Retiring No. 68 Is Appropriate Closure for Jaromir Jagr, Penguins
He wasn’t a Penguin for life, but he was the second-best Penguin ever to lace up a pair of skates. And it’s about time his Penguins career is celebrated.
The party the Penguins are going to throw for Jaromir Jagr on Sunday is as long overdue as it is well deserved.
We’re talking, after all, about the second-best player in the history of the Penguins.
That’s not intended as a shot at Sidney Crosby, who is the most complete player the Pens have ever seen and one who has a chance of eventually playing twice as many seasons with the franchise as the 11 Jagr spent with the Pens.
But if your context in assessing such things is the spectacular, if it’s a rare combination of will and skill, a collection of raw physical capabilities and a clutch gene that conspire to cause jaws to drop at the precise moment when spectacular is mandatory, it’s Jagr who takes a backseat only to Mario Lemieux.
Jagr has never been fully embraced in such a fashion, he’s never been placed upon the appropriate pedestal he earned for a variety of reasons.
One is probably that he wound up playing for eight other NHL teams, beginning with his trade to Washington before the 2001-02 season, the season after he’d won his fourth straight scoring championship and his fifth in a seven-season span.
A relationship with the media that could best be described as uneasy is likely another contributing factor. Jagr was always as complicated and moody off the ice as he was breathtaking on skates. He could be coy, cooperative, confrontational or combative, sometimes all at once and often for reasons that remained difficult if not impossible to comprehend. Maybe the language barrier had something to do with that, at least initially. Maybe it was because there may never have been a player as talented as Jagr who remained as susceptible to a crisis of confidence if he happened to have gone two or three games without scoring a goal.
Jagr’s off-ice flamboyance also likely distracted from his on-ice brilliance. He was more Mickey Mantle than Derek Jeter in that regard, and that perhaps rubbed some if not many the wrong way.
But the perceived injustice that seemingly irrecoverably stained his relationship with Penguins fans was Jagr signing with the Flyers and not the Pens upon his return from a three-season hiatus from the NHL in 2011.
Many had been booing him in Pittsburgh before that, a residual of the trade to the Caps. But signing with the Flyers, who were offering more money and more opportunity on the power play, was considered unforgivable, a sin against Pens fans, the franchise, and Mario.
Perhaps now, as the No. 68 jersey ascends to the PPG Paints Arena rafters on Sunday, all can be forgiven, as it absolutely, positively should.
Perhaps now Jagr’s tenure with the Pens can be fully appreciated for its brilliance rather than bemoaned for its relative brevity.
It’s past time for the number of the second-greatest player in franchise history to keep company in the rarified air of the home arena with the first.
Welcome home.
