Canucks and Rangers complete big deal days before deadline

Canucks and Rangers complete big deal days before deadline
By Carol Schram, Vancouver Correspondent

It has been a very unusual year in the NHL. Injuries, especially to marquee players, are way up. Scoring is down. Goaltending is superb. And general managers have been virtually paralyzed by the new NHL salary structure. The owners had to lock players out in 1994 in order to achieve the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement, but now the days are gone when trades were made based on merit, value, or filling a hole on a particular team. Now, salaries dictate that an inexpensive young prospect like Anson Carter can be seen on par with a perennial All Star like Adam Oates. Eventually, the new structure will settle down and deals will probably return to more normal levels. For now, general managers are afraid of giving more than they get and of ruining their team's budget or salary hierarchy. Thus, the deals have been few and far between this year.
In the week leading up to the March 18 trade deadline, the trade wires were astonishingly quiet. After the inevitable Adam Oates and Doug Gilmour moves, the only other deal of any significance was ungraciously announced in the wee small hours of the morning, eastern time. After dropping a 5-3 decision to the Detroit Red Wings on March 8, the Vancouver Canucks held a press conference to say that they had completed a deal to send Russ Courtnall and Esa Tikkanen to the New York Rangers for Brian Noonan and Sergei Nemchinov.
Both Courtnall and Tikkanen will be unrestricted free agents this summer, and while the Canucks had tendered new offers to both players, contract talks were not going well in either case and it looked like the two would walk at the end of the year. The Canucks are one of the deepest teams in the league at right wing, but the Rangers are weak there and have reportedly been pursuing Courtnall since last summer. At the time, they were said to have offered Nemchinov, but wanted the Canucks to pick up some of Courtnall's salary, so the deal fell through.
Russ Courtnall is a close personal friend of Wayne Gretzky. Both have homes in the Sherwood Park area of Los Angeles and they play golf together in the off-season. In fact, Courtnall was rumored to have been an important good-will ambassador in Vancouver's attempts to sign the Great One as a free agent last summer. After Gretzky landed in New York, it seemed logical that Courtnall could end up playing on the right side for the red white and blue -- either after a trade, or by signing with the bottomless-pocketed Rangers as a free agent this summer.
Courtnall was born in Duncan, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, and played his junior hockey for the Victoria Cougars. He was drafted in the first round, seventh overall, by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1983. Known for his blazing speed and decent offensive skills, Courtnall has worn out his welcome quicker and quicker at each stop in his career. He lasted just over four seasons in Toronto, then moved on to nearly four years in Montreal before hooking up with the Minnesota/Dallas organization for almost three years, then about two full seasons with the Canucks. Each time Courtnall has been traded, he has made noises about how he wasn't appreciated or used properly by the organization that he was leaving.
Courtnall was acquired by the Canucks at the deadline two years ago in exchange for left winger Greg Adams, minor leaguer Dan Kesa, and a fifth-round draft choice. While Adams was a fan favorite and a major-league hero from the Canucks' 1994 playoff run, the deal was seen to be a good one for the Canucks, particularly because it reunited brothers Russ and Geoff for the first time in their pro careers, and in their home province, to boot. What should have been a public relations dream quickly soured, however, when Geoff signed with St. Louis as an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 1995. Geoff's inability to come to terms with the Canucks also seemed to turn Russ off on Vancouver's negotiating style, and while the younger Courtnall was rumored to want to finish his career here, the two sides couldn't reach a long-term deal and ended up going through the arbitration process. Courtnall emerged with a decent contract and his freedom at age 32, but was deeply upset by some of the statements made by Canucks management during the arbitration hearings. The wound would never really heal.
This season has been tough on Courtnall. He missed a couple of months around Christmas time with a groin strain, and with his reduced ice time behind Alexander Mogilny and Pavel Bure, he managed to tally just nine goals in 47 games with the Canucks before being traded. To make matters worse, his contract status and imminent departure had been the subject of much gossip all season long, and with rumors of internal strife playing a part in the Canucks' problems this year, Courtnall was presumed by some to be another fly in the ointment. This was the element that disturbed him most once the trade was finally announced. The Courtnall family is close-knit and Russ and Geoff's mom was largely responsible for getting them through hockey after their father committed suicide, so Russ was devastated that his mother, in particular, would be subjected to rumors that he would be causing trouble in the room or not trying his hardest on the ice.
No matter how much Courtnall denies being part of the problem, there's little doubt about Esa Tikkanen's behavior in the room. A Stanley Cup veteran with a world of success behind him, Tikkanen was brought to the Canucks last year in an attempt to add leadership and that winning attitude. It's widely acknowledged that Tikk tends to march to his own drummer, but he never really became a good fit for Vancouver.
After his glory years in Edmonton, Tikkanen was shuffled off to the New York Rangers for Doug Weight, then moved to St. Louis with Mike Keenan as part of the coach's mutiny after winning the Stanley Cup in 1994. Early in the 1995-96 season, the Blues shipped their declining asset to New Jersey for a draft choice, where it didn't take Tikkanen long to clash with noted disciplinarian Jacques Lemaire. After dressing for just nine games with the Devils, Tikkanen was on his way to Vancouver for a second-round draft choice.
The problems started immediately. First, it was rumored that Tikkanen wouldn't report. Then, he wanted his contract renegotiated. When he finally did get to Vancouver, he failed his team medical, thanks to years of damage to his knees. After a great deal of testing, rehab, and checking past medical records, Tikkanen finally joined the team more than a month later, announcing "Moses is here". The Canucks' fortunes did improve when Tikkanen first took to the ice, and he was his usual formidable shadow' self against Peter Forsberg in the playoffs. But the situation turned really ugly this year at training camp, thanks to an early clash with rookie coach Tom Renney over the coach's banning of beer on post-game charters. "I'll get a doctor's note," quipped Tikk with his usual lack of respect for authority. Renney was not amused.
When Tikkanen joined the club last season, Vancouver was believed to be a good team with a missing superstar going through a period of mediocrity. With the addition of Renney and the return of Pavel Bure, the team's fortunes did not improve. For an aging player looking to win one last Stanley Cup, this did not sit well with Tikkanen. He stayed focused on winning, but pretty much decided that Renney's methods weren't going to make it happen. It was not unusual, during games, to see one group of players huddled around Renney, listening to his instructions, while Tikkanen was frantically talking and gesturing to the rest of the team, explaining his ideas. While it may be true that Tikkanen is gradually losing his physical abilities, there's no doubt that he has an outstanding grasp of the mental side of the game.
Tikkanen's situation with the Canucks began to come to a head a couple of months ago. Unhappy with the team's direction and looking for a great new contract to start his free-agent years, Tikkanen and his agent Rich Winter went public with the rather acrimonious state of their negotiations to date. They said that, if the Canucks did not make improvements and had no intention of keeping Tikkanen beyond the end of the season, as their contract offers had indicated, that they would prefer to see the player traded. Tikkanen even threatened to withdraw his services until a deal was made, although he did stay with the team until the bitter end and even scored in his last game with a skate on his chest.
Despite Tikk's value as a hockey player, by this point it was clear that Pat Quinn would probably be better off dealing the player out of the Vancouver dressing room. The only problem was, the market for soon-to-be-free-agent wingers with one knee and one bad attitude is not that hot. Because of the Rangers' desperation to land Courtnall, Pat Quinn was able to package the crazy Finn and send him back to the site of his last Stanley Cup win, to play once again alongside number 11 and number 99, and to be a smaller fish in the bigger pond of the Big Apple. Having dealt with Tikkanen before, the Rangers know exactly what they're getting, and if they don't like it, they're free to go their separate ways at the end of the year.
In exchange for a sum total of about 30 combined games from Tikkanen and Courtnall, the Canucks acquired center Sergei Nemchinov and right winger Brian Noonan. While Nemchinov may be the playmaking Russian needed to center Bure and/or Mogilny, we'll have to wait awhile longer before we find out the answer to that question. In an eerie case of deja vu, Nemchinov was suffering from a reported minor injury to his ribs when he was traded, but his condition now appears worse than first expected. He has already been out a week longer than the Rangers projected, and his return is still not imminent. Some believe that, by acquiring Nemchinov now, Pat Quinn was hoping to have a chance to try him out with the Russians before deciding whether or not to offer him a free agent contract for next season. As he sits on the shelf while the season winds down, and Bure is also not expected back anytime soon, even this minor objective may go unfulfilled in this disappointing season.
Nemchinov was drafted by the New York Rangers in 1990 and joined the team in '91. He got 30 goals in his first NHL season, but his production has tailed off steadily since then. Of course, searching for quality ice time behind guys named Gretzky and Messier is no small feat, either. In recent years, Nemchinov has been known for his defensive skills, which the Canucks can sorely use. He is also one of the first Russians, along with Alexei Kovalev, to have his name engraved on the Stanley Cup -- following the Rangers' nail-biting Game Seven victory over the Canucks in 1994.
Boston-born Brian Noonan may actually turn out to be a bit of a sleeper in this deal. A Mike Keenan favorite, Noonan was also a member of the '94 Cup-winning team, then was signed as a free agent by Iron Mike for his St. Louis Blues before the 1995-96 season. Earlier this year, Noonan was shipped back to the Rangers for ex-Canuck Sergio Momesso, who continues to ride the pine more often than not. Noonan is a physical, grinding right winger who almost scored 20 goals once: his career high is 19 with the Chicago Blackhawks in 1991-92, also under Mike Keenan. He was also drafted in 1983, but while Russ Courtnall went in the top ten, Brian Noonan went in the 10th round. Noonan is also a longer-term commodity. While he does turn 32 this May, he has one more year remaining on the deal he signed in St. Louis, so he's the only one of the four players involved in this trade who are under contract past the end of this season.
Despite the relative loss of talent for Vancouver in this deal, the trade may not turn out to be all that bad for them. Certainly, the Rangers have acquired a couple of pieces of the puzzle that could help them significantly in their playoff run. They had also been in a terrible slump before the trade, and the change seems to have improved their fortunes. It's still way too early to truly judge the impact of the deal for the Canucks. The trade coincided with new injuries to Trevor Linden and Mike Ridley, so the team's current depth at center is essentially zero. The big drop in offensive talent level has forced the Canucks to revert to a disciplined, defensive, no-nonsense kind of game, and Brian Noonan has so far proven to be an admirable role model for this style of hockey. He even managed to pot two goals, including a short-handed marker, in Vancouver's only recent victory, against the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Essentially, this is a deal that was made for short-term gain by both teams. Nemchinov and Noonan may not be enough to get Vancouver into the playoffs, but they may prove to be important to the critical exercise of changing the team's chemistry for next season. It is even more likely that hockey fans will be subjected to Tikkanen's maniacal grin as he returns to the land of liberty for what could be another convincing playoff run this spring, and to Courtnall's blazing speed as he picks up perfect passes from his neighbor Wayne Gretzky. It was evident that Canucks management had to get Tikkanen out of Vancouver because of his crazy attitude, although he always wanted to win. If the Chicago Bulls can find a way to put up with Dennis Rodman's antics for the sake of his rebounding skills, should a team looking to build towards a championship be able to somehow see past their character players' idiosyncrasies? It now appears to be up to the New York Rangers to answer that question for this season.