In the fall of 1995, it made little sense the Stars would even want 35-year-old Guy Carbonneau. Less than nine months later, it made no sense they could so easily obtain 25-year-old Sergei Zubov.
If ever a sports franchise transformed itself from outhouse to penthouse it was the Dallas Stars during what some would call the 1995-96 season and what I might call my first year on the beat. When I switched from the Cowboys beat to the Stars beat, my parents thought I was on the brink of being fired. I’d call the Stars an afterthought but that would imply fans had greater awareness of their presence on the Dallas scene, two years past their arrival from Minnesota, than was true at the time.
Carbonneau and Zubov are being inducted Monday night into the Hockey Hall of Fame, which is more than just the best Hall of Fame located next to a food court in a Toronto shopping mall. What they did in Dallas at opposite ends of their very opposite careers — a French-Canadian forward determined to defend and a Russian defenseman who was all about offense — played a central role in the Stars capturing the Stanley Cup in the summer of 1999 and returning to the Cup Final a year later.
Carbonneau was acquired from St. Louis for Paul Broten on Oct. 2, 1995, and although GM Bob Gainey (also head coach for another two months) had every reason to respect anyone else who had worn the Montreal “C” since his retirement as a player, what kind of leadership was Carbonneau likely to bring a team destined to miss the playoffs?
The Stars still looked like a team in need of just about everything at the June 1996 player draft when suddenly the team pulled off one of its greatest heists, swapping defenseman Kevin Hatcher to Pittsburgh for a younger, more skilled, more interested Zubov. Having led the New York Rangers in scoring in 1994 when the club captured its first Cup since 1940 (and still its only one since then), then engineered the Penguins to the league’s best power play (not to mention Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals) in 1995, how in the world was Zubov even on the block?
You can thank Mario Lemieux for lacking the patience that Zubov would often exhaust on those power plays, but regardless the Stars took off in 1996 under new coach Ken Hitchcock and the race to the Cup was on.
Gainey assembled a locker room filled with former captains (Carbonneau, Joe Nieuwendyk, Pat Verbeek, Brian Skrudland) to guide the young stars like Mike Modano, Jere Lehtinen, Jamie Langenbrunner and Zubov through the rigors of a long season. A three-time Selke Trophy winner in Montreal where he also won two Stanley Cups, Carbonneau helped Modano establish himself as a solid defensive center to go along with his remarkable offensive skills.
Meanwhile, Zubov and Darryl Sydor gave the Stars an exemplary pair of skilled puck-moving defenseman to take the ice when the bone-crunching Derian Hatcher and Richard Matvichuk weren’t doing their thing in front of the crease.
Zubov never quite approached the scoring status in Dallas he achieved in that Cup season in New York — for one thing, league scoring fell dramatically after the 1994 lockout — but he performed at a high level for a decade, producing his highest point total in the ‘05-‘06 season when he was as old as Carbonneau had been upon his Dallas arrival.
Two decades later, the Stars organization is all about building new playoff tales to remember. It’s worth recalling the importance Carbonneau and Zubov brought to this city’s sports fans one more time.