Four Cups, assorted bruises, countless stories

Claude Lemieux, one of the NHL's most feared players and biggest winners, leaves us at 60.

They were together for only one season, 1990-91. Brendan Shanahan was beginning his career in New Jersey, Claude Lemieux was sent there from Montreal, where he and coach Pat Burns were coming off a head-butting contest that, for a change, Lemieux lost. Still, they became close friends. If you wore the same sweater Lemieux did, that’s what you became. If you didn’t, keep your head up.

“Playing with him, you could see why the other teams hated him,” Shanahan said. “He was a ruthless competitor.”

Five years later Shanahan was with Detroit and Lemieux was with Colorado. Those two teams, along with Dallas, formed a troika of hatred in the Western Conference. Detroit and Colorado met in the conference finals, and Lemieux crossed paths with his old friend during warmups. “You’re a loser,” Lemieux informed Shanahan. “You haven’t won anything.” At the end of that series, Lemieux was still right. The Avalanche won in six games and then won the Stanley Cup, Lemieux’s fourth.

“We had to learn to be ruthless ourselves,” Shanahan said, “or we weren’t going to win.”

Before dawn on Thursday, authorities found Lemieux’s body in the back of Andros Home, the furniture store in Lake Park, Fla. that he co-owned with wife Deborah. At 60, he had taken his own life. A few hours earlier the Canadiens had lost Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals to Carolina. Two nights before that, Lemieux had worn his Canadiens sweater, No. 32, and carried a torch into the Bell Centre rink, to a typically riotous ovation. Canadien luminaries are doing this throughout the postseason, in which the team is attempting to win its first Stanley Cup in 33 years, and also the first by a Canada-based team. The torch comes from John McRae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” after Canadian troops suffered heavy losses during World War I, in the Belgian village of Ypres: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch. Be yours to hold it high.” In French, that passage has been displayed on the Canadiens’ locker room wall for decades.

Lemieux played 21 NHL seasons and was an All-Star once, when he scored 41 goals in 1992. He got Selke Trophy votes, as the best defensive forward, on two occasions. Yet he twice led the NHL in playoff scoring, and in 1995 he won the Conn Smythe as the MVP of the playoffs, for New Jersey. As a 20-year-old rookie in 1986, he had four game-winners in Montreal’s Cup-winning season, including a Game 7 clincher against Hartford that he considered his top individual thrill. Lemieux scored 10 goals in that postseason.

But a late goal in Game 6 of the ‘95 Eastern Conference finals keyed a 4-2 win for New Jersey over Philadelphia, and set up the Stanley Cup. Overall he had 80 postseason goals, 19 of them game-winners. He was a one-man spring offensive, hockey’s equivalent of Robert Horry, except with elbows and knees and malevolent sticks.

This is a massive loss, of course, one that brought former New Jersey teammate Ken Daneyko to tears when he discussed it on NHL Network Thursday. But something greater is disappearing. There were only 61 Quebec-born players in the NHL this year, none on the Canadian Olympic team. The 1993 Canadiens had 14. The 2021 Canadiens at one point had none. This Montreal team has five French-Canadian players and two others from Quebec who speak the language, as does coach Martin St. Louis, but two of them were acquired by trade during the season.

In 2012 the Habs fired coach Jacques Martin and made Randy Cunneyworth the interim boss. Cunneyworth did not speak the language. La Presse, a French newspaper, ran a headline in French that proclaimed “Randy Cunneyworth ne peut pas lire ceci (Randy Cunneyworth can’t read this).”

There are theories for the Quebecois decline but no reasons. As author Brandon Kelly pointed out, Quebec is relatively poor compared to the rest of Canada but so is Nova Scotia, the home of Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon and Brad Marchand. Hockey expenses have skyrocketed. , The players who are separated and fast-tracked are getting younger and younger.There aren’t as many outdoor rinks because the weather is warmer, and there aren’t enough indoor facilities. Swedes, Finns, Russians and American college players are filling the void. And the great French-Canadian goaltender has almost totally disappeared. The provincial government’s efforts to rebuild the game are either insufficient or misdirected.

In 2003, there were 38 players drafted from the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League, the easternmost of the three major junior leagues. In 2025 there were 19, and that was a high since 2021. So there’s no Mario Lemieux skating through that door, not anytime soon, and no Claude Lemieux either.

This Lemieux had huge hands and legendary strength, and he was a gamesman as well. Before embellishment was ever considered a penalty, he was the king of cowboy-movie victimhood. He sprawled helplessly after one near-hit, against Toronto, and Burns told the trainer not to even bother helping him. “He played two positions,” wrote Michael Farber, the brilliant Montreal Gazette columnist. “Right wing and prone.”

Hockey has rarely been as savage as it was in those Detroit-Colorado series, and Lemieux was the cold, unblinking eye of the storm. He sent Detroit’s Kris Draper face-first into the boards, and Draper basically had to leave his face right there, since he suffered a concussion, a broken cheekbone, a broken orbital bone, a broken jaw and a broken nose.

Early in the fall of ‘96, Detroit’s Brandon McCarty put a bullseye on Lemieux. McCarty was Detroit’s most eager pugilist, a Type A personality who formed the Grind Line with Draper and Kirk Maltby. He has since appeared as a pro wrestler and has also gone through alcoholism and thoughts of suicide. When Detroit played Colorado in Joe Louis Arena, McCarty said his intention was to “hit Lemieux so hard that I could reach down and drag out his heart, even though that’s anatomically impossible.” He nearly did, flooring Lemieux with a right hand. Lemieux responded by covering up, an ice-a-dope strategy that is known around hockey, contemptuously, as “the turtle.” Lemieux later said the blow had knocked him unconscious, that he would never back down intentionally in such a moment.

McCarty was so intent on his revenge that he hardly noticed what was going around him. Colorado goalie Patrick Roy and Detroit goalie Mike Vernon staged an undercard bout right behind him, with Shanahan going airborne to apprehend Roy. It was known as Fight Night At The Joe, but it wasn’t over. Later in the season Lemieux and McCarty staged a rematch at the very first puck drop, and this time Lemieux weathered the storm.

But there were stories of kindness. Scott Niedermayer was a New Jersey rookie when Lemieux was there, and when the Devils lost a playoff series to Pittsburgh, they went out with the boys. Niedermeyer didn’t drink but Lemieux had a few, and he told the kid to drive him home. Once there, Lemieux slept on his couch and Niedermayer got the bedroom.

As Terry Frei of the Denver Post recalled on Friday, Lemieux lived near Columbine High, scene of a massacre in 1999. Several Columbine students served in a babysitting pool for Avalanche families. When Lemieux visited a hospitalized shooting victim, he was told that the family hadn’t been at its home for a few days. Lemieux hired a cleaning service and sent it to the house.

The fierce side of Lemieux surfaced at contract time. Such a dispute prompted New Jersey to trade him to Colorado, a 3-way deal that also involved the Islanders. He later became a player agent and represented, among others, Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen, and Lemieux made sure it was OK with Andersen if he walked with the torch. He also resisted the years that were catching up to him. He played in Switzerland and signed a deal with the Shanghai Sharks in 2008 before San Jose made a call. Six seasons after he had left the league, he played 18 games for the Sharks, with no goals and an assist.

Known as “Pepe,” the cartoon skunk, Lemieux became quite the entertainer. He appeared on Canada’s equivalent of “Dancing With The Stars,” partnering with figure skater Shae-Lynn Bourne, and even sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the show.

Lemieux is survived by his wife and four children, one of which played for five NHL teams over seven years and most recently played in Davos, Switzerland. He is Brendan Lemieux, named after Shanahan, by his most ruthless friend.