NHL99: Mark Messier was ‘tough, strong and mean,’ and impossible to defend

Welcome to NHL99, The Athletic’s countdown of the best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.

Mark Messier has scored the third-most points in NHL history and won the Stanley Cup six times. He was awarded one Conn Smythe Trophy and two Hart Trophies and his legacy as a leader is such that the league put his name on its leadership award.

But there are aspects of Messier’s excellence that are ineffable.

“Everybody on your list can skate, pass, shoot and win Cups. We know all that,” says Hall of Fame defenseman Paul Coffey. “But Mark’s a special guy. To describe Mark Messier, it’s not all fundamentals: skate, pass, shoot, hitting guys. That’s not Mark Messier. Mark’s more than that. He’s just more than that.”

Perhaps it was the look in his eye, the intimidation factor, the sheer force of will. Maybe it was the bone-crushing body checks and the well-earned comparisons to Gordie Howe. Something about Messier transcends his list of accomplishments, the blazing speed, the strength to bulldoze defensemen, the hands to attack anyone one-on-one and the wrist shot he launched from either foot to fool even the best goaltenders of his era.

For teammates, he was a marvel to play with and an inspiration to be around.

“Glen (Sather) used to have Mark and I go head to head every drill in practice. For people who don’t know Mark, he is one of the hardest working guys, ever, in the game,” says Wayne Gretzky. “It made us better. Mark had this incredible ability to make players around him better.”

But what about the players who absorbed the elbows, battled him in the faceoff circle and tried to contain one of the NHL’s most potent combinations of size, speed, skill and brutality?

In an effort to explain Messier’s dominance, and his spot at No. 17 on The Athletic’s NHL99 list, we asked the opponents whose job it was to try to stop him.

Jim Peplinski fought Messier twice, officially — once in the first-ever regular-season game between Edmonton and Calgary — and a few more times than that in countless post-whistle scrums throughout a decade’s worth of the Battle of Alberta.

As a key piece of Calgary’s most matchup-ready line, Peplinski reckons that he faced Messier as many times as any player in the ’80s.

“It seemed like I played against him for four exhibition games, eight regular-season games and playoffs every year for a decade,” says Peplinski. “When I look back on things, he was trying to obliterate us and I was thinking it was good enough to play him to a draw.

“He was approaching the game in a different way than I did, and I didn’t realize that until I was long retired.”

What Peplinski remembers most about the early days, however, was not knowing how good Messier or the Oilers were going to become.

The Oilers had some success in the WHA and had a rising star in Gretzky. The team drafted Kevin Lowe, Messier and Glenn Anderson in the first, third, and fourth rounds of the 1979 draft, and in 1979-80, finished fourth in the Smythe Division before losing to Philadelphia in three straight playoff games.

So when Peplinski joined the Flames as a rookie in 1980-81, he certainly wasn’t sure that Edmonton, even with Gretzky, was anything close to a dynasty in the making.

It took until the first playoff version of the Battle of Alberta for Messier to announce himself as a force.

Some of Messier’s first forays into unhinged, terrifying playoff hockey — such as his famous stick-swinging incident against Larry Robinson as the upstart Oilers swept the post-dynasty Canadiens in 1981 — came in losing efforts.

The Oilers had gained recognition but couldn’t get past the Islanders dynasty in the second round. Their first-round loss to the Kings after scoring a record-setting 417 goals in 1982 seemed to cement it: Edmonton still had a lot to learn.

Entering that series against Calgary in 1983, though, the Oilers had figured out how to play playoff hockey and Messier was starting to show the mental edge that would eventually make him a hockey legend.

Teammates say Messier would do anything to help them win — score, hit, fight, you name it. Messier’s opponents soon learned that whatever Messier did over the course of a game, he did it for his whole team.

“When you’ve got that type of wolfpack around you, you get a measure of confidence and swagger that’s hard to understand,” Peplinski says. “When you then combine that with the attributes that Mark has … that’s impressive, man.”

You want swagger? Messier needed only three puck touches on his very first shift of the series to write his name all over the Battle of Alberta, darting into the slot to turn Randy Gregg’s pass into a forehand, backhand, forehand deke for the opening goal. Messier scored three more times in Edmonton’s 6-3 win, kickstarting what would become a 4-1 series victory.

The Oilers’ run to the Stanley Cup ended in the final, a sweep at the hands of the Islanders, and led to the now-famous moment when Edmonton’s stars walked by the Islanders’ dressing room, expecting to see Bryan Trottier, Denis Potvin and company in the throes of a celebratory party.

Instead, the Oilers greats found a team caked in icepacks and stoicism — an impactful reminder that no matter how good the Oilers were, they had more inside them to give.

By the 1984 Smythe Division final, Messier was virtually unstoppable and the Oilers were ready to win it all. He’d moved from left wing to center in February, giving the Oilers the most dominant one-two punch down the middle in NHL history.

“We needed someone who was big and strong to counteract Trottier,” Oilers coach Glen Sather said at the time. “I didn’t think we could beat them with Messier on the wing. He’s tough, strong and mean, which is just what we needed. He’s still a left wing on the power play, but this makes us more versatile.”

Even then, the Flames managed to push Edmonton to seven games, twice staving off elimination, with Gretzky saying he’d never been hit so often or so hard. Gretzky led the Oilers with 13 points, but Messier was right there with three goals and eight assists in seven games.

After Edmonton beat Calgary, it turned out there was no stopping Messier or the Oilers. Messier won the Conn Smythe, finishing the playoffs with 26 points in 19 games, and the Oilers beat the Islanders in the final and won the Stanley Cup for the first time.

It was just the start of a historic run.

“He thought he was on a mission and I thought I was playing a game,” says Peplinski. “He was not just playing a game.”

As a left winger, Messier had established himself as one of the NHL’s fastest, strongest goal scorers. As a center, he’d become a champion, a Conn Smythe Trophy winner and a force so strong up the middle that the Flames went out and signed the biggest, strongest, free-agent center they could find in the hopes of slowing him down.

Enter Joel Otto, a 6-foot-4, 220-pound center who would go on to make a career out of shutting down the NHL’s top players. Otto scored 508 points in 943 games, racked up 1,934 career penalty minutes and was a two-time Selke Trophy finalist. Otto says Messier’s dominance is what helped land him with the Flames.

“I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to win a job in Calgary in terms of trying to be physical with him and, as much as I could, take him off his game,” Otto says. “And I’m sure he had one of me on every team in the NHL.”

Otto didn’t get to test his playoff mettle against Messier in 1985 as Calgary lost to Winnipeg in the opening round and the Oilers ran roughshod over their opponents, going 15-3 in the playoffs on their way to their second straight Stanley Cup championship.

In 1986, Calgary beat Edmonton in seven games, ending their rival’s shot at a three-peat. The Oilers got their revenge in 1988 on the way to their fourth Cup in five years.

All these years later, the intensity of those games still brings out the competitor in Otto.

“It’s difficult to sing praises of a guy or a team you played against,” Otto says. “We still have animosity against the Oilers. I’ve met a lot of the guys off the ice — they’re very good people — but it’s still in you as a hockey player to be prideful.”

Otto’s respect for his opponents and the game itself is so deep that he chooses to indulge. What made Messier unique?

“He’s strong and he could certainly handle himself in a game, for sure, but that’s not what his main purpose was,” Otto says. “His abilities and skating abilities set him apart from others. It made you a better player because you had to be on your game and prepared every time you were on the ice.”

And how do you stop him?

“That’s a good question,” Otto says. “He had Anderson, Esa Tikkanen and other variations of wingers as well. You’re a unit going against another unit and, as much as it was billed as him and me, I’m not shadowing him. I’m not doing anything differently that way. Jim (Peplinski) and I were always on the same page about how we had to handle better players. He was one of them and you’re not going to stop him all of the time.”

The Flames won the Stanley Cup in 1989 after Gretzky was traded from Edmonton to Los Angeles, but Messier’s championship days weren’t over. The Oilers won the Cup in 1990 without “The Great One” and Otto says that Messier’s own greatness was so thorough that wherever Messier went, winning was sure to follow.

“He had all of the attributes,” Otto says. “You could rival a Trottier or (Steve) Yzerman or somebody with the full package but in terms of strength, skill, speed, defensive abilities, there aren’t that many people who can match Messier’s all-around game.

“Unfortunately, we came up on the other end most nights, but it’s pretty fun to say you competed against a guy of that caliber.”

Ken Daneyko attended Messier’s father’s hockey camps as a child and gravitated toward the teenaged Mark, who took him under his wing. Daneyko has said many times that the Messier family’s warm treatment of him — with Mark and his brother Paul particularly taking a shine to Daneyko — helped give him the tools he needed to become an NHL player.

When the Oilers started winning Stanley Cups, Messier welcomed Daneyko at their championship parties. (Coffey describes a sense of “Hey, why’s Ken Daneyko here?” that was always met by an enthusiastic “Of course, Ken Daneyko is here!”) Messier’s mentorship continued well after Daneyko’s NHL career took off in New Jersey and throughout Edmonton’s 1980s dynasty. In fact, right through Edmonton’s fifth Cup-winning season in 1990 — its first without Gretzky — Daneyko would receive humorous messages from Messier and Lowe multiple times a year at his New Jersey home.

That is, until October 1991.

“All of a sudden, when he got traded to New York, that all stopped,” says Daneyko. “It was such an intense rivalry. Our team was getting better. The Rangers were getting better and obviously, we had that epic ’94 playoff series. We didn’t speak for probably two years because it was such an intense rivalry — and that’s what it was all about. It was hard, too, because I had to defend against Mark.”

Messier was an instant success in New York, scoring 107 points and winning the Hart Trophy in 1991-92. The height of his Rangers tenure, of course, came in the spring of 1994.

By then, Messier was 33, an age when most players realize they can’t rely on fast-twitch muscles and explosiveness as much as they could in their youth.

Not only did Messier hold onto his peak longer than most, but he reinvented himself. During the regular season, he was less of a bulldozer and more of a playmaker than he’d been in Edmonton.

By the 1994 playoffs, however, Messier was everything.

“Mark was such an intelligent player,” Daneyko says. “He thought the game so well that he was able to adjust his game for whatever was asked of him.

“He could play through anything because of his size, strength, power and speed. There weren’t many players who could do that. There were more power forwards in the game back then, maybe, but nobody I could say who was like Mark Messier.”

The Rangers were down 3-2 to the Devils in the Eastern Conference finals when Messier made his now famous “guarantee.”

At first, though, Game 6 was all New Jersey. Daneyko and the Devils — full of Hall of Fame talent with Martin Brodeur, Scott Stevens and Scott Niedermayer — took Messier’s words as a challenge, storming out to a 2-0 lead.

“The first 30 minutes of that game, if it wasn’t for Mike Richter, it was probably 5-0, 6-0,” Daneyko says. “But he kept them in it. And in the second half of the game, Mark took over.”

First came Messier’s assist on Alexei Kovalev’s second-period goal — a late-period dagger that Daneyko says “froze” the Devils. Then came the takeover.

The game-tying goal: Messier on his backhand.

The game-winning goal: Messier, cashing a Kovalev rebound by crashing the slot.

The insurance goal: Messier from deep in the Rangers zone into an empty net.

He’d talked and walked and led a team that had not won the Stanley Cup in 54 years to within a game of the Stanley Cup Final. That’s up there with Babe Ruth calling his shot or Joe Namath guaranteeing Super Bowl III. If it had never happened, you might not believe it could. The Rangers won Game 7 in double overtime and 2 1/2 weeks later, they were Stanley Cup champions. Messier became the first player in NHL history to captain two different teams to Stanley Cup wins.

Daneyko calls the 1994 conference finals one of the greatest playoff series ever played, saying it had all the elements that were hallmarks of Messier at his best.

“And that’s why Mark excelled,” Daneyko says. “It was nasty, it was fast, it was what rivalries are all about and their captain led the way.”

(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)