Whicker: Kariya leaves hole in the Ducks' scrapbook | kariya, ducks, game - Sports - The Orange County Register
You didn’t go see the Mighty Ducks. You went to see Paul Kariya.
He kept the building full when the novelty disappeared. He gave the Ducks points when games seemed pointless. He was the face of the franchise when no one was using that tiresome phrase, although he was really the legs.
Then came the Cup and the Twins and the Hall of Fame defensemen and the annual playoff trips. Kariya missed all of that.
He retired in 2011, on terms dictated by the elbows of others. He is neither gone nor forgotten, but the essential Duck is now invisible.
Oh, you can catch him at a beach now and then, surfing. The concussions that robbed Kariya of a proper goodbye do not keep him out of the water. Scott Niedermayer joins him sometimes, watches him prepare and practice as if he were facing the Red Wings again.
“He has his little warmup, he works hard out on the water,” Niedermayer said. “For someone who isn’t a lifelong surfer, I would find it hard to believe someone could be better. He loves it. It’s fun to see. He’s having a lot of fun.”
“He reads the books about how to surf, he watches surfing videos,” Teemu Selanne said. “He wants to be as good as he can be. He’s out there every day. And he told me that once I’m done playing, we’ll play golf once a week.”
But Kariya will not ride a wave or a car or any other mode of transportation into Honda Center, and not because of any particular antipathy toward the Ducks, who have changed mightily since he left after the run to Game 7 of the 2003 Stanley Cup Final.
“He’s generous with the kids, and I was there one day when he gave away 10 pairs of skates and some sticks,” Selanne said. “I need to talk to him, find some way to get him back with the Ducks’ family. Obviously he was the No. 1 star here. He has a lot to give to this organization.
“They should retire his number. Absolutely. But he says, no, don’t ever talk to him about that. He’s still a little humble about that, for sure.”
Selanne senses Kariya is “bitter” about the way it all ended, about the fact that Kariya’s head became a piņata, and nobody seemed to care.
In 1997 he got his first concussion, from Montreal’s Mathieu Schneider. In 1998 he was pole-axed by Chicago’s Gary Suter and missed 28 games and the Nagano Olympics, where he would have been Canada’s best shootout weapon against Dominik Hasek.
In 2003 he took a head shot from New Jersey’s Scott Stevens in Game 6 of the Final. Carried off, he skated back and produced the most electric moment in 20 years of Ducks hockey: a massive slapper that zinged past Martin Brodeur.
In 2009, playing for St. Louis, Kariya came out of the penalty box just in time to take an elbow to the head from Buffalo’s Patrick Kaleta.
Suter got a four-game suspension. Stevens and Kaleta were not suspended.
Doctors told Kariya his career was over in the summer of 2011, just as the Ducks, at Selanne’s urging, were trying to sign him.
Kariya suggested at the time that general managers should be fined and coaches suspended over illegal head shots.
“With a concussion, you walk into the dressing room and they say, ‘How are you doing? Are you OK to go tomorrow?’” Kariya said. “It’s totally backward. I’ve had two hip reconstructions and I’ll take that any day over a concussion.”
Niedermayer was on the ice when Stevens caught Kariya.
“The game was good to him but in other ways it was tough on him,” Niedermayer said. “We’re still learning about concussions but we’re much more aware of them now than 20 years ago. I’m sure he was expected to do things that wouldn’t happen today. That day he made a decision to come back. We’re entitled to that, as athletes. Everyone respected that.
“I can understand that he isn’t left with good memories. Hopefully over time he can focus on the good stuff. He told me he’s feeling good. That’s good, right? That’s what you hope for.”
Kariya turns 39 next month. With a clearer head, he could still be playing supersonic hockey with the 42-year-old Selanne, especially with the post-2006 rules against obstruction.
“It was magic when we played together,” said Selanne, who joined Kariya in February of 1996. “We didn’t have to look at each other to know where we were. Every day we practiced different things, and there was always a competition. Who could score more goals? That’s how we got better.
“Expectations were so high. He would make a bad pass and we’d go to the bench and I was just giving it to him so bad. Teammates would say, ‘Holy smokes, what’s he doing?’ He would do the same to me. Not very often can any player have that type of chemistry.”
Kariya scored 11 goals in 47 games his rookie year. The coaching staff told him to go home and work on his shot. “Pound the puck,” assistant coach Tim Army recalled. Kariya pounded the puck all summer. The next year he scored 50.
“What I remember is how he could accept the puck, no dribble or anything, and then buggy-whip it so fast,” said Army, now an assistant in Colorado. “You couldn’t hear the puck hit or leave the stick. Brett Hull could do that. Paul just did it through hard work.”
That’s how he gathered a rolling puck on slushy ice in Phoenix and fired an overtime goal to win Game 6 of the Ducks’ first playoff series, setting up a Game 7 victory.
Kariya skated against the best defenders every night. In ’97 he was plus-36 on a team that went 36-33-13. That was the year he led the NHL with 10 winning goals.
He ended his career with a symmetrical 989 points in 989 games, with 402 goals.
The rafters at Honda Center will never be complete without his No. 9. But first Kariya must emerge from the quiet room.