Greeting Canucks fans!
Not sure if this is the right thread but I'll give it a shot.
Jyrki Lumme was on a Finnish Podcast this week and they were talking about his career and his best days in Vancouver.
I wanted to ask you guys, how do you remember Lumme from his time in Van? What did you think about him as a player and as a human being? Apparently, he still lives in Vancouver so he must've fallen in love with the city.
Anyway, thanks for your time!
Oh man, I wish someone had tagged me when this topic came up. Suffice it to say, I am a big fan of the guy, having more or less devoted my online persona to him.
I actually only ever met Lumme face to face once – getting an autograph after a game, really before my extreme fanship of him had developed – so there was nothing exceptional or unusual about that moment. But I have a family member with close ties to a number of the hockey broadcasters back in the day, who described Lumme as "the type of guy you just want to give a big hug to when you see him." I've never heard an ill word spoken about him, he just seems like the friendliest, most jovial fellow and it's kind of touching how much he's kept his ties to Vancouver even after a few other NHL stops and a return to playing in Finland. I remember my 1991 yearbook even noting he was a Seattle Seahawks season ticket holder who would commute down for games, which shows how seamlessly he fit into the local scene.
On the ice, the main reason I became such a fan is because he was somehow unheralded despite being
good at everything. With that upright skating stride, he slowed the game down and carried the puck through the zone with ease around opponents; he had a famously straight stick-blade that allowed him to loft the puck high on the backhand and do the alley-oop move that
@MS described above. He also had a surprisingly deadly wrist-shot that he would let loose when he got the opportunity between the faceoff circles, and he could beat goalies like a seasoned forward. He didn't have a booming slapshot, though -- he was no Sami Salo to be sure.
He put up really good offensive totals year after year, yet somehow barely got noticed in the rest of the league -- Tom Larscheid famously called him "the best kept secret outside of British Columbia" following the Detroit goal posted above. I thought it was the same play, but it may have been another, where Larscheid also exclaimed "And this guy isn't in the All-Star Game?!" right after some nice play that came on the heels of the release of the All-Star selections. Everyone remembers the Detroit goal, but the very next year in a game in St. Louis he pulled more or less the same move, and this time Larscheid shouted out "Remember Detroit??" without any context, but we knew exactly what he meant.
The knock on him was supposedly his defensive play. Honestly, I never saw it. His versatile stick and that straight blade made him much better at doing one thing that Canuck teams of the past famously struggled with: clearing the zone. He was always the most reliable guy for that. He wasn't a bruiser, but he wasn't a shrinking violet either and was pretty strong on the puck – I think it was Jim Robson who once noted that if Lumme were a forward, he'd be considered something of a power forward.
I think just by scoring points and being European, he had a lot of hockey guys making assumptions about defensive weaknesses. This was before analytics, of course, I could be way off, but that's how I remember it. It also doesn't help that he ended up under the microscope of Toronto at the very end of his NHL career when he would have been less effective.
I of course still proudly rock his jersey at games:
