Phanatic Hockey Editor
The childhoods of thousands of hockey fans amongst the back end of Generation Y and the Millennials were not officially validated on Tuesday afternoon, when the Hockey Hall of Fame announced its Class of 2013.
Eric Lindros, the player which defined an era of hockey in Philadelphia and beyond will have to wait one more year. Instead, it was a victory for their older uncles and parents' generation when Fred Shero was finally selected for enshrinement along with four other giants of the game.
"I am thrilled to hear that Fred Shero was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. There’s no sense looking back as to why it didn’t happen sooner, because today’s a happy day to celebrate the fact that a guy that deserves it immensely has finally been elected to the Hall of Fame. It’s a great day for the Philadelphia Flyers," stated club chairman Ed Snider, who brought the heretofore unknown minor-league coach to help an underachieving team in 1971.
Upon the November 11 ceremony at the intersection of Front and Yonge in downtown Toronto, he'll become the sixth member of the organization who was involved in the first great period of the franchise to be honored. Snider and Keith Allen were selected as builders, while Bob Clarke, Bill Barber and Bernie Parent went in as players.
“Freddie Shero going into the Hall of Fame is obviously a huge honor for our organization and the Shero family. Other than Keith Allen, Freddie Shero was the person who should have gone into the Hall of Fame ahead of myself, Bernie Parent, Billy Barber, any of us who have gone in," Clarke said. "He was that important to the success of the Flyers. I’m very happy for his family.”
Shero passed away in the Fall of 1990 from stomach cancer, mere months after the Flyers permanently put aside any bad feelings about his departure from this city and rightfully placed him in the team's Hall of Fame.
After a wildly-successful seven-year stint behind the bench here, Shero stepped away in 1978 after a semifinal-round loss to the Boston Bruins, citing burnout and a mutual need for a change of scenery -- only to resurface days later as the new head coach and GM for the rival New York Rangers.
He then guided the Rangers to a second-round demolition of the Flyers in the Spring of 1979 en route to a Stanley Cup Finals appearance, and loss, against the last of the dynastic Montreal Canadiens powerhouses. However, Pat Quinn's record-setters squared the books in the following postseason, steamrolling the Blueshirts in the second round en route to their own Cup Finals bid.
In addition to begrudging praise about the on-ice success of his "Broad Street Bullies," Shero was rightly considered an innovator because he was one of the first coaches to put his team through morning skates, the first man to hire a full-time assistant (Mike Nykoluk), the first to make sure his players used in-season strength training and among the first to use film as a tool to deconstruct the opposition and construct a game plan.
They called him "The Fog" because Shero always appeared to be not exactly living in the moment, but it was all a finely-tuned act designed to throw everyone but his closest confidantes off the trail.
“He was really big on John Wooden and had a lot of Wooden stuff around the house and books,” said Ray Shero, one of Fred's sons and current GM of the Pittsburgh Penguins. “Dad saw how [Wooden] used his psychology of reading people at UCLA as applicable to hockey. My dad was pretty quiet, but if he trusted you, he would engage you and talk for hours about things. He was a big, big reader and even on Russian history. After the first Cup, he went to Russia and brought my mom for three weeks. He met with Boris Mikhailov and took Lou Vairo over there. It was a hockey seminar. He must have met with Viktor Tikhonov, too. He really loved it.”
That Shero, a born Canadian, dared to engage the Evil Empire and learn their methods, could have been the mitigating factor in his wait of more than two decades after his death and more than three after he coached his final NHL game, in December of 1980 for New York.
Shero was behind the bench for the Flyers' lone Stanley Cup titles, back-to-back wins in 1974 and 1975, and also coached in two more championship rounds. He was the first coach to win the Stanley Cup with an expansion team and he did it the hard way, depriving the high-powered Boston Bruins of a third Cup in five seasons with a six-game upset victory.
In a 10-season NHL-coaching track from 1971-81, Shero compiled a 390-225-119 regular-season record, standing 11th all-time in winning percentage (.612).
The native of Winnipeg also ended his Philly tenure (and still remains) the club's all-time leader in wins (308), games coached(554), and winning percentage (642), while also lapping the field in playoff victories (48) and postseason games coached (83) He was also the first winner of the Jack Adams Award, back in 1974, given to the top coach in the NHL and also was the recipient of the Lester Patrick Award in 1980 for service to hockey in the United States.
Nine years after his passing, a poll conducted by the Daily News ranked Shero as Philadelphia's greatest professional team leader, outpacing Connie Mack Dick Vermeil, Dallas Green and others.
Lindros, on the other hand, was one of three ex-Flyer players to miss out, joining Jeremy Roenick, John LeClair and Rod Brind'Amour.
In a sense, his day will come, but it will not be without its detractors and plenty of debate.
Now 40, married and active in his local beer league, Lindros only had a touch more than five seasons at the top of his game. That period of domination was bracketed by his first two injury-plagued seasons here, and seven more years which include a season-long holdout, three seasons with the Rangers, another season lost to a lockout and a subpar turn each with the Maple Leafs and Stars.
It's not as simple as what's been going around the internet lately, that if Cam Neely is in, Lindros should be. I've written before that the proper comparison is, if Neely's in, Tim Kerr has to be as well. Big E has no comparable player because he was one of the prototypes for the 21st Century NHLer.
Yes, Lindros changed the way the NHL game was played forever -- but I'm still not convinced it was for the better.
Due to his rare combination of size, skill, speed and physicality, he caused a steepening of the curve as far as competing players are concerned, speeding up the process that required teams to draft taller and heavier skaters by roughly a decade sooner than it might have occurred. That led us to Hal Gill and Zdeno Chara in their early playing days, little more than statues on skates merely required to get in the way.
Head coaches, fed up at seeing their players constantly out-muscled, out-paced and out-scored, began to develop defenses whose sole function was to slow the pace of the game through all three zones. Jacques Lemaire bears the burden for the implementation of the neutral-zone trap that largely shackled Lindros in the 1995 Eastern Conference Finals and led to the so-called "dead puck era" which lasted through 2004.
What will aid his cause, will be a spate of predecessors and contemporaries who were blessed with relative health and length of years; Lindros will stand against them as one who clearly stood out for a defined period as the best in the sport.
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