Luc Robitaille spent 19 seasons in the NHL and shared a dressing room with most of the people who defined the era. Wayne Gretzky, Marcel Dionne, Mark Messier, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Brian Leetch. Asked by Mayor’s Manor whether there was anybody he never got the chance to play with, he answered before the question had finished landing.
“Mario,” Robitaille said.
He came within a whisker of it. Robitaille joined Pittsburgh for the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season, the one Mario Lemieux spent on medical leave, and the club spent the following months dangling the obvious carrot in front of him.
“They wanted me to come back and they kept trying to entice me with the thought of playing with Mario,” he said.
Luc Robitaille’s career:
| Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Consecutive 40-goal seasons | 8 |
| Stanley Cups | 1 |
| Hall of Fame induction | 2009 |
Why was Luc Robitaille traded to the Rangers?
The lockout did it, indirectly. It wiped out his option year as a contract factor, which left his agent filing for arbitration exactly as the process required. The problem for Pittsburgh was that Robitaille had a very strong case.
“At the time I was the only player to have scored 40 goals eight straight seasons, so they knew we had a good case,” he said. “When they figured out they weren’t going to be able to re-sign me, that’s when they traded me to New York.”
So he went to the Rangers instead, and Lemieux came back the following season and scored 161 points.
“If I had gotten to play with Mario it certainly would have been special,” Robitaille said.
The rest of the interview was a word association exercise on former teammates, and the answers are worth the price of admission on their own. Tiger Williams got “I was scared of him.” Dionne was “like a father figure to me.” Tomas Sandstrom was “what a competitor.” Goaltender Robb Stauber received “crazy goalie, couldn’t believe the way he would run at guys.”
The best of them went to Sean Avery, who Robitaille summed up, laughing, as his little puppy.
Robitaille retired as the highest-scoring left winger in league history and entered the Hall of Fame in 2009 alongside Yzerman, Hull and Leetch, all three of whom he had played with.
Read more:
