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Stars' winger Brenden Morrow finished the 2003-04 season with a career-high 25 goals and 49 points.
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Stars' Morrow does it all
By Larry Wigge | NHL.com columnist
Dec. 12, 2005
Sometimes kids grow up almost completely different from their boyhood idol. Case in point, left winger Brenden Morrow of the Dallas Stars.
Morrow grew up in Carlyle, Saskatchewan with posters of Brett Hull all over his room. All that was missing are the hands of a surgeon that helped Hull score 741 career NHL goals, including 86 one season in St. Louis.
"I take a lot of ribbing for that Brett Hull thing," Morrow admitted. "Actually, once I started playing junior hockey and saw it would take me maybe four years to get 86 goals, I added a few Mike Modano posters and switched to Peter Forsberg as my idol.
"Yeah," he said with a big smile, "I know he, too, plays with a lot of skill. But, for me, I have to play aggressively and keep moving toward the net. Getting my nose dirty in the middle of a battle for the puck, well, that's sort of like the way Forsberg plays, right?"
In reality, Morrow has a little of both Hull and Forsberg in his game now that he is a five-season veteran. He is more skilled than some scouts gave him credit for when Morrow was picked at the bottom of the first round in the 1997 Entry Draft, having finished the 2003-04 season with a career-high 25 goals and 49 points. He also is a real leader on the Stars, a player who comes to play every night and makes an impact.
"I remember him coming to training camp in 1999 and he wasn't supposed to be in our plans at the NHL level for another year or so, but he did everything we asked of him," said Montreal Canadiens General Manager Bob Gainey, who held the same position with the Stars for their two Stanley Cup runs. "Brenden was this kid that wouldn't take no for an answer. We kept giving him more responsibilities, thinking he would eventually fail and then we could send him down. But he forced us to keep him with his dogged determination. Finally, we had to send him down just because of the roster numbers. But he was back to stay in mid-November."
Obviously, nothing has changed in that regard with the hard-driving left winger.
"He grew up as a rookie and went to the Stanley Cup Finals in his first season in the NHL around leaders like Mike Keane, Joe Nieuwendyk, Brian Skrudland, Brett Hull and Guy Carbonneau and he soaked up a lot of that dedication and passion for the game from them," said Philadelphia Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock, who coached the Stars when they won the Cup in 1999 and for a near-miss the following year. "He broke his leg in the playoffs that year and he showed how much he wanted to play by missing only two games. If you broke his other leg, I still think he'd find a way to play."
Currently, Morrow wears an "A" as alternate to captain Mike Modano. More important, his performance so far this season, which has the Stars in a battle for first place in the Pacific Division, includes being a near-point-per-game player and realizing that he has arrived as a true impact player every night.
"I want all of the important minutes -- on the power play, penalty-killing and at the end of each period," Morrow told me in the last week of training camp. "I want the responsibility of a leader on this team."
Clearly, the fortunes of the Stars revolve around Modano, Jere Lehtinen and Sergei Zubov, the only remaining members of the 1999 Stanley Cup team, plus Morrow, power forward Bill Guerin and goaltender Marty Turco.
"He'll do whatever it takes to win," Stars coach Dave Tippett said, with an I-wish-I-had-another-15-players-on-the-team-like-him smile on his face. "He adds something new to his game each year, from scoring and passing and slamming people around the ice to penalty killing. Players seek out roles after they've been around for a while. But Brenden wants to learn how to do it all."
The 26-year-old Morrow grew up in a farming town of about 1,200 people in Western Canada, where the local arena was where the action was, and in a hard-working community for hard-working folks where a hard hit drew as much response from the fans as a pretty goal.
It's no wonder Morrow's style of never-give-an-inch play caught the attention of Carbonneau, a member of three Stanley Cup championship teams (two in Montreal and one in Dallas) before joining the front offices in Montreal and Dallas after his playing days.
Brenden Morrow comments on being a leader and an impact player:
"I want all of the important minutes -- on the power play, penalty-killing and at the end of each period. I want the responsibility of a leader on this team."
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Carbonneau is doubly key in this story, because Morrow married his daughter Anne-Marie.
As a rookie, Morrow was Carbonneau's linemate. Their lockers were side-by-side in the old Reunion Arena. After work, it got a little trickier, especially after Brenden met Anne-Marie while singing karaoke at a New Year's Eve party in 2000. One thing led to another and, since Anne-Marie was sort of a hockey brat herself, the match turned to kismet.
For Morrow, it led to a few meals at the Carbonneau house.
"We'd be waiting for dinner and rearranging the salt and pepper shakers to represent penalty killers or power-play forwards and then Anne-Marie and her mom would walk in with the food and boy were we in trouble for bringing the game home with us," he said, with a laugh.
"She really looks out after me, and I guess I drive her crazy sometimes. She says I lead into the traffic area with my face and often seem to come away with a few stitches. She wanted me to start wearing a visor. I said no. So then, she got me to agree that I'd try a visor if I got 20 stitches in a season. I tried it, but didn't feel right. It bothered my vision on the ice, so I took it off. Then, that night, I got 25 to 30 stitches. Boy did I get the cold shoulder that night. She even made me look in the mirror."
"He's the sparkplug every team dreams of," said Turco, whose wife, Kelly, often sits with Anne-Marie at games. "He'll stand up to anybody, hit anybody. He's emotional, but he keeps it in check, where the team can feed off it."
Early in the 2003-04 season, I remember a night when Morrow barreled into the opposition zone and headed straight for the puck, which was in the corner. In the way was New Jersey Devils captain Scott Stevens, whom Brenden belted into the boards and knocked the puck away from the future Hall of Famer. From there, Morrow muscled his way in front of the net. The pass by linemate Jason Arnott was a little off the mark. But Brenden against out-fought Stevens for the puck and scored the game-winning goal.
It was just a night at the office for Morrow, however.
"I don't look at who I'm battling with. I don't care who it is," Morrow said. "My job is to get the puck and do something with it. And that's all I'm thinking about."
A player doesn't crawl across the ice to get to the bench the way former Stars defenseman Darryl Sydor did in the 2000 Finals against New Jersey to get respect. It's all for the team. Similarly, Morrow, who broke a bone in his right ankle in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals against Colorado that same year, was back in the lineup in Game 4.
"I remember hearing Guy say many times that the difference between being good and being a champion is being willing to make that extra effort," Morrow said. "I wasn't trying to be a hero by playing with the bad foot. I felt like somebody had punched me, when they told me I had fractured my ankle. End of playoffs, I thought. Except, every day, I was walking into the locker room and looking at guys who were hurt and still playing.
"So I thought to myself, 'No way I'm not playing.' Think about it, you only get a few chances in life to play in the Stanley Cup Finals and I wasn't going to let a little pain get in my way."
Team player? One of the best.
Morrow hasn't made it back to the Stanley Cup Finals, but he has represented Canada several times, including the World Cup in 2004.
Like we said, Morrow no longer is a Brett Hull wannabe. He doesn't even mind, if he calls home after a road game and he hears Anne-Marie's voice on the other end greeting him with a terse: "Can't-Score-a-Goal Morrow's residence."
He knows his role in the game is to do everything else, from shooting, passing and hitting to penalty-killing. And, if you start with the intangibles in the game of hockey, then Brenden Morrow is a goal-scoring champion.
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