Jaromir Jagr was the entire basis of the Pittsburgh Penguins power play through the mid-1990s, the player coaches sent over the boards for every situation that mattered. On nights when it wasn’t working for him, he occasionally decided he wasn’t going.
That left Mario Lemieux, as captain, looking for someone to deal with it. He found Petr Nedved.
“Sometimes, when things weren’t going well for Jarda, he’d get stubborn and didn’t want to go out on the power play,” former teammate Nedved told NHL.com. “Then the funny part was that Mario would come to me and say, hey, please, go, skate over to him, get him to go out on that power play.”
The results were mixed.
“Sometimes he went, sometimes he didn’t,” Nedved said. “Then they figured out that I had quite a bit of influence on him, so they’d come to me. Tell him to go and play.”
Why could Jagr get away with that?
Coaches Eddie Johnston and Kevin Constantine both had to work around it, and nobody appears to have seriously considered forcing the issue. Nedved’s explanation is that the standing Jagr had in that room was unusual, and that the room itself was unusual.
“That just shows what kind of position Jarda had there. And deservedly so,” Nedved said. “Compared to other teams the atmosphere there was more relaxed, more homely. I liked that a lot.”
READ MORE: Jaromir Jagr hilariously paid a teammate to take his girlfriend out
The production backed it up. Jagr put up 149 points in 1995-96, a total nobody has beaten since apart from Lemieux in that same season and Connor McDavid with 153 two years ago. Nedved had the best year of his own career alongside him, finishing that season with 45 goals and 99 points in 80 games.
Rick Tocchet, a teammate from the Stanley Cup years, described a different side of the same stubbornness.
“We had to dig him off the ice every time. He stayed out there forever. Sometimes we really had to physically drag him away. His work ethic was unbelievable,” Tocchet said.
Pittsburgh raised Jagr’s No. 68 to the rafters at PPG Paints Arena in February 2024, hanging it beside Lemieux’s 66.
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