Carbo feeling pain:
It's the result of playing 18 years

By Red Fisher for The Montreal Gazette, June 1, 2000

The years—18 of them playing the only game he knows and all he knows—have left their marks on the Dallas Stars' Guy Carbonneau. High sticks have cut into his face, which now, at 40, is as round and as brown as a meatball. Elbows have crashed into it. So have sneaky fists. Flying pucks.

"There's been a lot of pain over the years," he muttered yesterday. "It comes and goes, and you accept it because it's what comes with being out there, particularly at this time of the year. What happened yesterday was a hurt of a different kind, but you don't and can't live with it. That, too, will go away."

What happened was as close as you can get to a demolition derby: a 7-3 loss to the New Jersey Devils in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final. It doesn't leave a criss-cross of little white lines, the remnants of stitches needed to repair his collisions with sticks, elbows, fists and pucks on too many nights. The ache, he sighed, is where the heart lies—but it only hurts for a little while.

"I think it was a reality check," Carbonneau said. "We weren't ready. We were making mistakes...I think we made every mistake in the book, and the puck ended up in our net every time. I don't know...I think we were playing solid and then we kinda fell apart."

Fell apart? When it's considered that the Devils led 4-1 after two periods and 7-1 a little more than five minutes into the third, perhaps you'll agree that now and then Carbo has a talent for understatement. At any rate, his assessment of Black Tuesday was echoed by Dallas coach Ken Hitchcock yesterday.

"We were the team turning the puck over all the time," Hitchcock said. "When you see us at the end of the night give it away 16, 17 times in the neutral zone, like we did, that's not good at any time, particularly against New Jersey. There were some periods when we were spending three and four minutes in our zone, which is completely different from any series in which we've played. It's been the opposite in a lot of the other series."

After Tuesday's loss, Hitchcock suggested that the Devils are the fastest team the Stars have seen in the playoffs.

"When I said that, I kept thinking they were coming at us...coming at us...but then, when I looked at the tape this morning, the reason they were coming at us was because the mistakes we were making gave them that opportunity. We were giving them odd-man rushes.

"I think you negate speed by being better with the puck," Hitchcock added. "You can stand in position defensively all you want, but if you're not good with the puck and you're not strong in those positions and determined to get the job done, then you're constantly going to be looking at speed coming at you. That's the area that has to be better for us. We have to make them spend more time in their zone than we did in ours.

"We just didn't react the right way," said Carbonneau, who predictably didn't skate during yesterday's optional practice. "We just kinda...we worked hard to get the puck, but once we had it, we just gave it away rather than make them work hard to get it back.

"It was just a bad game, you know. I mean, we lost the first game in every series. We had to come back every time, and I don't see any concern in the dressing room about coming back one more time. What other choice do we have?"

A year ago, and five years after Carbonneau was shipped to St. Louis by the Canadiens for a marginal talent named Jim Montgomery, Carbonneau talked about what could have been, about trying to understand why the Canadiens chose to trade him in the first place. The word he delivered was "devastated."

"I didn't expect it at all," he said at the time. "After 12 years with the Canadiens, after 15 years in the organization, I thought I would at least deserve a better explanation. I wish they would have come to me and said: 'All right, you did this or you did that, or you can't play, or you're on the downhill.' I wish they would have done that. They never did.

"I remember talking about it last year. I remember talking about retirement...about how scared I was about retirement because hockey is all I know. And then I got a phone call telling me I was still wanted in Dallas.

"This is another year," Carbonneau said yesterday with a laugh. "I think it's (retirement) getting closer and closer. I think once the season is over...I think by the end of June I'll make a decision. It was tougher for me this year than the year before. The traveling...playing a lot because of all the injuries we had. I've said it before: Dallas is where I want to play. Last year, Bob (Gainey) and Hitch made it easy for me. They wanted me back. Do they want me back next year? I don't know. I haven't really talked to them and I don't know."

Yesterday, Carbonneau was named one of three finalists, along with New Jersey's Ken Daneyko and the New York Rangers' Adam Graves, for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy that goes to the NHL player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication to hockey.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Carbo's name has been linked with front-office jobs in recent weeks. He would appear capable of bringing a lot to the table in any organization.

"I can look you right in the eye and tell you that nobody has offered me anything," he said. "No offers. No suggestions. No jobs.

"I can also tell you this," he added. "Nobody has talked to me, but if somebody came along and offered me a general manager's job, I would definitely look at something like that. That would make me retire for sure."