- Langway left my Habs and I followed, becoming a Habs AND Caps fan.
- Young Coffey was my jam so I became an Oilers fan. (Gretzky helped.)
- Peca was traded from my Vancouver hometown team to the Sabres during his promising rookie year (for Mogilny - ugh), so when I moved to Toronto I cheered for the Sabres!
You?
How many teams are you a fan of? I know you're a Sharks fan too (because of Marleau?). Montreal, Washington, Edmonton, Vancouver, Buffalo, San Jose? Any more teams?
As a kid I made the Penguins my official #2 team thanks to Mario Lemieux.
Mario made me take a lot more interest in the Penguins.
When the Penguins were at their highest heights in the early 90s around 1991–1992 and defending Cup champions I was 10–11 or so and a TV channel here in my home country, Kanal 5 (Channel 5, a rubbish TV channel by the way), had just begun broadcasting some games (live I think, in the middle of the night). Problem was though they
only/exclusively showed Pittsburgh Penguins games.
I had no idea then, and I still have no idea, if this was due to TV rights or not, but I still remember quite vividly how the commentators made it appear that the Penguins were the only important team in the league worth of any notice whatsoever, which kinda rubbed a young me the wrong way. I thought "what the hell, there must be more than one interesting team in this league with other interesting players than just this particular team". It annoyed the hell out of me, how (supposedly non-biased) grown ups on TV appeared to favor one team in front of all the others, force feeding it down everyone's throats.
And it couldn't have been because of home players, because yes Ulf Samuelsson was a good player, but him and Kjell weren't exactly the flashiest of the flashy drawing drooling Swedish hockey fans en masse to the TV screens. Sure, both Mats Näslund and Håkan Loob had just departed the league, but a young Mats Sundin had just entered it and we had some other decent guys too in Sandström, Steen, Pelle Eklund, Calle Johansson, Olausson, Dahlén.
It's not like this made me hate Pittsburgh, but it sure didn't make me a fan either. I think I was already a Bure fan at the time because I had seen him on a hockey card in Soviet outfit and probably in the 1991 World Championships too, but I don't think I knew yet that he had been drafted by the Canucks. At this time I mostly listened to SEL broadcasts in the family car tuning in on Färjestad games (because of Loob).
Thomas Rundqvist was chosen to the 1991 World Championship All-Star team in front of both Sakic and Roenick too.