What was with Craig Janney?

[dre]

http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=2505

great sophomore at Boston College
point per game player with Bruins
seemed to get better with Blues
declined to a 'second line' type on sharks/coyotes
played half a season on lightning
few games with islanders and he was done at age 30

i'm guessing injuries played a part but at his age he could of played another 5 years

I was a little young to know anything about players that weren't stars so tell me what you remember about him.

Based on stats alone he appears to be a mild-mannered playmaking center with pretty good size.

Click to read more...

 

[Marc the Habs Fan]

Yeah, I think you nailed it. Playmaker first and foremost, clearly helped out by playing with Neely and Hull.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

maybe, like kirk mclean, his game started to nosedive when his life did. brendan shanahan, his linemate and best man at his wedding, was having an affair with janney's wife and ended up marrying her. you can see her in those shanahan "my family is awesome" commercials they're airing right now.

 

[Mayor Bee]

maybe, like kirk mclean, his game started to nosedive when his life did. brendan shanahan, his linemate and best man at his wedding, was having an affair with janney's wife and ended up marrying her. you can see her in those shanahan "my family is awesome" commercials they're airing right now.

He didn't forget what his own side of the red line looked like at that point; he simply never bothered to find out in the first place.

Janney's real problem was that he was pretty much a one-dimensional player. His defense was non-existent, his physical play was non-existent, and his offensive contributions outside of passing were negligible at best.

 

[seventieslord]

Janney was a really poor man's Pierre Turgeon in every imaginable way.

 

[Rhiessan71]

In a nut shell.....

 

[doakacola*]

In a nut shell.....

His career was cut short by injury. Janney had a 105 point season in the NHL. He was an elite playmaker who though obviously benefitted from Neely & Hull also set them up with many a sweet ffed.

 

[Rhiessan71]

His career was cut short by injury. Janney had a 105 point season in the NHL. He was an elite playmaker who though obviously benefitted from Neely & Hull also set them up with many a sweet ffed.

Still doesn't mean he had any Heart, he was notoriously soft and was an incredibly small 6'1 200+ lb player.
The guy played red-line to red-line...the center one to the one the oppositions net sits on.

 

[GKJ]

Wasn't he involved in some kind of insubordination or something like that?

 

[tony d]

I always liked him as a player but yeah he was to much of a playmaker and to little of everything else.

 

[MS]

As others have stated, the Shanahan thing really broke him and he was never the same player afterward.

In his prime, he was one of the top 5 passers in the sport - exceptional talent who was top-10 in assists 4 straight years, averaged an assist/game from 1992-94. As talented as Oates as a playmaker.

Extremely soft player who was suspect defensively, but still produced well in the playoffs.

That said, one of the most unexpected things I've ever seen was Janney absolutely flattening a guy with a big open-ice check late in his career when he was with Phoenix - remember clear as day a flabberghasted Keith Tkachuk on the Coyote bench.

 

[SealsFan]

I agree with the assessments of his game so far. The one thing I'll remember him for is the card he received in the board game Strat-o-matic Hockey for the 95-96 season. He was a 20-goal scorer in 84 games yet received an offense rating of "1", the lowest (out of 4). The offense rating measures how many shots a player will generate and Janney took only 91 shots the entire season, barely 1 per game. That's an incredibly low number for a forward who was neither a defensive specialist nor a goon. It was probably the only time a 20-goal scorer was rated offense-1 in the game.

 

[SPV]

I used to score at least 2 PPG with Janney back in NHL 94!!

Janney was one of my favorite players before he got traded to St. Louis. Ironically, I ended up liking Adam Oates much more. I don't know what happened to him either once he left, but I thought he was a heck of a hockey player. Boston fans loved to tear him down because he played soft, which I think is often associated with having no heart.

 

[GentlemanOfLeisure]

He was the original Scott Gomez.

 

[Rabid Ranger]

In a nut shell.....

I don't think that's fair at all. Janney would get train wrecked to make a pass and produced when it counted. It's true he wasn't a banger and wasn't much of a backchecker, but the game was a bit differant in his hey day than it is now. I'll also say that it wasn't just the Shanahan thing that took a toll, but the "coaching" of Mike Keenan. Keenan DESPISED Janney and ran him out of town.

 

[ColdSteel2]

What POS Shanahan is; the woman is worse. Janney also deserves blame. Should have put it behind him and targeted Shanahan's knee until his career was taken away.

 

[Bob Kudelski]

He's a decent first line center.

 

[Mayor Bee]

What POS Shanahan is; the woman is worse. Janney also deserves blame. Should have put it behind him and targeted Shanahan's knee until his career was taken away.

That would have involved throwing a hit, so it wasn't going to happen.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

He didn't forget what his own side of the red line looked like at that point; he simply never bothered to find out in the first place.

Janney's real problem was that he was pretty much a one-dimensional player. His defense was non-existent, his physical play was non-existent, and his offensive contributions outside of passing were negligible at best.

it's funny. in that daigle thread where someone said, "daigle never realized he couldn't coast on his talent in the NHL." and someone else said, "could anyone?" and i immediately thought to myself, craig janney could and did.

He was the original Scott Gomez.

he was better than that. my best comparison would be jason spezza.

As talented as Oates as a playmaker.

too far.

 

[Gilles Meloche]

I remember when he refused to report to Vancouver after being traded.....

http://bruinslegends.blogspot.com/2007/12/craig-janney.html

A weird thing happened to Janney and the Blues near the end of the 1993-94 season. The Blues signed restricted free agent Petr Nedved from Vancouver and an independent arbitrator named Janney and a second round pick as compensation. Janney however refused to report, and the Canucks swung a subsequent deal to allow St. Louis to keep Janney in exchange for defensemen Jeff Brown and Bret Hedican, as well as young forward Nathan Lafeyette. The Canucks also got to keep the draft pick, which turned out to be Dave Scatchard.

 

[BraveCanadian]

One of the best pure playmakers I've ever seen. Great vision.

He gets labeled as soft but he did play hurt and he would take a hit to make a play.

Injuries and a lack of a good finisher really slowed him down by the end though.. but in his good years he was a very talented player.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

I remember when he refused to report to Vancouver after being traded.....

http://bruinslegends.blogspot.com/2007/12/craig-janney.html

A weird thing happened to Janney and the Blues near the end of the 1993-94 season. The Blues signed restricted free agent Petr Nedved from Vancouver and an independent arbitrator named Janney and a second round pick as compensation. Janney however refused to report, and the Canucks swung a subsequent deal to allow St. Louis to keep Janney in exchange for defensemen Jeff Brown and Bret Hedican, as well as young forward Nathan Lafeyette. The Canucks also got to keep the draft pick, which turned out to be Dave Scatchard.

yep. as i recall, janney even said to the press that he had a good thing going with his best buddy shanahan and didn't want to leave it. the shanny and janney line was doing well, janney potting his only 100 point season the year before and helping shanahan get to 50 goals for the first time. i wonder if janney regretted that decision soon after, though?

he seems to have put on a brave face in the aftermath:

Janney has had to live with his first wife, Catherine, running off with Shanahan, his linemate in St. Louis and now the NHL’s vice president of hockey and business development. That infidelity led to Shanahan being traded to the Whalers after the 1994-95 season for standout defenseman Chris Pronger and succeeding Pat Verbeek as team captain. Despite the leadership role and getting 44 goals and 34 assists in 1995-96, Shanahan wasn’t interested in being in Hartford, so after two games the following season, he was traded to the Detroit, where he helped the Red Wings win three Stanley Cups.

Janney said that development, which reportedly upset a lot of Blues players, never caused any mental anguish or affected his career.

“I don’t keep in contact with (Shanahan), but I have no hard feelings,” said Janney, who remarried in 1998. “I just wish him all the best.”

http://www.whalernation.tv/2011/02/...com-whale-bowl-legends-game-feb-19-at-re.html

according to the same article, he is happy with his second wife and they have a 12 year old daughter so maybe everything worked out for the best in his personal life?

janney's refusal to report to vancouver sure worked out best for us (canucks) anyway.

 

[TheMoreYouKnow]

He was the original Scott Gomez.

I think in his New Jersey days Gomez was much more defensively responsible than Janney ever was. Gomez is a guy who could have just stayed with NJ for the rest of his career and get his jersey retired and enjoy a nice little reputation as a good if not HOF caliber player.

 

[dre]

I had no idea about the shanahan, janney, canucks stories. Why did he retire at 30 though?? I suppose after a couple down years the contract options weren't good enough for him to keep playing? What was the injury that kept him away?

 

[Breakfast of Champs]

I think in his New Jersey days Gomez was much more defensively responsible than Janney ever was. Gomez is a guy who could have just stayed with NJ for the rest of his career and get his jersey retired and enjoy a nice little reputation as a good if not HOF caliber player.

Let's not get carried away. Scoring 20+ goals and over 70 pts once in a career doesn't get you anywhere near the hof. A good player though not taking away from him just nowhere near hof caliber.