Sporting News, The: Philadelphia Story - hockey team Philadelphia Flyers

Eric Lindros is a tour de force for the Flyers, but his strained relationship with G.M. Bob Clarke makes you wonder how long it will last

The secret to the new Eric Lindros, who, he insists, is little different from the old Eric Lindros, is the ability to show his teeth while putting those of his opponents in jeopardy.

"Any time you come to the rink with a smile on your face, you are going to produce," he says.

Is there a direct correlation between going ear-to-ear and end-to-end? Those of us who do not stand 6-4 or weigh 236 pounds may never fully understand how the plastered-grin impacts upon the defenseman plastered against the glass.

It is widely acknowledged that the Flyers center's game has never been on a better beam. But still subject to interpretation is why he beams. Is this the joyous, cathartic laugh of a big, gifted, powerful, handsome 25-year-old man who, having finally figured out he has the world at his mercy, is kicking butt and taking no prisoners? Or is this a sardonic smirk of an overburdened manchild who has leaned to hold off a checker with one arm and the world with the other?

When the subject turns to his relationship with the Flyers--which basically has become a dueling handshake at 20 paces--hospital comers form at the edge of Lindros' lips. "You know what it's like around here without a contract?" he says. "A lot of things are said. I can't control that."

Like media criticism? "No, I was talking about what Bob Clarke does," Lindros says. "I realize what kind of support I'm going to get. He does whatever he thinks is the way."

And last summer, with Lindros headed into his option season, there was no way the Flyers G.M. was going to play Russian roulette with another long-term commitment to a star not starring and a leader not leading without first firing a warning shot. "If you want to be the highest-paid player in the game or close to it, you've got to play that way," Clarke told the media. "You can't keep paying someone on potential.

"If you're going to be as good as you can be, you have to have a real passion for the game and your teammates. (Rod) Brind'Amour has that passion. Every day on the ice, you see him working with a player. Eric has to have that if he is going to be a great player. Some players never learn it. That's why they never get better."

When the franchise player hears that from his boss and mentor, he has just as good a chance at getting bitter as becoming better. Particularly after missing 18 games last season, well into April, with a concussion, jumping back on a boat much more sinkable than its G.M. believes and going down with it in five miserable first-round playoff games. "It was a frustrating time," Lindros says. "(Clarke) felt better about (challenging me) that way and didn't talk to me personally before he did."

The Flyers ended up making a five-year offer for around $42 million, the yearly value of which was based on the $8.5 million Lindros is making this season, which was set by the same amount the Mighty Ducks are paying Paul Kariya in the second year of a two-year deal. But Lindros and his father/agent, Carl, didn't feel the Flyers' proposal protected Lindros from lesser players eventually making more or from trade possibilities embellished by the cost control a signed multiyear contract would give an interested team.

It was the family's idea to work the 1999-2000 season on a handshake at $8.5 million, the rate the Flyers had offered for the second year of the long-term deal, and the team verbally accepted. "What we've done is take away from their concern that Eric was going to jump ship (after this season), play hardball," Carl Lindros says. "Let's let things settle down and see how well we are working together."

On the ice, so far, it's a love-in. Lindros has 42 points in 32 games and is the early front-runner for the Hart Trophy. "I think he has been the best player in the NHL this year," Flyers chairman Ed Snider says unabashedly, knowing he probably is going to have to pay for it.

Off the ice, however, the tension is palpable. If it was Clarke's side intention to distance himself from Eric and Carl, establish a business-only relationship that allows managers to manage, captains to produce and father/agents to sit in the stands and cheer, then he has succeeded. Carl Lindros, who has never had a shortage of suggestions on his son's and the Flyers' behalf, hasn't called Clarke yet this season.

Still, there will be a price to be paid in a long-term relationship that both family and organization say they still want while dumping the puck in the other's comer to achieve it. "What was said publicly and to others has just helped us understand Bobby Clarke," Carl Lindros says. "Maybe it makes it easier to have a good working relationship."

Translation: True colors have come out, and none of them are gray. So we now have an understanding, if not an agreement.

"Absolutely, we still want to do a long-term deal," Snider says. "We just feel that the market has been set." Along with new parameters for relationships. Coach Roger Neilson, who, like the previous four Flyers coaches Lindros played for, has had more problems with other players than Eric, is the good cop. Clarke, whose return to the organization in 1994 after two years in Minnesota and one in Florida was hailed by Lindros as restoring the organization's direction, has become the bad cop.

The G.M. will happily pass on the Christmas card from Carl and Bonnie Lindros this year, if it means getting the best from their son. "He is a different guy this year," Clarke says.

Even with that praise, Clarke probably is shooting another round into the air. Eric steadfastly insists that he is showing only the same strong commitment he has had since 1992, when the Flyers bet $15 million, six players, two first-round draft choices and, to a degree, the construction of their new house, the First Union Center, on a 19-year-old considered the best prospect since Mario Lemieux. Clarke is not taking any credit for lighting any fires under Lindros or bringing him any closer to his teammates. He had better not if this still is going to work out.

"Nothing has really changed a whole lot around here," Lindros says. "It's not like this is the second coming or anything like that. Two years ago, we had a great team but nobody remembers that. All anyone remembers is that we lost in the finals. And as far as last season, I was having a pretty good year until I got hurt."

You can look it up. Lindros had 28 goals and 39 assists in 59 games when an open-ice hit by Darius Kasparaitis left him with a concussion. While Lindros' head cleared, Clarke, acknowledging rookie Wayne Cashman was miscast as a head coach, pulled the plug and put Neilson behind his seventh NHL bench. The Flyers went 10-6-2 in Lindros' absence, but won only one of four games after Lindros returned. Disjointed and uninspired, they didn't even give Buffalo goalie Dominik Hasek a chance to stone them in a five-game, first-round playoff loss. "We weren't putting ourselves in position to score," Lindros says.

Instead, Clarke put himself on the spot of having to explain not getting an ace goalie or finding a second line to take pressure off Lindros and his shotgun, John LeClair. Fact is, young Flyers players who had looked so destined to bring the city its first Stanley Cup since 1975 have not improved.

Winger Dainius Zubrus, a first-round pick the Flyers rushed into the lineup in 1996-97 at age 18, has only 18 goals in two-plus seasons. Alexandre Daigle, the No. 1 overall pick in 1993 who foundered in Ottawa, not only has failed to blossom since last year's trade to Philadelphia for Vinnie Prospal and Pat Falloon, but often has been scratched from the lineup. Defenseman Janne Niinimaa, a revelation during the 1997 run to the Stanley Cup finals, was deemed to have a bad attitude and was traded last season for the competent, but less-skilled Dan McGillis and a second-round draft pick in '98.

Clarke got only 62 points out of Chris Gratton for a $10 million expenditure ($9 million in bonus money) last season, then traded the big free-agent signee of 1997 back to Tampa Bay for Mikael Renberg, the former Lindros linemate who was part of the Flyers' compensation for Gratton in '97, and center Daymond Langkow. Renberg last week was reunited, at least for the forseeable future, with Lindros and Leclair on the "Legion of Doom" line, at the expense of Keith Jones, who, after being traded to Philadelphia from Colorado for Shjon Podein on November 12, sparked a Lindros line explosion of 25 goals in 13 games but had fizzled of late.

The fact is, handling other Flyers lines has required no asbestos suits. Other than Brind'Amour, who has scored seven of his 13 goals on the power play, no other player has goals in double digits.

The Flyers' defense has one of the NHL's better all-around defensemen in Eric Desjardins but lacks both a superior puck mover and nasty slot-clearer. Goalie John Vanbiesbrouck, a controversial signing for two fewer years and at least $14.25 million less than the Flyers would have had to spend on Mike Richter (based on what the Rangers eventually gave him to re-sign), has been average.

In other words, pending further changes, the Flyers, who two years ago appeared close to the front of the line of Stanley Cup heir apparents, have slipped back to peripheral contention. They can go as far as Lindros can take them, which, without a second scoring line, could be right back into another checking buzzsaw like Buffalo's last spring.

"Every team has its holes," Lindros says. He understands Snider's financial and emotional commitment and knows that over time there is probably as good a chance to get over the top in Philadelphia as anywhere. Asked if he would feel any sense of failure to leave, without being grand marshal of a parade down Broad Street, Lindros says, "You are crossing a bridge I don't want to go over yet. I don't want to think in terms of leaving.

"I want to win a Stanley Cup. I think we have a pretty good team here, a real good group of guys. I think our fans are fantastic. And I really like Roger."

Neilson was assured of Lindros' best intentions during a 90-minute meeting last summer in the cottage country north of Toronto, where Neilson maintains a seasonal residence. Lindros came to camp with a physical-fitness test score that impressively beat the ripped Brind'Amour and buff Desjardins to win team honors. Since then, the Flyers' captain has played as though every goalie and every guy in the comer is Clarke, all the while bristling at any suggestion he was shamed by the G.M.'s hot poker.

"I've always come to camp in shape," Lindros says, frowning. "They just never had an award before. The only thing I did differently tiffs year was lift more."

He means weights, not the Flyers, although the effect has been the same. "It certainly seems like he has taken a lot of responsibility on," says the Rangers' Mike Richter. "I think it was a good thing Clarke did, and it seems like he has responded.

"I do think that the top players in the world are judged by a different standard. It comes down to have they won a Cup or not. So many top players don't do that, but you have to look at what kind of a team is around him."

Conversely, great players do everything they can to make their teammates better. And according to Nielson, Lindros is setting fine examples. "He comes back (defensively) hard," Neilson says. "Like anybody, he has little things (wrong) in his game, but he doesn't mind you telling him. Overall, he's been great. Every practice, he seems to be the hardest-working guy. He reminds me of Darryl Sittler, the captain of my first team."

Teammates, few of whom have ever gotten close to the Zeus who dresses amongst them, see more consistency in Lindros' nightly concentration levels but have stopped saying so because it irritates him. And not without at least some reason, either. It is entirely arguable whether a player who reached 500 points faster than all but four players in NHL history should be considered a disappointment at this stage.

Lindros was the NHL's MVP in 1994-95, the lockout-shortened season, only his third in the league. In 48 postseason games, he has 56 points. There have been postseason series--against Buffalo in 1995 and against the Rangers in 1997--when Lindros has been dominant, and a few where he has been considerably less. Still, the fact remains that in the two years the Flyers had good playoff runs (1995, when they reached the Eastern Conference finals, and 1997, when they advanced to the Stanley Cup finals), they received scoring contributions from other lines. And in the two times they were bumped early (by Florida in the second round in 1996 and by Buffalo in the first round last spring) they did not.

Bryan Trottier was considered a yearly playoff underachiever with the Islanders until they acquired Butch Goring and won the next four Cups. The Oilers and Wayne Gretzky didn't get to a final until Mark Messier matured. And besides, just whose expectations does Lindros have to live up to anyway? When he began to be identified as the game's Next One at 16, he and his family steadfastly insisted his body type and role model was Messier. In his first six seasons, Lindros scored 30 more goals and had 32 more assists than Messier had at the same point in his career, despite having played 70 fewer games.

Of course, those missing contests are just more misplaced items from a resume still in the making. Absences of 23 games (over three segments) with torn left knee cartilage ('92-93), 14 games with a torn right knee ligament ('93-94), 18 games with a concussion (1996-97) and 23 games with a groin pull (1996-97), have held a big body back from a full season's momentum. "It's tough to miss a quarter of the year every year and feel good about your year," Lindros says. "I want to stay healthy."

Content, too, which takes a lot of work when you've had adult expectations shoved at you since puberty. "I don't let as much bother me as I used to," Lindros says. "I want to enjoy what I'm doing. I'm not going to let uneducated, far-out gossip, trash, affect me.

"People keep going through this leadership stuff like there's a manual for it. They have so much to say on that topic, and they have never been in an NHL dressing room; they don't have a clue. So I'm not going to worry about it.

"To me, it's all about going to the rink and having fun, because when you are, it doesn't even feel like you are working extra hard. You're flying out there, you're enjoying it and it brings up your awareness of the other guys in the rink. They just hop on board."

And opponents just fall off. "You just try to survive out there against him," says Rangers defenseman Brian Leetch. The big hits, like the one in October that drove Boston's Andreas Dackell's shield into his face, knocking, him cold, are a dramatization of Lindros' pure brute power. But the more effective manifestations of his strength are the zip of his devastating wrist shot and how, stick-on-stick against 220-pound players, he wins the puck almost every time. And Lindros and LeClair can exhaust a defense to an even greater degree than the Flyers and Lindros have been worn down by their expectations of each other.

As Keith Tkachuk lives happily ever after in Phoenix, as Paul Kariya comes back from a severe concussion, the options for a superstar-for-super-star deal are small. And to trade Lindros for a package would leave the Flyers--who unsuccessfully beat their heads on Guy Lafleur, Trottier, Gretzky and Steve Yzerman in five trips to the finals since their last Cup--without the superstar historically necessary to seal the deal.

They need another scorer, but also more patience and instruction to develop what they have, which includes a maturing Lindros. The coaching carousel has to stop, along with the finger-pointing and mind-set that the Flyers are behind schedule. The window of opportunity is hardly dosing on a team whose key players are still relatively young. Lindros, who could become a free agent after next season's handshake agreement, has no real place to go, nor any great desire to leave. If a long-term deal is unobtainable, it's conceivable he and Flyers could keep signing short ones.

"The goal is to be part of a successful Flyers organization," Carl Lindros says. "How we get there I'm not sure yet. It might be (best to do a long-term deal) and it might be just the opposite.

"Eric feels a sense of commitment. The fans have treated him very well, and there has been a commitment toward him by some of his teammates, too. There is a network in the community and organization that Eric quite likes. Roger has been a key factor in the whole thing. Eric sees Roger as an honest and forthright person who shoots from the hip and maybe because of his stature at this stage of his career can be his own guy.

"Don't misunderstand; there are a lot of quality. things about the Flyers organization."

Asked to name them, Carl Lindros says: "I'm not going to tell you." He will not expose what he considers the bad stuff by the process of elimination, something the Flyers have gone through too many springs for the franchise and franchise player to waste time on different pages resenting, rather than helping each other over the top.

Jay Greenberg writes for the New York Post.