Jeff O’Neill was the fifth overall pick in the 1994 draft and went on to score 237 goals and 496 points across 12 NHL seasons. None of that helped him much when his line drew Jaromir Jagr and Mario Lemieux.
O’Neill arrived in Hartford as a rookie in 1995, and a few games into the season Paul Maurice took over behind the bench. Maurice put him on a line with Brendan Shanahan and Nelson Emerson, which meant that whenever the Whalers played Pittsburgh, they got the assignment nobody wanted.
“Whenever we played Pittsburgh, we got the Lemieux-Jagr matchup, and it was hell,” O’Neill said, in an ESPN feature on early memories of Jagr.
O’Neill on Lemieux and Jagr
Then came the line that sums it up better than any statistic could.
“I knew that Shanny and Emerson hated me because we never touched the puck the whole game,” O’Neill said. “They were playing shinny hockey with us.”
Shinny is the pick-up game kids play on outdoor rinks, with no structure and no stakes. O’Neill’s point is that two of the greatest players in history were treating an NHL shift like a bit of keep-away in the schoolyard, and that his own linemates blamed him for the fact that none of them saw the puck.
READ MORE: Mario Lemieux’s points against every NHL team
His first impression of Jagr had come a few years earlier, and it was the goal most people still think of first.
“My first Jagr memory was that playoff goal he scored against Chicago when he deked everybody out. That’s when you’re like, ‘Wow, this guy is a special talent,'” O’Neill said.
That was Game 1 of the 1992 Stanley Cup Final, when a 20-year-old Jagr weaved through most of the Blackhawks to tie the game late in the third period.
O’Neill, who retired in 2007 and now works as an analyst on TSN’s OverDrive, gave the interview in 2017. By then he’d been out of the league a decade, and Jagr was still going.
“It still boggles my mind that I’ve been retired 10 years, and Jagr is still playing,” O’Neill said.
Read more:
