how it appeared to me last time I checked, but I do realize Sid played some of those pretty young).

Eric was a bit of a media victim. People thought physicality and hitting combined with decent skill and offensive ability would be the next neccessary step in hockey evolution, thus they presumed Eric would become a new-age superstar with a Gretzky- or at least Lemieux-like impact, but the time proved them wrong, as the game, the DPE notwithstanding, leaned even more towards skill and now, the tough guy antics are getting left behind almost completely.

But you're probably right it was not as underwhelming as I initially swore.

 

[Big Phil]

It was a great rookie season. 75 points in 61 games (Flyers fans had to get used to the idea of him playing 60 games a year). That's a 100 point season in a full year. Throw in the fact that he was hitting everything in his path. This was the year where we were introduced to a player who regularly sent another player flying..........despite being the TARGET for a hit. I had never seen that before with such regularity and there were some strong men who had played in the NHL over the years.

Selanne getting 76 goals will overshadow anything. He got every single first place vote, and he deserved it. But what surprised me was that Lindros finished 4th in Calder voting behind Juneau and Potvin too.