A Growing Legacy
In capturing the Selke Trophy, Jere Lehtinen contiunured a tradition in the Stars' organization
Amid the mountain of post-season awards bestowed upon National Hockey League players, the Frank J. Selke Trophy lays buried somewhere in teh middle when it comes to public acknowledgement.
But then, that's probably the perfect place for an award that salutes "the forward who best excells in the defensive aspects of the game."
The role of the defensive forward is often unglamorous and, in some ways, an oxymoron. Defensive forwards play a position normally associated with scoring goals and yet are asked to sacrifice much of that offensive glory to stop the other team's best players.
They are asked to work the corners of the rink, often against bigger and faster players, so that the rest of the team will have more room to work. They are aksed, at the most pivotal points of games, to win key face-offs, kill penalties and/or shadow the opposing team's scoring stars. And, if they get the chance, they are asked to score.
Statistics hardly tell the story of the defensive forward. He will rarely lead teh league in the plus-minus category or rank among the league's top ten scorers. But there are some ways to keep tabs on which defensive forwards are more effective than others. Their team's goals-against average will probably be among the best. And, perhaps most important, there is a god chance that a team with top-notch defensive forwards will be challenging for the Stanley Cup in June.
Anyone who plays or coaches hockey will stress the importance of the defensive forward to the success of a club. Winning the Selke Trophy may not lead to high-money endorsements (it does come with a $10,000 prize and $6,000 and $4,000 for the second and third place finishers), but it will earn a reverence from those in teh game that few plaeyrs ever receive.
Such is the place 25-year-old right wing Jere Lehtinen finds himself in as he enters his fourth season with the Dallas Stars. In winning the award in 1998, Lehtinen surprised many hockey critics who anticipated Buffa'lo's Michael Peca would become the first back-to-back winner since Stars' center Guy Carbonneau won it in 1988 and 1989 as a Montreal Canadien.
"I know I didn't expect it," Lehtinen said.
The Selke Trophy capped a breakthrough season for Lehtinen. Thriving on a line with Mike Modano and Greg Adams, Lehtinen maintained his defensive composure while increasing his offensive contributions. In the first half of last season, Modano and Lehtinen developed a chemistry that rivaled the top playmaking duos in the league. Lehtinen's 23-goal total would likelly have surpassed 30 had Modano not missed 30 games due to injury.
Unlike most of the other top scoring duos in the league, Modano and Lehtinen stayed on the ice duirng crunch time for defensive purposes. They were also the team's - and one of the NHL's - top penalty killing forward unit, with seven shorthanded goals between them. When Lehtinen's name was announced as the 1998 Selke winner, it was clear he had officially arrived in the NHL.
Discussion about the Selke Trophy almost always begins with who won it instead of whom the award is named after. In interviews for this article, very few players or coaches knew anything about Selke other than that he was a legendary hockey team builder who began his success with the Toronto Maple Leafs and peaked by putting together some of the greatest teams ever assembled with Montreal in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Selke was a coach, manager, and executive for more than sixty years. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, which he helped establish, as a "Builder" in 1960.
Born May 7, 1893, in the Ontario town of Berlin (renamed Kitchener during World War I), Selke began a career in hockey management at age 13 by coaching the Berlin Iroquois Bantam club to the city chamionship. He eventually moved to the junior hockey ranks and, by the age of 31, resurrected the defunct Toronto Marlboro junior club and steered it to the championship.
In 1927,he joined the Toronto Maple Leafs as teh assistant-at-large to another legendary builder of the game, Conn Smythe. Together, they helped consstruct Maple Leaf GArdens and began to formulate what would develop into the league's farm system concept.
By the time he had resigned from the Maple Leafs in 1946, Selke had successfully established a minor league system, made scouting a league-wide priority and even set new standards in the quality of game programs, which he edited. While Selke was in Toronto, the Leafs won three Cups.
Montreal signed Selke as its managing director in the summer of 1946, and he held that position until his retirement in 1964. He developed Montreal's farm system, which would crank out Hall of Fame players at an alarming rate long after Selke retired. During his Montreal tenure, the Habs only missed the playoffs once and won six Stanley Cups, including a current record of five straight between 1956-60.
After his retirement, Selke stayed involved wiht the Canadiens and hockey. When Stars' General Manager Bob Gainey first came into the league, he was fortunate enough to speak with Selke several times.
"He had a reputation of being very rigid, having a very straight-ahead personality that directed athletes and teams the way he liked things to be done," Gainey recalled.
Technically, there is no real connection between Selke and the defensive forward position that teh trophy recognizes other than the league needed an award in which to honor him. But one could argue that there are at least two similarities: like defensive forwards, Selke sacrificed whatever he could for his team's success. And like Selke's presence in Toronto and Montreal, having a top notch defensive forward on your team dramatically helped winning your team's chances of winning a Stanley Cup.
While Lehtinen is the first Star to capture the trophy, Gainey, Carbonneau, and Assistant Coach Doug Jarvis have either won or been a runner up several times. Gainey's dominance in the trophy's early years has made his name synonymous with the award today.
By the time the Selke Trophy was introduced in 1978, the general concensus among the hockey population was that is was long overdue.
The Selke Trophy cause was helped by how Gainey played the position with a command rarely seen before or since. Carbonneau joked that "Bob was the Selke Trophy," adding that Gainey's play made it impossible for the league to ignore the importance of defensive forwards amid the common notoriety for straight-up offense, defense, and goaltending.
"Bob was so dominant in his days that the league needed an award to recognize guys like that," Carbonneau said.
Anyone who has heard of the Selke Trophy will likely hear it with Gainey's name attached. While there is some truth to Carbonneau's statement about the need to reward Gainey, Gainey believes hs fame from the award is a matter of coincidence, too.
"When it was initiated, it happened that I was the most dominant player in that style of play at the time," he said.
Gainey said having his name attached to the inaugural trophy brought "a certain amount of pride."
"It's been good for my ego," he joked.
Gainey won the first four Selke Trophys and finished as the runner up the fifth year in 1982 (Boston's Steve Kasper won). Since Gainey, 14 other players have won the award. Only Carbonneau (three) and Detroit's Sergei Fedorov (twice) have won it more than once.
"It's been interesting to watch and see what kinds of players have won the trophy over the years," Gainey said.
During the 1980s, Selke Trophy winners were in the mold of Gainey: tough, gritty forwards who excelled at killing penalties, winning key face-offs, and scoring the occasional goal. Only Philadelphia's Bob Clarke, a former 100-point scorer, seemed to break that mold in 1983. But Clarke was at the tail end of his career and, realizing some of his offensive skills had left him, he changed his game to focus more on the defensive aspect.
After the trophy changed hands six times between 1982-87, Carbonneau grabbed the Selke Trophy tighter than anyone since Gainey. He won the award three times between 1988-92 and finished as the first runner up in 1990.
After he won the award in 1987, Carbonneau said he began to see a shift in the mentality behind the award's distribution. More offensive-minded forwards were creeping up in the voting and when Doug Gilmour won the award in 1993 after a season in which he scored 127 points, it set off a chain reaction of defensively strong, but also high-scoring forwards winning the award.
Fedorov won the award in 1994, when he scored 120 points, and in 1996, when he scored 107. Pittsburgh's Ron Francis, who had become an assist-making machine on Mario Lemieux's line and scored 59 points in 44 games, won the award in the strike-shortened 1995 season.
Was a player's exceptional offense being mistaken for good defense against opposing top lines?
"The award was meant for the forward who was sacrificing a lot of his game for his team. When Sergei won it, I mean, c'mon. He's a great player, but I don't think he was sacrificing a lot of his game," Carbonneau said. "For a few years, the way the award was given changed. It seemed like whoever had a great season offensively but didn't win the scoring championship own (the Selke Trophy), like the league felt sorry for the second guy. I don't think that was fair."
Gainey is somewhat more diplomatic about the issue.
"There have been certain players over the years who have maybe not fit the exact descriptions or displayed the characteristics of who the trophy should go to. But they may have adjusted their play for a period of time, like Fedorov, or like Bob Clarke did at one time, to suit those definitions and characterisitics," Gainey said.
Stars' Head Coach Ken Hitchcock believes the award has taken on another meaning besides honoring the best defensive forward, which may further explain why Fedorov, Francis, and Gilmour won it.
"To me, the award says 'complete player,'" Hitchcock said. "Everyone who has received this award in teh past has proved to be a complete player. Offensive, defensive, special teams, they can do it all."
With the award going to Peca in 1997 and Lehtinen last year, the voting appears to be swinging back in favor of the Gainey-esque player the award was created for.
"Last year was a great choice with Jere," Carbonneau said.
It is no coincidence that the Stars are a Stanley Cup contender and that Gainey has Selke Trophy winners and finalists sprinkled throughout the organization. While he calls teh position of defensive forward one of many pieces to the puzzle that is a winning lineup, there is an extra emphasis in his voice when he discusses plyayers like Lehtinen and Carbonneau.
"If you go by the opinion that the way to win the most games is to get the lead and keep it, then those kinds of players become at least half of that equation. And the players like Jere who can also contribute with offensive production also become bigger," he said.
The Florida Panthers and New Jersey Devils proved a team could still reach the Stanley Cup Finals - and, in New Jersey's case, win it - without having explosive scoring. Their clubs were stocked with defensive-minded forwards who used their pressure to force turnovers. Their goals were rarely confused with tic-tac-toe, highlight-reel passes reminscent of the mid-1980s Edmonton Oilers. While their teams had some speed, their scoring chances often resulted from blue-line pressure, corner mucking and scrapping in front of the net.
"I don't think any team can win withoud defensive forwards," Carbonneau said. "You're always going to have guys who can put the puck in the net, but in certain situations expecially nwo with how teams carry two or three guys just for the power play, you need defensive forwards.
"There are so many good players in this league right now that if you can't carry guys who are going to be able to defend that, then you will get in trouble most of the time," he added. "Look at every team that has won the Stanley Cup from the beginning, they always had those big players that cold score goals. But the rest of the guys, they're the reason why the team's winning."
Unlike a pure goal scorer or stat-at-home defenseman, there is no simple anatomy of what makes a great defensive forward. The position requires a balancing act, said Gainey, the best person to explore the nature of the Selke Trophy winner.
"There are certain characteristics that are going to make that player very good. Some of them are physical, like skating ability, getting around the ice andacross the ice so you can be in more places than the (opposing) offensive players wish you were," he said.
That usually means spending extra time at the rink skating and working on other small parts of the game. Waht you work on depends on your position, said Jarvis, who won the award as a Washinton Capital in 1984 and was the runner up for the Caps in 1985.
"If you're a centerman, you want to work more on face-offs. If you're awinger like Jere, you want to be good at pucks that are rimmed around the boards. He normally doesn't turn it over there, and as a resullt, he's able to make good plays," he said.
Defensive forwards also require ice-cool veins since they are often on th eice in adverse situations.
"You're on at critical times, like the ends of periods, the last 30-40 seconds of the game and when you have face-offs in your own zone," Carbonneau explained.
What turns an above-average defensive forward into a Selke Trophy winner, Gainey said, is an innate sense of the game that only certain players are gifted with.
"There is an instinctiveness about where the puck will move and knowing other people's thought patterns. That puts you into their mind before they've made their selection of plays so you can rob them of the play they want to make," he said. "It's a smilar process to the offensive player who is anticipating where the puck will go next because he's going to get it from one of his teammates. A defensive player has the same process but his end result is he wants to get it from the other team."
Finally, the foundation upon which a player applies his work ethic and one-ice intuition is his belief in sacrifice.
"The first thing your need to have is the will to do anything for the team. That's mainly what (a defensive forward) does," Carbonneau said. "Once you have that, you will sacrifice some offense, you will sacrifice some scoring chances, sacrifice a little bit of your body to do whatever ti takes to win the game."
When Carbonneau arrived in Montreal fresh from Chicoutimi of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League in 1980, the had the tools of a defensive forward, but he thrived as a scorer. As a junior player, he scored 323 points his last two years, including 182 in the 1979-80 season. As a minor leaguer at Montreal's American Hockey League farm team in Nova Scotia the next two years, he had seasons of 88 and 94 points.
Since his first full NHL season in 1982-83, Carbonneau never scored more than 57 points. His role - and his career - changed when Montreal coaches first penned him into the lineup as a defensive forward. Carbonnau said the role took some adjusting, but the learning period went quidkly.
"I've had (defensive skills) since I was a kid. What I had to do was perfect teh game and learn teh game a little more. I needed to learn whom I was playing against and then apply that knowledge. At the NHL level, it's a different game."
Fortunately for Carbonneau, Gainey was his teammate during his first year. The two would play together for the rest of Gainey's career, which ended after the 1988-89 season. "He was probably the best teacher I had," said Carbonneau, who added that Gainey taught him more by example than by giving verbal tips.
"Watching him was the thing that taught me the most. Things like show up every game, play as hard as you can, don't be afraid to make mistakes. . . you're always going to make mistakes, but the thing is not to make the same one too often," Carbonneau said. "Once you do those things, good things happen."
Gainey was not surprised by Carboneau's success. "It wasn't too difficult for him because he already had many of the attributes like skating ability, thinking ability and competitiveness," GAiney said. "He just had to apply them to what he was asked to do."
When Gainey brought Carbonneau to Dallas from St. Louis in a trade for Paul Broten October 2, 1995, Gainey said he was responding to a positional need. But he admitted "the fact I knew him and his background was an advantage."
Coincidentally, Carbonneau's first season with Dallas was also Lehtinen's rookie season in the NHL. Lehtinen came from the Finnish elite league as a well-rounded scorer who averaged a point a game. When Hitchcock first saw Lehtinen play, he was impressed with the young Finn's maturity.
"From the day he came here, I could tell he was a very well-coached player. he was such an accomplished player in the key areas of competing that it was amazing," Hitchcock said.
Lehtinen's defensive role with the Stars was clarified very early, much like Carbonneau's status when he arrived in Montreal. Lehtinen's point production was similar to what one would expect from a Selke candidate: 28 and 43 points, respectively. However, unlike most Selke winners who won the award after being sttled in teh league for several seasons, Lehtinen's speed and forechecking ability turned heads across the league right away.
In 1997, after just his second season, he finished third in the Selke voting. Last season, Lehtinen became one of the youngest players to win the Selke. Both he and Peca won the award in their third season, and only Kasper won it with less NHL experience (two seasons). Carbonneau and Gainey say Lehtinen's development into a Selke winner was only a matter of time.
"Jere's always been a very good positional player," Carbonneau said. "What has gained him this recognition is his strong level of play and his consistency in taking care of the details."
"The year before he came to Dallas, his role with the Finnish national team was like here . . . playing between two very skilled offensive players and being a balanced player with them," Gainey said. "He only required one year to get accustomed to the National Hockey League. By his second year, you could seehe was a standout on most nights."
Lehtinen humbly shrugged his shoulders when asked what put him over the top last season. He finally agreed with the consistency theory.
"I've trained pretty much the same way. The big thing is that I kept doing what I've done before. Last year, we had injuries but we continued to play the same way," Lehtinen said.
He hasn't seen focusing on defense as necessarily limitingh is game. Lehtinen's speed asn quick hands also earned him a spot on the team's top power play unit. "When you play good defense, you get good chances offensively. I think that way," he said.
One of the perks of playing a two-way game, he said, is that you get extra ice time. "That makes the game fun," he said.
Lehtinen is also aware that expectations fo rhim will also rise from now on.
"It makes me train harder and play harder," he said.
And the expectations won't just come from North American hockey fans. Lehtinen said Finnish fans are well aware of the Selke Trophy.
"During the summer, I had hockey people coming up to me all the time saying things about (me winning) the award. A lot of people watch the NHL back home," he said.
As the Stars prepare to employ their bear-hugging style of play on the rest of the NHL this season, fans may want to keep their eyes on several other Stars who could find themselves part of the organizaitions' blooming Selke legacy.
Eyebrows raise in bewilderment around the NHL when Modano's name is mentioned with the Selke trophy. Part of the heat that has been place on Modano to lead the team offensively this season comes from his history of playing defense so well. Modano came close to winning the Selke Trophy in 1997, finishing fourth, and is nearly as respected for his defensive work as Lehtinen.
Despite missing 30 games due to injury, Modano still finished second in the NHL with five shorthanded goals in 1998. Hitchcock thinks the Stars have enough overall defensive depth that Modano can produce a 50-goal season and still concentrate on the defensive aspects. If the definiton of the Selke Trophy tilts again toward Hitchcock's interpretation of teh winner as the league's most complete player," then Modano should be a favorite.
"The Selke Trophy, to me, should be one of his goals," Hitchcock said.
"Mike could win it," Jarvis agreed. "Probably because of his offensive game, people don't think of him in a Selke-type role. But he's made a commitment to that aspect of the game and has done very well at it."
When asked about any up-and-coming Selke candidates in teh organization, Hitchcock said that, several seasons from now, he would not be surprised to see left winger Jamie Wright in the Selke hunt. "I think that's the tyupe of role he really likes," Hitchcock said.
Fortunately for Hitchcock and the Stars, Wright can take time to develop. And he has the game's best teachers in his locker room.
Howard, Bill. "A Growing Legacy: In Capturing the Selke Trophy, Jere Lehtinen Continued a Tradition in the Stars' Organization." Dallas Stars Tonight: The Official Game Program 24 October 1998: 75-83.