Jaromir Jagr Gets His Day in Pittsburgh
Penguins fans made peace with him. Do Washington hockey fans need that too?
They had quite the party in Pittsburgh on Sunday, as the franchise retired the #68 jersey of prodigal son and future member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, Jaromir Jagr.
I hardly need to recount Jagr’s exploits. In the front half of his career, he was absolutely electrifying, and one of the best players in the game on a team choked with Hall of Fame-level talents. Jagr was a member of the first two Penguins teams that won the Stanley Cup in 1991 and 1992. He scored 1,000 points in a little more than 800 games in Pittsburgh. Jagr won the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading scorer five times and the Hart Memorial Trophy as league MVP in 1999. The hockey media only voted him MVP that single time, but his fellow players, who he regularly undressed on the ice, voted him the winner of the Pearson Award as the best player in hockey twice.
All of those achievements happened on the ice in Pittsburgh. In those years alone, he had earned a free pass to hockey immortality, and normally would have spent the balance of his career in Pittsburgh. Fate had a different plan.
After Mario Lemieux returned from a premature retirement in time for the 2000-01 NHL season, Jagr was the captain and the two didn’t get along. As great as Jagr was, Lemieux was greater. The Penguins weren’t just his team, it was a franchise he had saved from extinction. A decision needed to be made, as the team could hardly afford to pay exorbitant salaries to both of their superstars, so Penguins General Manager Craig Patrick traded Jagr to the Washington Capitals for a handful of prospects who together would go on to play less than 250 games at the NHL level.
If that deal sounds like a steal today, it did too in the Summer of 2001. Not long after the trade was complete, Jagr signed a seven-year, $77 million contract to play for the Capitals, with an option for an eighth season. It was the most expensive contract in NHL history at the time. Hockey fans in Washington like me were ecstatic. Not only was Jagr the sort of talent the Capitals had never secured in their history, he was also a living symbol of Pittsburgh’s dominance over Washington on the ice. Between 1991 and 2001, the two teams had met seven times in the playoffs with Pittsburgh winning six of those series, many of them in heartbreaking fashion. But now, with Jagr on the Washington side of the ledger, things would change.
Or so we thought.
In his 2.5 seasons in Washington, Jagr was good, but he wasn’t great, and he certainly didn’t live up to the contract that made him the richest player in hockey. The problems on the ice weren’t exclusively his fault. Head coach Bruce Cassidy, who would go on to win a Stanley Cup in 2023 with the Las Vegas Golden Knights, had a lot of trouble scaling to the challenge of being a first-time NHL head coach while juggling an aging lineup. But as Washington General Manager George McPhee tried to put talent around Jagr to help him, the rest of the roster fell apart. By the time the Capitals traded him to the New York Rangers in 2004, he was damaged goods, so much so, that the Capitals had to pay $4 million per season on the remaining years of Jagr’s contract to get the Rangers to take him off their hands.
That season saw the Caps trade every valuable veteran asset out of town in the most painful of rebuilds. Eventually, the losing would yield a #1 pick in the NHL Entry Draft, a selection the Capitals used to draft Alex Ovechkin. And while the process took what seemed like an interminable 14 years, it culminated in a Stanley Cup win in 2018. Today, the failure of the Jagr trade to turn the Capitals into a durable winner remains the turning point in the ownership of Ted Leonsis. Never again would the team overpay to secure a superstar talent from outside the organization.
Meanwhile, in the ensuing years — a period that included an exile to Russia’s KHL — Jagr gradually rehabilitated his reputation. He earned his third Pearson in New York, and eventually won the Masterton Trophy in 2016, awarded annually to the NHL player who “best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to ice hockey.” Looking back, it was hard to argue that he hadn’t earned it. In the years after he returned to the NHL, he’s played in Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston, New Jersey, Florida and Calgary. At each stop, it would have made sense to walk away from the NHL. Instead, he kept going, not leaving the league until they practically had to pry the skates off his feet in Calgary in 2018.
From time to time, as the trade deadline would approach, reporters would ask the Caps if they might entertain Jagr’s return to Washington to aid in a playoff push.
Every time, the answer was no, there was no way back. That answer came from the top.
These days, Jagr is back in Kladno in the Czech Republic, helping run his hometown team and occasionally returning to the ice. He played as recently as last December, just a few months before his 52nd birthday. He even participated in a practice with the Penguins last week, and appeared on the ice in uniform for the pre-game skate.
It was all very warm and fuzzy.
I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge Washington’s hated hockey rivals in Pittsburgh a single day to celebrate their glorious past. Jagr’s departure from Pittsburgh marked a long estrangement between him and that franchise, and we ought to welcome any instance where old friends bury their differences and remember the good times.
So to Jaromir Jagr I say, I hope you enjoyed your day in Pittsburgh. And if you ever find yourself back in Washington, DC, I’m sure the Capitals would sell you a ticket.
I took a quick look at the calendar, and I realized that it’s been one year since I started writing again here on Substack. Thanks for coming along for the ride. It’s been fun.