So we have two Mighty Ducks captains who were born one year apart, retired the same season, shook hands in a Stanley Cup Final as arguably their teams’ top skaters, and even go surfing together. My first instinct is that Scott Niedermayer is better than Paul Kariya, but I wanted to test that.
Niedermayer was, of course, a 1st ballot HOFer in 2013. I’m not saying he was the top of his class (Chelios), but he was at the very center of that weekend’s program - just to give you an idea of how far the media was running with the pro-Niedermayer narrative back then. Meanwhile, Paul Kariya waited another four years to get inducted.
On the surface, that’s pretty damning since they didn’t even take four HOFers in 2013 when Niedermayer was selected and Kariya was not, but an optimistic reading may be that the advance knowledge of Teemu Selanne’s inevitable induction in 2017 made it a little easier to not vote for Kariya a handful of years. After all, they took Housley in 2015, didn’t take a full set of four in 2016, and then added Kariya in 2017. Another reading may be that the injury-ridden and Cup-less Bure and Lindros had to wait too (5 extra years each), so Kariya would as well.
This ran in contrast to how they were perceived prior to leaving/joining Anaheim before and after the 2003-04 season. Kariya was a mainstay in the THN rankings, finishing 6th in 1996, ranking as one of the league’s five “franchise players” (along with Forsberg, Jagr, Lindros, and Roy) in 1997, 2nd in 1998, 5th in 1999, 3rd in 2000, 8th in 2001, 8th in 2002, before declining to 40th in 2003 and disappearing thereafter.
Niedermayer debuted at 28th in 1998, placed 39th in 1999, 25th in 2000, 46th in 2001, 31st in 2002, 19th in 2003, then rattled off 13th, 7th, and 8th before his first partial retirement in 2007 took him off of the list (where as a 1st Team All-Star and Conn Smythe winner, he would have presumably been quite high up there).
There is a good case that Kariya, given his downward trend, was less likely to retain a spot on the list (which had transitioned to being more predictive rather than reflective starting in 1998) despite still being good. He was still a top-20 scorer in 2005-06 (and his team-leading 76 points in 2006-07 wasn’t far off from 2nd Team All-Star Thomas Vanek’s Briere-influenced 84 points) but the buzz was gone.
If Kariya’s 2005-06 and 2006-07 were transplanted to the beginning of his career - giving him a bigger wind-up to his peak rather than a lengthier cool-down - would we feel substantially different about them? I think THN would, but maybe we would as well.
There’s worse filler seasons than being in a logjam of the 17th-25th highest scorers in the league (159-164 points) alongside Jarome Iginla and Martin St. Louis. After Dany Heatley (208 points), Alex Ovechkin (198 points), and Ilya Kovalchuk (174 points), we’re looking at a two-year window where Paul Kariya (161 points; 9 points in 10 playoff games on a Nashville team that won just 2 of 10 against San Jose) is maybe the next best Left Wing in a 30-team, internationally-diverse league.
So even though he’s another Dead Puck Era player with an abbreviated career, he was probably relevant on the ice for a longer period than we may otherwise expect if we lost track of him after the lockout.
Kariya was also pretty vocal about his frustrations with hockey, and distanced himself from everything in a way that Brendan Shanahan (HOF 2013) and Rob Blake (HOF 2014) did not, which probably put a bit of a pause on people’s willingness to celebrate him.
ESPN - June 29 2011 said:
Mark Lovell, one of the continent's top concussion doctors and a man familiar with NHL players, told Kariya last season that the forward suffered brain damage and wasn't able to play.
"He said to me, 'No one in my profession would clear you to play this season,' " Kariya recalled.
Kariya began working with Dr. Daniel Amen, one of the NFL's leading post-concussion experts. After five months of hyperbaric chambers and other workout regimens, Kariya jumped from the 20th to the 80th percentile in brain function.
Still, Amen echoed Lovell's sentiments: Playing in the NHL again would be foolish.
"There's still brain damage on the scan," Kariya said.
"It's been a little disappointing that in the time I've been in the league, nothing much has been done to stop that," Kariya said. "We shouldn't be having this conversation right now. To me there's never been enough of a deterrent not to do it."
Paul Kariya - 2017 said:
Any of the concussions I’ve received in my career, when I came to and saw what happened... there’s a lot of anger.
So I’m not sure it’s enough to say Kariya > Niedermayer, but I do think that even as late as 2009, if there was more of a deterrent than a 2-minute penalty not to try to brain someone who already had 5 concussions, Kariya probably could have coasted by as a good player on St. Louis or elsewhere for the remainder of his 30s and landed close to 1200 points (Iginla added 205 after he left Calgary, so Kariya is probably good for 211).
I’m glad that the doctors in 2010 stopped him. 10 years earlier, and they would have just let him continue playing, collecting those post-prime points that would have probably put him 30 spots higher on our list, and it would have only taken Kariya gambling his life. Hell, not even 10 years - the doctors let him come back
that year (he scored 24 points in 37 games in his return), only finally putting an end to it in the off-season.
That’s what really differentiates the end of his career relative to that of Bure and Forsberg and Lindros - while they all fell apart physically, Kariya was the only one who could still skate and shoot and play at a high level if asked to suit up for another few years; he just wasn’t allowed to do so.
I can’t think of worse timing: Kariya joins the league in an era where players don’t respect the health of each others’ brains, plays through those injuries (sometimes even dramatically so), and then when it’s time to just compile numbers - both points and dollars - they stop him. Not because he can’t do it but because doctors finally realized the danger of the compounded interest on all those times Kariya was asked to “get back out there” after getting his “bell rung”.
