Every Daigle Has His Day Part Two: Philly January 24, 1998
Author: Unknown
The numbers that stand out most in Daigle’s stat sheet are his +/- figures. Daigle entered the season with a career +/- of -130. While that still left him as a “plus” player (at 156 career points), Daigle’s +/- hovered around -30 as his teammates’ numbers improved -- Daniel Alfredsson was a +5 last season. Daigle’s lack of attention to defense was just one of the problems the Sens eventually decided were too much to deal with. Daigle never established himself as a player who could handle playing in traffic and there were serious questions about his work ethic and conditioning. He could fly, but he couldn’t stickhandle, although he has gotten better this season, so Daigle couldn’t do the only thing that was going to help him -- get into open ice.
So why did the Flyers bother? Because Daigle has speed to burn. Scary speed. The Flyers may move well for big men, but they still move like big men. Daigle gives Philly something they never had -- a quick forward who can back up the defensemen and break past a trap. Also, the Flyers have been weak on the right side since Mikael Renberg suffered his first injury. The acquisition of Daigle helps correct that.
Bobby Clarke liked Daigle at the 1993 draft, and, as with Pat Falloon last season, decided to see if he could nurture something out of an underachieving player. And, as the Flyers have shown, money is never an object. Falloon wasn’t much to lose, and the Flyers had become convinced that Vinny Prospal, currently out with his second serious bone break in less than a year, was going to be injured more frequently than he was going to be great.
It would seem like a pretty good gamble for the Flyers -- if Daigle thrives among big, strong teammates who will protect him physically and defensively, then it’s a steal. If Daigle stays the same, well, there are worse things than a faster-than-fast floater. They seem to handle Paul Coffey well enough. There are a couple of pundits who wonder if the Flyers aren’t doing with Prospal what Montreal did with John LeClair (i.e., trading a player before he could show his stuff), but it’s way too soon to know.
One aspect of Daigle that the Senators already miss and the Philly reporters are already drooling over is Daigle’s rapport with the press and teammates. Whatever Daigle has not accomplished on the ice, he’s been pretty successful in the dressing room. Bomb joke on the plane aside, Daigle has a sense of humor and isn’t afraid to share, a quality in absolute dearth in Philly, where the Flyers are uniformly described as “quiet”, “introspective”, and “brooding”. Eric Lindros hid from the press as the Flyers collapsed in the Finals, a bad example for his team. No such worries about Daigle. This is the guy who mooned a teammate doing a post-game television interview (Daigle was off-camera), the guy who donned a nurse outfit for a hockey card promotion, the cheeky kid who in 1993, when asked to compare himself to the previous season’s first overall pick, Eric Lindros, replied that “I drink my beer,” a reference to Lindros’s then-recent incident where he spit beer on a woman in a bar and a comment which upset Lindros for months afterwards. Outta be interesting.
