Former Dallas coach Ken Hitchcock, now behind the bench in Columbus, recalled the summer of 1998, when the Stars signed Hull. Within the first hour of the signing, Hitchcock said, he received 10 phone calls, most wishing him luck with getting along with the vocal, strong-willed Hull.
"When I first met him, I was kind of intimidated," Hitchcock said. "He had the reputation of being a really strong person in the dressing room. And then after a while, I found I could really learn a lot from this guy, the way he thought the game."
It was Hitchcock, lauded even now by Hull as one of the greatest coaches for whom he played, who tapped into an inner reserve of determination in the sometimes prickly winger. By the time Hull landed in Dallas, he had a reputation as a one-dimensional player whose value to the team was limited to a single element -- scoring goals. In 1992-93 and 1993-94 in St. Louis, for instance, Hull scored 111 goals and was a combined minus-30.
"I was never held accountable defensively in my whole life, which is why I never did it," Hull said.
In Dallas, people didn't think he could do anything different. Or would. He proved them wrong. "That's what I'm most proud of," he said. "Just being able to shut people up."
It wasn't easy.
Hitchcock recalled ultimately coming to an agreement with Hull about how they were going to co-exist. Hitchcock, an exacting man when it came to preparation, agreed to cut Hull some slack, demanding he give the coach 30 good minutes of practice if Hull guaranteed he'd become the player Hitchcock wanted him to be on game nights.
"I said, 'Let's have a negotiation,'" Hitchcock said. "I said, 'I'll show you the respect you want if you show me the respect I need.' That's when he bought in."
In time, the agreement paid dividends in the form of the team's first Stanley Cup in 1999. Hull scored what will be remembered as "the toe goal" at the edge of
Dominik Hasek's crease as the Stars defeated the
Buffalo Sabres in the sixth game of the Cup finals.
But the agreement did have its moments of peril. Hitchcock recalled the Stars' losing a sloppy game to Los Angeles, 8-5. The next day, he railed at the players in practice about how it didn't matter how many goals anyone scored if they couldn't stop the other team from scoring. In all of the Stars' drills, Hull would skate in on goal, then dump the puck into the corner.
"Every drill," Hitchcock recalled with a laugh. "I got really mad and threw him off the ice. And then, I chased him around the locker room. He was laughing the whole time. He told me he had to go golfing."
One day, Hitchcock gave Hull the day off from practice. Later, the coach and players looked up at GM Bob Gainey's corner office, and there was Hull sitting with his feet up on Gainey's desk watching the rest of the squad go through the drills. Still, there were many moments that revealed the passion Hull had for his craft.
When he wasn't scoring -- and that wasn't often -- it wasn't uncommon for Hull to stay on the ice at practice and fire 200 one-time slap shots into the net. Virtually all would find their way to the back of the net, the coach said, still marveling as he remembered the sight.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Hitchcock also said Hull was the best passer on the team. He often would team up with a young player in drills, and his hard passes sometimes would knock the youngsters' sticks out of their hands.
"He'd be there, snickering in the back of the line because there's this poor kid chasing his stick down the ice," Hitchcock said.
The year the Stars won the Cup, Hitchcock said that Hull elevated his game against his former team the Blues in a series that saw four of the six games go to overtime. "I've never seen such desperate hockey," Hitchcock said.
After the Stars had squeezed past Colorado in a seven-game thriller in the Western Conference finals, Hull ended up playing most of the Cup finals against Buffalo with a third-degree MCL tear. Hitchcock wondered how Hull was going to be able to get home from the rink after practice, let alone how he was going to play in games.
At one point in Game 6, team doctors told Hitchcock that Hull wasn't going to play. A few shifts later, he was back on the ice, and he later scored the winner, toe in the crease or not. Hull would win a second Stanley Cup in Detroit near the end of his career, when he played a surprisingly well-rounded role for the talented Red Wings under coach Scotty Bowman.
GM Ken Holland acknowledged that he wasn't sure how Hull would fit in with the veteran team back in 2002, but he did.
"No. 1, Brett was an awesome guy. No. 2, he was great defensively," said Holland, who recalled that one of the first things Bowman did was install Hull on the Wings' penalty-killing unit. "Scotty's way of coaching was to challenge somebody, and Brett loves challenges. Brett was everything we could have asked for."