TORONTO—Twenty-five years ago today, the biggest player swap in NHL history to that point went down and altered the fate of two franchises.
Fans of the Calgary Flames and Toronto Maple Leafs will remember it well.
On Jan. 2, 1992, the Flames traded Doug Gilmour, Ric Nattress, Kent Manderville, Jamie Macoun and Rick Wamsley, and Toronto sent Gary Leeman, Craig Berube, Alexander Godynyuk, Michel Petit and Jeff Reese the other way.
“Oh yeah?” Leeman, 52, said, when reminded of the anniversary. “I knew it was a long time ago. Everything was.”
During the NHL Centennial Classic weekend in Toronto we spoke to the two key players in that 10-player swap. Leeman, the former 50-goal scorer who’d put up just 11 goals for the Flames in 59 games over the course of two seasons following the trade, as Calgary missed the playoffs for the first time in franchise history in 1991-92.
And Gilmour, who led the Leafs—one of the worst teams in the league at the time of the trade— to within one victory of a Stanley Cup Final appearance the following season. Gimour posted two 100-point seasons as a Leaf and set franchise records for assists and points in his first full season with Toronto, winning the Selke trophy and finishing second to Mario Lemieux for the Hart.
Gilmour and Leeman will take it from here.
Gilmour: “I knew I was going somewhere. I didn’t honestly know where. There were a couple teams interested that I thought about.”
Leeman: “I asked to be traded, so I knew it was coming. Had I known the guys that were comin’ this way I might have wanted to stay.”
Gilmour: “I got a phone call from (Flames GM and coach) Doug Risebrough saying, ‘You’ve been traded to Toronto. They’ll be calling you soon.’ I got a call from Rick Wamsley. He goes, ‘Did you get traded to Toronto?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So did I’
‘Anybody else?’
We hadn’t heard the full deal yet. Then it came out: five for five.’”
Leeman: “Unfortunately, we had to get out of here at that time to think that we were gonna win because it was just really dysfunctional. The ’80s were a difficult time and the early ’90s they were starting to straighten things out a bit. Cliff Fletcher asked me at the beginning of the season, he said, ‘Gary do you wanna stay or go?’
“We never had anybody that we could trust. I was thinking, what does he want me to say? He really cared about the players and I said to him at the time that as of right now I wanna stay, because there was a talk of a deal with Edmonton. And the deal ended up happening where Grant Fuhr and Glenn Anderson came to Toronto. But I didn’t wanna go to a team that was rebuilding again. That’s what I was thinking: I wanna stay. Then we traded Vinny Damphousse and Luke Richardson, two young, first-round, high picks, again. And I’m like here we go again, getting rid of the youth.”
Gilmour: “I don’t know what other teams were in contention. I know Hartford was one, but there were other teams interested as well. Nobody told me at the end of it.”
Leeman: “Back then if you told them you wanted to go to L.A. they’d ship you to Edmonton or Quebec City [laughs].”
Leeman: “You see what’s happening in Toronto now and that’s what you want, you want to grow with that. They’ve got some phenomenal young talent and it’s a great situation. That’s what I always wanted to be a part of, and hung in there in Toronto in all those tough years and then finally had enough.
“We had a lot of player movement—a lot of player movement—in the ’80s. We used to put up our nametags in the whirlpool room, and we filled two walls with them. There was about six or eight of us that were kind mainstayers for eight or 10 years, and the number of guys that went through that organization at that time was unbelievable. In my eight and a half years in Toronto I had four general managers and eight head coaches, maybe nine head coaches. So there was the constant change. That made it difficult for players because you see the coaches and the managers were butting heads. Of course Mr. Ballard was still in charge and he was late in life. It was a different time but it was that changeover time, all good people but when it came to the product on the ice it was ever-changing.”
Gilmour: “It was excitement. I went through a stage there where I was in a contract dispute with Doug Risebrough, and Cliff (Fletcher) left (to become GM of the Leafs). When you’re a GM, you want to make your own team, make your own decisions. I had a contract issue. I won in arbitration. He didn’t like that and said he was gonna move me, so that’s how it went.
Leeman: “It was unfortunate because I went to a team, they were out of a playoff position at the time, and they were kind of underachieving. A lot of really good players, Gary Roberts and Joe Nieuwendyk and (Theo) Fleury and Al MacInnis, and (Mike) Vernon, a super bunch of guys, guys that you’d wanna start a team with.
“I didn’t play well so I didn’t earn the ice time that I needed. So it didn’t start off that well. We were out of a playoff position that year and that didn’t change. So the pressure was on for the next year, got a new coach and then things—you know, I wanted to get out of there. (Laughs.)”
Gilmour: “My first game as a Leaf was in Detroit. Got there in the afternoon, had a game that night. I scored on my first shift, but we ended up losing 5-3 or something like that. We played the next night at home against Chicago and lost 3-2. It was a new team to me. Didn’t know the guys. But I sensed potential there for the future. Cliff brought Pat (Burns) in, we added some pieces, and obviously had a pretty good run at it.”
Leeman: (The years in Calgary) were tough for me. I was dealing with some issues, I cracked my skull in ’88, things started to develop, some panic attacks, anxiety, stuff I just didn’t know how to deal with. There was a number of years I just kind of kept quiet about it.
“Some of the stuff that was really intense at that time, I’ve learned to manage. That’s the thing. But it was difficult because I wasn’t in the best shape mentally, physically, and if you’re not, you got no chance because you’re playing against the best.
Gilmour: It’s never easy to get traded. Even when I got traded from Toronto to Jersey, Dave Ellett (another Leaf who was also part of that 1997 deal) was gonna meet me at the airport. Lou (Lamoriello) flew in the guys they traded for and picked us up for medicals and all that. It’s nice when you get traded with somebody already on your team, but it doesn’t always happen that way.”
Leeman: “All in all it worked out good. I went to Calgary then I went to Montreal and won a Cup in ’93.”
