“It's a great game. But coaches find a way to stop it.”
"I prefer the NHL style of hockey. You always think European hockey is going to be more wide open and with more scoring and that sort of stuff, but it's almost the opposite. There is less scoring...There was a lot more grabbing, holding and clutching than I expected. Because of the big ice, there's a lot of man-on-man play. In the playoffs, they were just draped all over me and nothing got called. They let everything go. I remember forwards looking at me and not even looking at the play, with their stick between my legs."
"A big part of it is, the goalies are the best players on every team now. That's slowly evolved over the past 10 years. They're the superstars of the league and the highest-paid players and they're the TV announcers. They practically run the league. Is that what you want in your sport? When I was growing up, your best athletes were your top centres and your top defencemen and the guys who played all the time. That's the way it should be in the NHL again."
"I saw courage last night. There were calls that haven't been made in 25 years."
"They've taken everything out of the game. Guy Lafleur would grind out his 50 goals every year and so did (Lanny) McDonald, (Bryan) Trottier, the Rocket, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Now, you don't have to get a broken nail on your finger and you're going to score 40 or 50 goals. Is that what we strived to do in the NHL the past 70 years? Guys paid a price to score on a regular basis. They get carte blanche now to score on power plays."
"Now when you’re on the ice, you just go non-stop and it’s hard. You come off the ice completely winded. Playing hockey is fun. Going out and hooking and holding isn’t fun. People shouldn’t confuse fun with not working... For a guy who played the left-wing lock the past eight years, I can say it was a lot easier for me to wait for my guy to come up toward me and to lock onto him and ride him into the boards. This is harder."
"Everybody keeps saying this is great. It's not great. It's not hockey... There are penalties all over... There has to be some discretion. The referees have to use some judgment on what is a penalty and what is not."
"I've got no respect for him at all," Markus Naslund told the Vancouver Sun. "Even talking to his teammates, it seems evident he doesn't have a lot of support in hockey… This is just a guy who's trying to hit a home run. Someone who wasn't good enough to play. I'm not saying what (Bertuzzi did) was right. But if it was me, I'd be doing everything I could to get back and play and show everyone the character I have... instead of trying to sue everyone."
"When he broke in with us, he was basically a one-dimensional player. He could shoot the puck and he could do it better than anybody. But he wasn't great defensively, he had trouble turning, he wasn't strong and his skating had to be improved. He just got better every season, to the point where he became one of the greatest defencemen to ever play the game."
"I didn't really want to play but in the back of your mind you always want to play, if that makes any sense. I don't think anybody retires without still wanting to play. I'll always want to play."
"In a contact sport, as in life, there are consequences. Mark was always big on consequences."
"In the old days, you could have a guy who couldn't do anything but fight because he wouldn't hurt you too much on the ice. But with the up-and-down of the game now, you have to be able to do more than fight. Plus, with the salary cap, you can't afford to keep around guys who fight and don't do much else. You watch. In a couple of seasons, there will hardly be any fights at all. That's where the game is headed."
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