Mike Modano’s Monumental Legacy
Mike Modano’s Monumental Legacy
On Saturday, the Dallas Stars will unveil a statue honoring their greatest player — hockey's most important (and least likely) Sun Belt superstar
If Minnesota is the U.S.’s State of Hockey, Michigan isn’t too far off. (Among all states, only Massachusetts is also in the same tier when it comes to producing NHL players.) So it was fitting in 1988 when Mike Modano of Livonia, a Detroit suburb, went to the Minnesota North Stars with the first overall pick of the NHL draft — making him just the second American to ever go No. 1. The twin hotbeds of U.S. hockey were conspiring to help nurture the game’s next potential American superstar.
Fate, however, had different plans for Modano’s career. Rather than becoming an icon in the cold climate where hockey makes its natural home, he would end up in Texas as the face of Sun Belt hockey instead — serving as both the region’s first long-term superstar and the leader of its first-ever champion. All of those twists and turns have led up to this coming weekend, when Modano will be forever immortalized with a statue outside of the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
Such an outcome would have been difficult to envision 35 years ago, back when a teenaged Modano made his NHL debut in the 1989 playoffs for the North Stars.
For starters, there was no such thing as an NHL franchise in Texas, or anywhere near it: The league’s southernmost teams at the time were the L.A. Kings and the St. Louis Blues — the latter situated 550 miles northeast of Dallas. And the thought of a team leaving hockey’s heartland for a place where it only occasionally snows would have sounded crazy. Texas is where college football and the Cowboys totally overshadow even other conventional American sports like baseball. What chance would hockey ever have there?
Besides, the North Stars were busy building something for Minnesota’s hockey aficionados to get excited about. The team had quickly reloaded around a core that included goalie Jon Casey, centers Neal Broten and Dave Gagner, winger Brian Bellows and, of course, the blue-chip prospect from Michigan with the blazing speed, cannon shot and world-class puck skills. The North Stars’ previous brush with the Stanley Cup came in a lopsided Finals loss to the dynasty New York Islanders in 1981, when Modano was an 11-year-old playing youth hockey. But the pieces were falling into place for another run.
Modano would quickly develop into an offensive threat in his first few NHL campaigns, scoring 29 goals as a 19-year-old rookie in 1989-90 and following that with 28 goals the next season. Under new coach Bob Gainey, and with new LW Brian Propp providing extra offensive punch, the plucky North Stars skated through the 1991 playoffs and knocked off the defending champion Edmonton Oilers to make the Stanley Cup Finals.
Though Modano was held to 2 goals and 4 points in a 6-game championship loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, he had produced 8 goals and 20 points in 23 playoff games at the age of 20. The future could be bright in Minnesota for Modano, the youngest American with 25 or more goals that season.
But there was one big question to be settled: What about the North Stars’ future as a franchise?
Despite the playoff run, attendance was at the bottom of the league, and it wasn’t close. The Met Center, where the team had played since 1967, was starting to show its age. And most worrying of all, owners Gordon and George Gund were looking to sell the team — or move it. They’d asked the NHL about the potential for relocation to the Bay Area, but were denied. Instead, the league offered the brothers the San Jose Sharks’ expansion bid on the condition they sold the North Stars to an approved buyer, which ended up being a group led by shopping-mall magnate Norm Green.
In an echo of the convoluted process that saw the Gunds fold the soon-to-be-defunct Cleveland Barons into the North Stars more than a decade before, San Jose — now the league’s second team south of the 38th parallel — was allowed to swipe 24 players from Minnesota’s roster (or its affiliates) before the North Stars replenished their talent in the expansion draft alongside the Sharks. Though the moves cost Minnesota only a few players who were regulars during the playoffs,1 it’s still hard to imagine that a team coming off a Finals run would promptly be looted by the expansion squad its former owners had jumped ship to.
Then there was the new owner, Green, who was supposed to save hockey in Minnesota. Instead, his reign was chaotic and filled with broken promises to the local fans. An attempt to develop a new arena in Bloomington, near the freshly opened Mall of America, fell through, as did the possibilities of co-occupying the Target Center (with the Timberwolves) in Minneapolis or building a publicly funded home for the team in St. Paul. Unbeknownst to fans, Green was also negotiating a potential move to Anaheim, though Disney was later given league preference to create the expansion Mighty Ducks in exchange for Green getting his pick of other markets.
He picked Dallas.
So on March 10, 1993, Green announced the rebranded Stars would be packing up their gear and heading from frigid Minnesota to sweltering Texas. A new era of warm-weather hockey was already beginning — from the expansion Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning (who made their debut a few months earlier) to the L.A. Kings’ iconic, Wayne Gretzky-driven Finals run later that spring. But the Stars were the first in a wave of NHL teams that would relocate from their icy homes to sunnier climes during the 1990s.
How did Modano, native child of Michigan and adopted son of Minnesota, treat the big change in scenery? Here’s how Sports Illustrated described things after the new Dallas Stars made their return to Minneapolis for an exhibition game before the the 1993-94 season:
Later Modano was asked about his transition from Minnesota to Texas. Was it difficult? Traumatic? "Actually," he said, "it was pretty easy. It was just me and my clothes and my golf clubs."
With that, the career of hockey’s first Sun Belt superstar was off and running.
Modano notched the first (and only) 50-goal season of his career that year, and Dallas won their first-ever playoff series in April, sweeping the St. Louis Blues before losing to the eventual finalist Vancouver Canucks. Imposing young defenseman Derian Hatcher, the 8th pick in the 1990 draft, was growing into his own and would be named captain before long. Soon enough, the team would also deal for former Cup-winning centerman Joe Nieuwendyk and slick, puck-moving defenseman Sergei Zubov. The Stars were a rising force in the West.
But an unexpectedly terrible pair of seasons in 1994-95 and 1995-96 (in which the team went 43-65-22) showed that Dallas — and Modano — needed something more. Gainey stepped down as coach, remaining at GM while handing the reins to the more defensive-minded Ken Hitchcock. Hitchcock pushed Modano hard to become a two-way player instead of a glitzy scorer. As Modano later told The Dallas Morning News:
“It was tough. Hitch had my cell phone, he'd call me every night before games and ask me 'what type of player I was going to be, how you're going to show up, you going to be there tomorrow for us, how are you going to play?' He was on top of me 24-7.”
But the improvement in both Modano and the Stars’ defensive commitment was noticeable. After seldom providing much defensive value (according to adjusted Goals Above Replacement) during his first seven NHL seasons, Modano’s production at that end was consistently much better for the rest of his prime — while also not sacrificing his offensive output too much:
There was still the matter of dealing with the rest of the West’s heavy hitters: The 1996 champion Colorado Avalanche (themselves an example of colder-to-warmer relocation, from Quebec City) and the loaded Detroit Red Wings — who would win back-to-back Cups in 1997 and 1998. After an epic first-round upset loss to the Edmonton Oilers in ‘97, Dallas played Detroit tough in ‘98 before bowing out to the eventual champs in the conference finals.
But 1999 was the Stars’ year. Modano was at his best — his 21.2 adjusted GAR was a career-high — and the team added ex-Blues sniper Brett Hull to give the offense another scoring option. Dallas earned the West’s No. 1 seed for the second straight year, and this time they were ready to defend it.2 Outlasting the Avalanche in a 7-game Western Conference Finals classic that saw Dallas overcome a 3-2 deficit, the Stars edged past all-time netminder Dominik Hašek and the Buffalo Sabres in the Finals — with a little help from a possibly, uh, questionable officiating interpretation allowing Hull’s Cup-winning goal to stand despite a skate in the crease.3
Regardless of how it happened, the Dallas Stars were Stanley Cup champions, with Modano ranking as their best player (by GAR) during the regular season and leading playoff scorer. (He didn’t win the Conn Smythe as playoffs MVP because Nieuwendyk had more goals, including many of the game-winning variety.) A young man who grew up in the middle of America’s hockey heartland had just led the NHL’s first Sun Belt champ.
The rest of Modano’s tenure in Dallas had its ups and downs. The team returned to the Finals the following season, running out of gas in double-overtime of Game 6 against the New Jersey Devils. Then the Stars won just two series over the following seven years — during which time Modano was elevated to captain, suffered a miserable 2003-04 campaign (just 44 points in 76 games), sat through an entire season lost to a lockout, and was controversially stripped of his captaincy in favor of the younger Brenden Morrow.
But Modano had one last great season up his sleeve at age 35 in 2005-06 — scoring 27 goals and 77 points with a +23 rating in 78 games — and the Stars went to the West Finals a few years later with their elder statesman still playing a key role. He remains the best player in Minnesota/Dallas (North) Stars franchise history by GAR, and was, at the time he left Dallas, the best Sun Belt superstar in NHL history.4
(He’s also the highest-scoring American-born player in history, though there’s debate about whether Modano or 3-time Cup champion Patrick Kane is the U.S.’s greatest player.)
Some Stars fans still have complicated feelings about Modano, given how he left Dallas for his hometown (archrival) Red Wings at the end of his career, and because of a post-retirement period spent mostly in the front office of the Minnesota Wild, not the Stars. But if fellow AAC statue recipient Dirk Nowitzki is the most beloved athlete in Dallas history — moreso than even the Cowboys’ greats — Modano is something else.
One of the most talented players to ever lace up a pair of skates, Modano was the man who validated the NHL’s Sun Belt experiment, proving that warm-weather destinations can be hockey towns, too. That’s a legacy which lives on more with each passing postseason — ironically, thanks in no small part to a man from Michigan who began his pro journey in Minnesota.
Career-wise, the best players plundered from Minnesota were goalies Arturs Irbe (56.1 adjusted Goals Above Replacement) and Brian Hayward (25.5). The rest collectively produced negative value.
In the rock-paper-scissors game of the NHL playoffs, it also helped that the Red Wings — who had ended Dallas’ season in both 1995 and 1998 — were ousted by Colorado in the second round, in another installment of the greatest rivalry in hockey history.
Personally, I am still torn about this ruling. On the one hand, the late-90s NHL’s crease rules were deeply dumb, and should never have been adopted. On the other hand, the rules were what they were — and by the letter of the rule, it probably (though not certainly) should not have been a goal. But such is life.
He was since surpassed by Steven Stamkos and Roberto Luongo.