On Monday night, Mark Howe will at long last be where he belongs: in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Howe became eligible for election to the Hall in 1998, three years after his distinguished 22-season career ended, but only now is he being ushered into a club in which he has long deserved membership. Yet even that is somehow fitting for Howe, whose quiet excellence tended to be overlooked throughout his career.
Howe was nothing less than one of the greatest defensemen of his generation, and it was he, perhaps more than anyone else, who made the Flyers of the 1980s a perennial Stanley Cup contender. Howe’s play on the Philadelphia blue line looked an awful lot like Nicklas Lidstrom’s does on the Detroit blue line: near flawless through the use of positioning rather than body checking, virtually penalty-free, and with an effective attacking component that made him doubly good.
Compare Howe’s 16 N.H.L. seasons (1979-80 through 1994-95) with the 18 full N.H.L. seasons of Lidstrom (1991-92 through 2010-11), and you can see just how good Howe was.
Totals:
Howe in 929 games: 197+545=742, +400, 455 PiM
(per game: 0.78 pts, +0.42, 0.48 PiM)
Lidstrom in 1,494 games: 253+855=1108, +429, 486 PiM
(per game: 0.74 pts, +0.29, 0.33 PiM)
Howe’s record is remarkable. Certainly Lidstrom will be elected to the Hall in his first year of eligibility, and deservedly so. But Howe’s career averages are actually slightly better than Lidstrom’s, and he had to wait 13 years.
The things Howe is best known for are special enough, even if they lead people to miss the bigger picture of his on-ice accomplishments.
He is a son of Gordie Howe, and where Gordie could be and was often savagely rough, Mark was gentlemanly and clean. In any case, it was for the chance to play alongside his sons Mark and Marty that Gordie came out of retirement for the 1973-74 season.
The three formed a line for the Houston Aeros of the W.H.A., with Gordie, 45, centering Mark, 18, on the left and Marty, 19, on the right. Gordie scored 100 points and Marty 24. Mark scored 79 points in 76 games and was voted the rookie of the year.
But it should not have come as a big surprise – Mark had already led the Detroit Junior Red Wings to the national junior championship as a 15-year-old in 1971; won a silver medal with the United States at the 1972 Olympics at 16, the youngest hockey player ever to earn a medal; and been named Memorial Cup most valuable player with the Toronto Marlboros in ’73.
With the Howes leading the way, the Aeros won the Avco World Trophy as W.H.A. champions in 1974 and ’75. Then the family moved to Hartford and the New England Whalers, and Mark continued to excel:
WVIT in Hartford offered this back-in-the-day profile of Mark:
Father and sons stayed together for the Hartford Whalers’ first N.H.L. season, 1979-80, and by this time Mark Howe was playing defense more and more – though still putting up point-a-game numbers. Then came a horrific injury, when he was impaled by a prong at the center of the goal net – it entered through his thigh and buttock and narrowly missed his spine. You cannot find the injury on video, but witnesses call it gruesome. The N.H.L. subsequently redesigned the nets, removing the prong.
Despite losing 35 pounds while on a liquid diet recovering from the injury, Howe managed to come back and score 53 points in 76 games the next season. But in those high-scoring days, that was seen as a big decline, and he was dealt to Philadelphia for the 1982-83 campaign.
So began Howe’s greatest period. He was partnered with Brad McCrimmon on the Flyers’ defense for much of five seasons, and the pairing was practically impregnable in leading Philadelphia to the Stanley Cup finals in 1985 and ’87. (Howe’s plus-minus marks for those five seasons: plus-47, plus-30, plus-51, plus-85, plus-57. McCrimmon’s: plus-24, plus-19, plus-52, plus-83, plus-45.) Howe could score, too, averaging 19 goals and 63 points in that span:
Amazing how much that goal looks like the one he scored for the Whalers of the W.H.A. a few years before.
Howe’s best season was 1985-86, when he led the league with his plus-85 (followed by McCrimmon’s plus-83), while scoring 24 goals and 82 points – and did so while taking only 36 penalty minutes. Howe did not win the Norris Trophy that season; Paul Coffey did. But Howe should have. For that one season at least, Howe, like his father, had become the best player at his position; unlike his father, he never gave out a mean check or a cheap shot.
Howe continued to excel in Philadelphia until beginning the slow decline of a wise but still useful veteran. The Flyers let him go after the 1991-92 season so he could sign with Detroit to try to win a Stanley Cup. But in three seasons with the Red Wings – two spent alongside McCrimmon — he could not.
Perhaps the absence of a Stanley Cup on his resume was the reason for the long delay in according Howe the recognition he will receive Monday. He did make three trips to the finals with Philadelphia — and sat in the press box for a fourth, as a veteran scratch with Detroit. But he won two W.H.A. titles, was a first-team N.H.L. All-Star three times, had the rare distinction of skating for both the United States and Canada in international play and, as we have seen, had a career of overarching quality and class. Better late than never.
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