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For Mo, these playoffs are just like old times

By JENNIFER FLOYD ENGEL
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

A relaxing and refreshing day of golf awaited Stars forward Mike Modano on Tuesday, only he was running woefully late.

A meeting had gone long. So had this interview.

And Mo had been again flirting with retirement talk -- Will he? Possibly. Maybe. Who knows? -- when his impatient golf partner walked up.

"It doesn't look like you're dressed," Stars GM Brett Hull said, noting, "I've got to take care of my man."

So any chance his man has a lot of free links time next season, Hully?

"He is not retiring," he said almost as quickly as he used to unleash slap shots. "He owes me one more year, then he can do whatever he wants. And guys like him do not walk away anyway."

Guys like him may not walk away. It doesn't mean they do not think about it, especially when they are 37 going on 38 and being asked to embrace the role of "the old guy."

"I think about it a lot now lately, certainly when you have gone this deep," Modano said. "And so you wonder if this will be it."

If so, if this indeed turns into his final season, then this West Finals against Detroit might well be his last kick at the Cup. Like .001 percent of hockey experts give the Stars a flying Fig Newton of a chance in this series.

They are underestimating this Stars team.

They have a quality not easily explainable, a quality exemplified by Mo. They will do anything to win, even if it hurts, even if it is not what they want to do, even if nobody notices.

"Mo has been a status player, in terms of offensive production, for a long time. That's kind of always been his identity," Stars coach Dave Tippett said. "What people don't realize is, even when he had that identity, he still did all of these things, what I call the important things. What we are doing is just putting a lot more onus on the important things."

Just look at Game 6 against San Jose.

What most remember about that four-overtime marathon was Marty Turco imitating a wall. Or Brenden Morrow chipping in another game-winner.

To get to this moment, however, Dallas had to kill a penalty on defenseman Nicklas Grossman in the third overtime. And who do you think was one of the guys logging huge minutes on that kill?

"Just look at the minutes he plays," Tippett said, not waiting for a reply and instead rattling off what said "not easy minutes" entail.

Point on the power play. Penalty kill.

Checking line duties, which is basically a thankless role of trying to keep beasts such as Ryan Getzlaf and Joe Thornton from being beasts. And with Detroit bringing a No. 1 line of Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk, whoever the lucky SOB is who plays with them, Mo needs to be good, Guy Carbonneau-on-Peter Forsberg good for the Stars to have a chance.

And herein lies the beauty of what a Hall of Fame player, the greatest American-born scorer ever and an iconic Dallas Star has done this season. Mo, like always, did the right thing.

Not flawlessly.

He admits to having moments of "what the..." The trade deadline was supposed to bring a scoring wing for him and instead ended with his replacement, a just-in-case-Mo-retires superstar, coming to Dallas. He had hoped to at least play wing on Brad Richards' line and Tippett had another use for him.

It is easy to stand on the outside and say "do the right thing" and not so easy to actually do so, to step aside for Generation Next, to not only watch as this becomes Morrow's team, but help in the transition.

And we have seen a seismic shift -- from Mo, Sergei Zubov and Jere Lehtinen to Marty, Morrow and Stephane Robidas -- dating to Game 4 against Vancouver a year ago. This needed to happen. This team needed an identity separate from 1999 and 2000.

Of course, only Mo had a visual accompaniment.

Local media types have been opining that former Stars GM Doug Armstrong's decision to strip him of the "C" in idiotic fashion was not personal. This just means it wasn't personal to them. It was to Modano.

"It was an uncomfortable situation for a lot of us. Obviously, Brenden and I's relationship made it difficult. It probably would have been better off if I didn't have it to begin with, just give it right to Brenden or don't give it to anybody for a couple of years," Mo said recently. "But I knew, sitting at home and going over this thing in my head, I couldn't be that guy that was going to make waves and make this thing any more complicated than it already was. I couldn't do that to Brenden."

He knows Brenden is the better captain. Everybody does after watching him in these playoffs. It doesn't make it any less hard.

It is not easy to do the right thing, which is why to a man the Stars respect the hell out of Mo for how he handled everything.

And they know how important his new role is.

"Look at him; you see that Modano you used to see," Stars forward Steve Ott said. "He looks like he's 19."

Never more so than Sunday.

Watch the tape closely of Morrow's overtime goal and you will see Mo, with the biggest smile ever, embracing him in a huge bear hug. And it is during moments such as this that Willa teases Mo that he'll play forever.

Does anybody except him take his retirement talk seriously?

"No," Mo said with a huge laugh. "And I don't even know. I'll probably do one more year."

He just has a little business to handle with Detroit first.

MODANO'S NUMBERS

168 Career playoff games with the Stars. Neal Broten is second in Stars history with 115 games, followed by Sergei Zubov with 108.

57 Goals in the playoffs. He also has 86 assists for 143 points, all club records.

9 Points in 13 career playoff games against Detroit, with four goals and five assists.

1O f six Stars to have faced Detroit in the playoffs (Sergei Zubov, Jere Lehtinen, Philippe Boucher, Mattias Norstrom, Brad Winchester).

Stars at Red Wings Game 1: 6:30 tonight, Versus

Jennifer Floyd Engel, 817-390-7760
jenfloyd@star-telegram.com

 

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