Jimmy Carson... Why did his career never take off?

[Dylonus]

Random question for the old timers here. Carson blew it up to start his career then just.... went to a downward spiral after his first three years.

What happened? Why did he falter so quickly? I've always been curious of this. Did the league "Figure him out" perhaps?

Click to read more...

 

[streitz]

Pretty sure he couldn't handle the pressure of living up to Gretzky. Smart guy and while I'm sure he enjoyed playing hockey, a combination of nerves, mental fatigue(traded so often as a young star) and knowing he had other options killed his career.

 

[Brodeur]

He wasn't the Great One, but Carson won't complain

Carson was not bad in Edmonton -- he rang up 49 goals and 51 assists in his first season with the Oilers -- but he was not great. Nor was he, as seemed to be constantly noted, The Great One.

"The end analysis was, I was not Wayne Gretzky," he says.

The expectations were unrealistic, the pressure unbearable.

"He had a good season in Edmonton, but did it matter? No," says McNall, who remained close to Carson. "He wasn't Wayne. And it was totally unfair."

Four games into his second season, Carson asked to be traded. The Oilers sent him to the Detroit Red Wings, where he spent two full seasons and parts of two others as the No. 3 center behind Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov.

His playing time severely cut, he never again reached the heights he had scaled in his first three NHL seasons as a top-line center.

He was traded back to the Kings late in the 1992-93 season, but it wasn't the same. Coach Barry Melrose barely used him during the last three rounds of the Kings' drive to the 1993 Stanley Cup finals and, after the Kings traded Carson to the Vancouver Canucks in the 1993-94 season, Melrose dinged him. Carson, he said, had "lost some of the fire" and was "not willing to pay the price anymore."

"In a weird way, I knew Jimmy's heart was not as much into it," says McNall of his friend, who neither smoked, drank nor partied with teammates. "He was an intellectual, multidimensional guy, read the Wall Street Journal, and so many other players just don't have his opportunities and interests. So I always thought, deep down, that maybe long-term hockey wouldn't be for him."

Lost his passion to play seemed to be the common sentiment.

 

[Habsfan18]

The future was so bright he had to wear shades!

 

[Neutrinos]

He had 286 points in his first 240 games - which included back-to-back 100 points seasons

2nd youngest player to reach 100 career goals

Played his final NHL season at the age of 27

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

there are two ways the story has always been told:

one is he was a rich kid and didn't need to play hockey and eventually didn't want to put in the work anymore so he became a finance bro.

the other is messier bullied him until he didn't want to play hockey anymore.

the truth is probably both.

 

[The Panther]

Carson has got a lot of mileage out of his "I-couldn't-handle-the-pressure-of-replacing-Gretzky" line, which is completely bogus. In reality, he was probably a bit molly-coddled in L.A. (owner McNall really liked him) and enjoyed the sunshine while starting his investments in the stock market. In Edmonton, he was suddenly in a freezing cold winter city with super-intense veterans Cup champs who were focused on getting the Stanley Cup back.

This was a thread I started about his tenure in Edmonton a while back -- some good information:
https://hfboards.mandatory.com/threads/jimmy-carson-with-edmonton-1988-89.2350035/

 

[MS]

He was a 'hands' guy who was neither big nor fast and those guys had very short careers in the late '80s and early '90s. He was far from alone in being this type of player who was done by age 30 around this time but was the most high-profile.

 

[c9777666]

I wonder how Carson might have fared if he landed on a team in a freezing cold winter city but not one with, to quote Panther, “super-intense veterans Cup champs who were focused on getting the Stanley Cup back.” Suppose he ended up going from LA to a place like Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Montreal.

Or if Robitaille was traded for Gretzky and Carson/99 were LA teammates instead.

 

[frisco]

He didn't fit the traditional hockey culture in Edmonton at that time. The Oilers drank and partied hard together and that's where they bonded. And sounds sort of stupid but they took the nights out as a team very seriously. Carson wasn't really into that lifestyle and sort of became an outsider within his own team.

My Best-Carey

 

[VanIslander]

I was in college when he was an NHL rookie and i recall criticizing him for being lazy without the puck and having a bad attitude in interviews.

I've had the same vibe with Jeff Brown and Dany Heatley.

 

[Vanzig]

word was he was selfish and a kind of a ROB BROWN type player (allegedly) he had a few great seasons but just kind of lost his way

 

[maacoshark]

I was in college when he was an NHL rookie and i recall criticizing him for being lazy without the puck and having a bad attitude in interviews.

I've had the same vibe with Jeff Brown and Dany Heatley.

He was lazy without the puck.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

word was he was selfish and a kind of a ROB BROWN type player (allegedly) he had a few great seasons but just kind of lost his way

are you suggesting that rob brown was selfish too, or just that they had a similar skillset/limitations?

i think of rob brown and mark recchi as one of hockey’s great immutable truths. same age, same size, probably the same skill, identical pedigrees (4th round pick, whl scoring superstar with the blazers), neither guy was going to blow by you with his skating, both got by with incredible o-zone intelligence and vision.

but one guy had a motor that did not quit while the other guy let his talents do the talking. and so one guy took the other guy’s job, even though the second guy was just 21 and had averaged a carson-esque almost 100 points in his first three years.

 

[Hoser]

I wonder how Carson might have fared if he landed on a team in a freezing cold winter city but not one with, to quote Panther, “super-intense veterans Cup champs who were focused on getting the Stanley Cup back.” Suppose he ended up going from LA to a place like Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Montreal.

Carson played two years of junior in Montreal; by all accounts he loved it. He was from Detroit after all, so it's not as though "freezing cold winter city" was something he had never experienced or couldn't 'handle'. He didn't like Edmonton itself, and did not like playing for the Oilers in particular.

He didn't fit the traditional hockey culture in Edmonton at that time. The Oilers drank and partied hard together and that's where they bonded. And sounds sort of stupid but they took the nights out as a team very seriously. Carson wasn't really into that lifestyle and sort of became an outsider within his own team.

From the Dec. 24, 1990 Sports Illustrated article, "Coming Home":

[The trade] has been looked at from Gretzky's perspective a million times, but here is what it looked like from Carson's: "The first thing I hear is there have been death threats on [Oiler owner Peter] Pocklington, and they're hanging him in the streets in effigy. Just a barrage of negativism. Meanwhile, in L.A., where I've just bought a house, the first home I've ever owned, it's like a big party. The town was going berserk. And guess who's leaving? I was totally numb at the press conference when I was introduced to Edmonton."

True, the Oilers were defending Stanley Cup champions, but Edmonton? After growing up in Grosse Pointe Woods, spending two years in Montreal, followed by two more in Los Angeles, Carson certainly wasn't going to find the West Edmonton Mall—the city's chief attraction now that Gretzky was gone—enough to keep his engine charged all winter.

He was different from most hockey players—well rounded, cosmopolitan, inquisitive about the world. His favorite people to hang around with were not just athletes but young accountants, lawyers and stockbrokers. Most of his childhood friends had gone into business. On the mantel in his Grosse Pointe home, Carson keeps photographs of himself talking to Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. He likes to read books on politics. Many of his Red Wing teammates call him Mr. Republican because of his conservative political leanings.

"It was reverse culture shock," he says of his exposure to Edmonton. "Most of the Oiler players come from small farming towns. They think Edmonton is Paris. Their idea of fun is going to a bar and getting hammered all night. That's not me. How do you give up your values, just to be accepted by the team?"

Carson was miserable. And he certainly wasn't going to make Edmonton fans forget Gretzky. Still, teamed with the Great One's old linemates, Jari Kurd and Esa Tikkanen, Carson did get 100 points (49 goals and 51 assists) for the second straight season.

So he had decided to play out his option. There was no getting around the fact that he didn't like living in Edmonton. It wasn't the money. Carson refused the Oilers' offer to renegotiate his contract because doing so meant signing a long-term deal. He simply wanted to work in a city in which he enjoyed living. Says Carson, "After the All-Star break I called Sather and told him, 'I don't think things are going to work here, and if you get a good offer, it might be best if you moved me.' "

Sather didn't make a deal, and Carson's first season in Edmonton ended on a sour note when the Oilers were bounced from the opening round of the playoffs by the Gretzky-led Kings. Carson returned to California to await a trade, but nothing happened. He reported to training camp, but still no deal was in the works. "The Oilers obviously weren't getting the hint," he says. "I kept asking myself, What do you do? What are your options?"

Near the end of camp, Carson's ice-time started to slip. He wasn't being used as often on the power play. He was being paired with wingers less skilled than Kurri and Tikkanen. Now Carson had a fresh concern. What if he got buried on the third or fourth line and had a poor season? What would that do to his status as a free agent? And what if he did play out his option?

According to the NHL's restrictive free-agent rules, the Oilers could keep him by matching any offer another club made to him. Recalls Carson: "I kept asking myself, What do you do? Keep playing? I decided that I had a few marbles in my hand, and, like in any business, I could either use those marbles or lose them." Four games into the 1989-90 season, Carson quit the Oilers.

Naturally, he was vilified in the Edmonton press, described as a spoiled, rich American crybaby who had walked out on his teammates. He was called a quitter. YANKEE GO HOME said one newspaper. The fact that for the previous eight months Carson had quietly urged Sather to trade him to a team based in a U.S. city—it didn't have to be Detroit—was largely ignored, because Carson had never taken his case to the press.

That last sentence is something that is conveniently forgotten by many: he wanted out of Edmonton long before the '89 playoffs, long before he walked out on the team in October.

In the thread "Jimmy Carson with Edmonton (1988-89)" The Panther noted:

... he scored at a furious rate after a slow start to the season. He scored twice on opening night against the Islanders, and then went cold for eight games. With 6 goals in the first 15 games, he seemed to be fighting it a bit. Then he went crazy in the next 27 games, scoring 28 goals. At that point, he was on pace for 61, a career high. But then he scored only 7 in his next 25 games...! He ended up with 49 goals (only 5 fewer than Gretzky in L.A.), and 100 points, which was only 2 fewer than Jari Kurri for the team lead. But he certainly cooled off over the late-part of the season, and then disappointed in the playoffs (most-bizarre-series-ever, as it was) against L.A., with 3 points in 7 games.

In fact if you break his season into 24-game chunks in the last 72 games of the year you find he scored at an 83-goal, 133-point pace (25 G, 15 A, 40 P in 24 GP) between games 9 and 32 (Oct. 25 to Dec. 14, 1989), but from there on at a very consistent 90-point pace the rest of the year (14G, 13 A, 27 P b/w games 33 and 56; 8 G, 19 A, 27 P b/w games 57 and 80). The threshold at game 32 is important because that was when his scoring pace had been at its highest over the course of the season as a whole; had he kept up the same pace as he had in those first 32 games—including the slow start—he would have finished with 68 goals and 47 assists for 115 points. The threshold at game 56 is important because that was the last before the All-Star break: he had privately asked Sather for a trade by that point but continued to perform at the same pace as he had since mid-December.

A 90-point season wouldn't have been total crap or anything, but you can clearly see that after that peak at mid-December his scoring pace very, very consistently levelled off about 25% lower than it had been earlier. Perhaps he had already made up his mind that he wanted out of Edmonton that far back.

Using the same kind of analysis I think you can see the breaking point in his career was clearly the trade from Detroit back to LA.

When he was traded to the Red Wings his scoring output dropped due to injury and to being relegated to the second or third-line centre role, but it was steadily improving. In '89-'90 his pace was a 65-point season. In '90-'91 it was 58 P. In '91-'92 it was 69 (the only full year he actually played in Detroit), and in '92-'93 prior to the trade it was 83 P. Once he was traded back to the Kings by the Red Wings his scoring pace fell back to 54 P, and thereafter was consistently about 0.5 ppg.


Does anyone remember anything about Carson's try-out with the Islanders in 1997?

 

[TheMoreYouKnow]

I think it's one of those things where you can kinda see and understand both points of view.

The reality is that the NHL for a long time had a 'keep your head down and shut up' mentality as far as players were concerned, just be one of the guys and do as you're told. If you wanted to break with that, you had to really earn it first and then maybe as a veteran leader you get a bit of leeway.

Of course, all of society was a bit like that to differing degrees up to the 1960s perhaps. So hockey - and team sports in general - were kind of a holdout there.

So on the one hand, Carson was perhaps simply an 'alien intruder' from normal society into a very insulated environment with a whole range of unwritten rules and expectations.. and there wasn't really much he could do about it without completely reinventing himself as a person. Which he understandably didn't want to do and unlike others before and after him didn't feel like he had to either. But perhaps, of course, there is a reason why those traditional values stuck around in hockey longer than elsewhere. In hockey, you need your soldiers, you need the sacrifice. It's how you win. The Oilers knew this, of course, better than most..having won a lot.

I can also imagine how if you're a veteran and you've made your sacrifices, you might react quite sensitively to a young player coming in going "oh by the way, this is how I want this to work" like he's figured out something new and have everyone adjust their championship-winning ways to this new individualistic approach. So yeah, I can see how Carson felt wronged..but I can also see why the Oilers weren't especially interested in making things work for him as per his own requirements.

 

[The Panther]

I don't have a problem, per se, with Carson's being unhappy in Edmonton and asking Sather to move him. (In fact, it worked out well for the Oilers and they won another Stanley Cup partly due to trading him, which created the 'kid line'.) What I do have a bit of a problem with is his dissing Edmonton and the team-culture in interviews (such as the one quoted above). I don't think he meant anything bad by it, but when you say things like "their idea of having a good time is getting hammered", and "they think Edmonton is Paris", you are burning a lot of bridges with powerful people in the game, including Mark Messier, who went on to be the toast of New York with much the same team-culture he applied in Edmonton. In other words, it wasn't an Edmonton-thing that Carson didn't like; it was a hockey-culture thing.

But I agree with TheMoreYouKnow (above) that we can see both sides of it. Carson, in a way, was ahead of his time. His attitude was like that of a collegiate NHL player of today -- primary concerns being salary, security, pension, investments for after hockey, taking care of #1 -- and the Oilers' attitude in late-Dynasty was still very much in Glen Sather's 1960s' mode of team-first-above-everything.

 

[Jim MacDonald]

I didn't realize Carson was an educated guy with a money/businessman sense etc. It may explain/support the thought of not being fully committed to the game. I thought of Ken Dryden, learning from reading "The Game" that he was going to law school and didn't aspire to just be a hockey player....Dryden kicked ass though when he was playing hockey....you wonder why Carson didn't maybe do the same, knowing the financial-type job would be there in retirement etc.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

well here we are in 2018 and dougie hamilton was traded twice immediately after posting 40+ point seasons because he was going to too many museums in his spare time.

 

[FerrisRox]

I've always found it interesting with the exception of his final trade (to Vancouver, for Dixon Ward) he was involved in such large transactions.

His first trade, of course, was the Gretzky deal and that involved (when you factor in the picks) eight players.

LA shipped Carson, Martin Gelinas and picks that became Martin Rucinsky, Nick Stajduhar and Jason Miller for Wayne Gretzky, Marty McSorely and Mike Krushelnyski.

Then he gets dealt in a deal that involved (when you factor in draft picks) seven players.

Edmonton sends Carson along with Kevin McClelland and a pick that became Brad Layzell to Detroit for
Petr Klima, Joe Murphy, Adam Graves and Jeff Sharples.

His third transaction has the Wings shipping him back to Los Angeles in a deal that involves six players. Carson goes to the Kings, along with Marc Potvin and Gary Shuchuk for Paul Coffey, Sylvain Couturier and Jim Hiller.

His first three trades of his NHL career involved a staggering 21 players!

 

[tony d]

He had a decent enough career (561 pts. in 628 GP) but still being traded for Gretzky had to play on him. Imagine having to live up to that in hockey-mad Edmonton.

 

[Reality Check]

Carson was put into a good situation with Detroit and still ended up as a disappointment. You could see the potential and why teams were enamored with him but it never happened.

He was quickly surpassed by a somewhat unknown Sergei Fedorov and shipped off for a key piece in the present and ultimately the future in Paul Coffey. Who was later shipped out in the Brendan Shanahan deal in '96.

 

[brachyrynchos]

The Hockey Writers 'What Ever Happened to Jimmy Carson' Michael Difranco 10/31/09
Jimmy Carson- "I was approached by Gary Holvick, General agent, in 1989 while playing with the Detroit Red Wings. He advised me to purchase a policy to fund a deferred compensation plan. I followed his advice and became a very happy policy holder. I was so impressed by the professionalism of both Mr Holvick and Northwestern Mutual that I reaized a future career existed for me with this company." *it mentions Carson taking summer classes and getting certifed in '92 as a licensed financial representative.
Bruce McNall-"In a weird way, I knew Jimmy's heart was not as much into it" says McNall of his friend, who neither smoked, drank nor partied with teammates. "He was an intelletual, multidimensional guy, read the Wall Street Journal, and so many other players just don't have his opportunities and interests. So I always thought maybe long term hockey wouldn't be for him".

 

[Jumptheshark]

Pretty sure he couldn't handle the pressure of living up to Gretzky. Smart guy and while I'm sure he enjoyed playing hockey, a combination of nerves, mental fatigue(traded so often as a young star) and knowing he had other options killed his career.

He never loved the game. He viewed it an ends to the means. He viewed it as an investment where he would make money to invest elsewhere. He was more interested in building his portfolio then working on his game.


One reason why he wanted out of Edmonton was because he did not feel the off ice opportunities were not what he wanted.

Say what you want Bout him. He never hides the fact he has made more money off the ice then on

 

[Jumptheshark]

here is an example of his mind set.

Back in the 80's and 90's, most teams had contracts with car dealerships where players got use a of a car or whatever they wanted. Carson was talking about getting a vehicle and ask the owner of the dealership "how much"--the owner said it was free with the advertising done with the team. Carson paused. "no, how much to buy your dealership"

Carson was always looking at the next step and was a head of his time for thinking about life after hockey. HE was the changing of the guard for hockey players IMO--my hatred for him has somewhat gone away the more I learned about him and his perspective of things. He started playing hockey when players were supposed to play for the love of the game--Carson liked the game-but he saw his involvement as a money making venture