Jagr-capping

TSN broke the story Thursday that Jaromir Jagr's agent had contacted 5 teams about playing again in the NHL next season. The teams: The Red Wings, Canadiens, Rangers, Crapitals, and Penguins.

One of the greatest scorers AND mullets.

I immediately did what every Jagr-obsessed fan should do: almost hyperventilated, fruitlessly scoured the internet about it for hours, and then slept with my Jagr jersey (1992 home jersey, with the ornithologically correct penguin on the shoulders and "Pittsburgh" spelled diagonally across the chest, worn for the second of his two Stanley Cup seasons with the Pens).

Never mind that Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dave Molinari dismissed the rumor with disgust (can't link to it because registration is required, though for some reason the site allowed me one viewing), not only belittling Jagr's ability on the cusp of his 40th birthday but also implying that any team with him on it would need chemotherapy or something. The real killer in his column, however, is that he had talked to the team's no-nonsense general manager Ray Shero, who's almost as responsible as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fleury, and coach Dan Bylsma for the team's 2009 championship. Shero not only said that no one had contacted him but that he didn't want to be contacted.

Why not just come to my house and repeatedly hit me in the head with a shovel, Ray? Why not put billboards up nationwide telling children there's no Santa? Why not initiate a kitten-eating regimen as part of the team's offseason workouts?

2010 Olympic Jagr.

There are Penguins fans who hate Jagr, no doubt. His departure from the Steel City was weird and shameful. Many adjectives have been put before his name in recent years -- moody, lazy, schizophrenic, selfish, mercurial, soft, indecisive -- only occasionally deserved, in my opinion. But it's hard to have an opinion since he's been playing behind the iron curtain in Russia's KHL (50 points in 49 games for Avangard Omsk). We've glimpsed him playing for his Czech national team in the recent Vancouver Olympics (in which shithead-extraordinaire Alexander Ovechkin concussed him in such an act of villainy that I just had to punch a hole in the drywall thinking about it) and then in the World Championships this past spring where he led his team to a bronze medal with 5 goals and 4 assists in 9 games. Yeah, pretty lazy -- only a point per game in international play. What a bum.

Jagr's messy divorce from the Penguins is hard to explain. He suffered from depression, I think. The team was losing all of its good players to free agency because it had overpaid Jagr and Mario Lemieux for what the Pittsburgh market could support. They sold out games and still teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Sometimes Jagr dominated; sometimes he sulked. In the late 90s he was stuck with centers like Jan Hrdina and still won scoring titles. Do yourself a favor and watch this reel of some of his best goals. No one else could do that, then. No one now could do that (maybe Crosby, maybe). Although they don't have to anymore because you can't drape yourself all over a forward like a wet blanket or clamp an arm and a leg around them without rightfully getting called for interference.

Who blows kisses nowadays? We need this!

And then there was the magical, mysterious year of 2001, when Lemieux came back and the Pens ran to the conference finals in the East, only to be hacked, hooked, and trapped to death by the dullsville New Jersey Devils in five ugly games. (Jacques Lemaire, I look forward someday to pissing on your grave for ruining a decade of the most beautiful game with your stultifying trap!) Something happened that year. In a locker room interview, Jagr famously said "I'm dying alive" on the ice. The Pittsburgh fans turned on him. He was traded to Washington where he turned in a few zombified years of play. Then he was traded to the New York Rangers, which rejuvenated him -- 123 points in 2005-2006 alone! But his play declined along with the team itself, and they parted ways in 2008. Jagr headed back to Kladno to see his dad and then to Omsk to play, where teenage sniper and Rangers draft pick Alexei Cherepanov died in his arms on the bench one night from a massive heart attack just after they skated a shift together. Shrouds and veils and occasional real darkness.

Why the change in 2001? Was it gambling and investment losses that were rumored to exceed $10million? Was it having to share the spotlight with Lemieux, a man who would have to divert the city's sewers into the confluence of the Monongehela and Allegheny Rivers and destroy the city with an army of mutant robots for any Pittsburgher to even conceive of saying a negative word about him? No one really knows but Jagr himself.

Jagr is equal parts intellectual and emotional. He's a poet, really. He wears the number 68 to commemorate his grandfather's death in prison during the 1968 Prague Spring rebellion. He loves games of chance. Even his play shows an existential awareness, a sense of the fruitlessness of it all, which he summons unprecedented will to overcome on one shift before succumbing to despair over and vanishing during the next. His style of play is a metaphor for the human condition -- something that meat-head Americans and Canadians never could resolve with their "play 110% every second and win win win" mentality. My first book has 68 poems in it because of him.

Bask in the happy Jagr smile.

Jagr's an artist. He is not meant to be completely understood. He is meant to be watched. He is meant to bring both joy and sorrow. He is meant to comfort, enthrall, and infuriate us before our inevitable deaths. We need him.

He should be back in the NHL. I don't care about the salary cap. I don't care that he's been out of the NHL for 3 years. Any team chemistry crap, I can deal with it. He should be a Penguin again. His orbit has come back around to us.

Anyway, I figured I would handicap his comeback chances. My caveat is that I haven't looked at the salary cap stuff at all. Cap management is about as interesting to me as progressive dental work.

Detroit Red Wings: 25-1. No way coach Mike Babcock even thinks for a moment that Jagr could play in their rigorous system. When it comes to defensive responsibility, Jagr's inconsistent. He has defensemen on his team for that! This wouldn't fly in Detroit, where scintillating offensive talent like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg sacrifices points for systemic, complete play. Thus winning championships, by the way. Jagr would never agree that preventing a goal is as good as scoring a goal. Not a good fit.

New York Rangers: 20:1. How long would it take for Jagr to be in coach John Tortorella's doghouse? Ten games? Ten minutes? The fans in Madison Square Garden already have Marian Gaborik to direct their scorn towards, reserving their love for grinders with enough talent to tickle the twine here and there like Brandon Dubinsky. Plus, they just dumped Jagr in 2008. Why would they ask him out again? No chance on Broadway either.

Washington Crapitals: 12:1. The Caps have suffered under huge expectations these last few years, something most hockey fans have enjoyed identically to how we all loved seeing LeBron James (I insist upon rhyming his first name with Hebron) lose with such ignominy in the recent bouncyball finals. Regular-season juggernauts; post-season chokers. Ovechkin tries to do too much on this frankly soft team. If they don't have room to glide and skate and pass, they shift into a kind of bafflement that's pretty sickening to watch. A lot like the Penguins being put down by the Devils in 2001. Jagr's not the tonic for that. The odds are only a little lower because owner Ted Leonsis is just insane+rich enough to maybe freak out and sign Jagr on an impulse. But then, again, the fans in the nation's capital (DC, not Ottawa) already expunged number 68 once before.

Pittsburgh Penguins: 12-1. I have to be honest with myself because I don't want to get hurt. He's not coming back to Pittsburgh. Shero and Bylsma don't make decisions with their hearts. Not even a little bit. It's torturous, though, to consider Jagr in the mix with Crosby, Malkin, and Staal. Oh my god! That power play would be freaky deaky good! And how could Jagr not skate with unbridled joy on Crosby or Malkin's wing? It would be like 1996 all over again! Okay, I have to go take my shot now and blow on a pinwheel all day in a supervised garden behind the sanitorium.

Montreal Canadiens: 8-1. Probably the only one of the five teams that would really consider Jagr, after his chemistry with Hab Tomas Plekanec at the spring Worlds. It's a city he hasn't already exhausted. He's always said he would love to play for a Canadian team (Edmonton has left the light on for years for him, by the way). The fan base and media could handle his star power. There's the sense that the Habs are one player away from being a contender. He wouldn't look weird in their jersey (don't ask me to explain that). Also I wouldn't have to die a little inside in order to root for him, like if he was in Detroit or NYC or DC. Jags, if Pittsburgh is not in the cards, then I endorse a move to Montreal.

He stays in Russia: 2:1. After all, we have a long history of Jagr saying empty words to reporters. He knows that retirement is on the horizon. The money is in the uncapped, mob-run KHL. The ice surface is bigger so the hitting is less intense. He doesn't have to go into the corners if he doesn't want to. His family and life are in Russia and the Czech Republic. In the Olympics and Worlds, he interacted with old friends who play in the NHL, so he got nostalgic. American and Canadian reporters got to stick microphones in his face and ask him if he was coming back, so he answered their questions with a kind, shrugging "Why not?" But he's not crossing the Atlantic again.

Still.

His jersey, right now, is in my bed.

I think I'll go turn on my back porch light.