They say that history is told from the winner’s perspective, and that is often true.
Hall of Fame hockey players are flooded with bon mots and flowery prose celebrating their breathtaking skill or showered with praise for clutch moments in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Others are lionized for finely honed skills that leap out at onlookers even during a simple hockey practice where a booming clapper, silky hands or stopwatch skating wheels can easily be spotted when they stand out from their hockey peers.
Sometimes there is praise simply for longevity in the brutal, punishing NHL world when a player reaches the 1,000 games played milestone, a magical millennial mark that separates legends of the game from everybody else.
On the week that he announced his retirement by signing a one-day contract with the St. Louis Blues (always a favorite move at this address for players strongly tethered to one city or one team), David Backes isn’t going to be remembered for eye-popping hockey skills that dazzled hockey scouts along the way. The 37-year-old fell short along with the rest of the 2019 Boston Bruins in his one and only shot reaching the Stanley Cup Final, and his Blues teams consistently ran into the greatness of dynastic Western Conference teams like the LA Kings and Chicago Blackhawks during his run in St. Louis.
Backes even fell agonizingly short of the 1,000 games played plateau as he retires with 965 career NHL games on his resume.
The former Blues captain admitted that he thought passingly about hanging on for one more NHL season to get to the gold NHL standard for longevity as a capper to his excellent pro hockey career. Instead, Backes ends his NHL career with his final game played as a member of the Ducks in his adopted NHL hometown of St. Louis, and the final road trip last season went through his home state of Minnesota where he was surrounded by family, friends and his circle of love.
The celebration of Backes’ career in St. Louis was pretty darn moving, in case you’d forgotten.
But in opting to retire rather than hang around after grinding on the taxi squad for last season’s Anaheim Ducks team, Backes showed exactly why he’s so highly respected as a hockey player, and a man, at the time of his NHL retirement.
“I felt like the game was kind of done with me, and truthfully I felt like I was done with the game as well,” said Backes. “It felt right with the ending we were able to have. Would getting 35 games to get to 1,000 make me whole inside? I don’t think it does. I think it’s all the memories that are coming back and the people that have messaged me [about his retirement] and the sentiment that’s shared with the places I’ve played and the people I’ve connected with. That’s what is impactful for me.
“I’ve been gone for a lot of kid’s activities and it’s time for me to reconnect with family and be present and be grateful for all the opportunities we’ve had. Now it’s on to this chapter that feels right. The script seems too good to be true about how it ended.”
Backes was a tireless worker, a thoughtful, but punishing technician of the game that would use engineering terms like “sub-optimal” when breaking down hockey and a selfless, team-oriented guy that never let his ego get in the way of leadership. And during his best years, he was a hardnosed 6-foot-3 power forward that rang up 248 goals and 561 points in his 965 career games. One might need to dig a little deeper to uncover exactly what made Backes so noteworthy during an era when Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Pat Kane, Jonathan Toews, Drew Doughty, Patrice Bergeron and Zdeno Chara will be remembered as the dominant players of the era.
But peeling back the layers is exactly when you might notice Backes challenging his teammates to be better like when he fought a young Vladimir Tarasenko in practice.
Or when he made his mark with Team USA during the Winter Olympics in Russia while rescuing and adopting two stray dogs he found running wild on the Sochi streets.
It was the hard-working, team-oriented competitor that Backes hopes to be remembered as at a time when there is thoughtful reflection on his NHL body of work.
“Other people will have to decide how I will be remembered…how I hope to be remembered is as a guy that gave it all and did everything in my power without wasting an opportunity,” said Backes. “[I want to be remembered] as a guy that left it all on the ice with the guys that I was wearing the same sweater with. The statistical component of it and the on-ice success of [my] teams is what it is, but if I’m remembered as a guy that was dependable, was responsible and cared for people, and then went out there and did it myself...to me that’s all that matters as I leave this game.”
Perhaps most revealing about Backes wasn’t when he was racking up 30-goal seasons for the Blues or engaging in some nasty, nasty playoff battles with the Blackhawks over the years. It was later in his career when he was mentoring a young first round pick Trent Frederic with the Bruins as he was fighting for a spot in the lineup. Frederic grew up in St. Louis idolizing Backes as a hockey-crazed youth player and even took a picture with him as a nine-year-old fan.
Years later Backes was the old war horse teaching the kid the tricks of the trade to lasting as NHL power forward just as some Blues veterans had done with him a decade earlier.
“My first [team with the Blues had] Tkachuk, Billy Guerin, Doug Weight, Dallas Drake,” said Backes. “You just sat there and were like ‘These are the guys I watched on Team USA, World Cups, all these things growing up, and now I’m in the same locker room with them.’
″(Tkachuk) kind of showed me the ropes, taught me how to be a pro. Maybe this is an opportunity to pay that forward a little bit.”
At the end of the day, hockey players are respected more for their standing as quality teammates and their toughness quotient than they are for just about anything else. Backes had both of those qualities in optimal amounts.
That’s why the occasion of his NHL retirement is a noteworthy moment in a league that reveres team-first mentality and celebrates Backes as somebody that did things exactly the right way for the last 15 years.
