Claude Lemieux won four Stanley Cup championships with three different franchises, earned a Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, and retired with 234 postseason games played — a record that stood for years. He was also, by nearly universal consensus among opponents, the most despised player of his generation. That these facts coexist is not incidental to understanding what Lemieux meant to hockey. It is the entire point.

Lemieux died at 60, and the tributes pouring in from former teammates are warm and genuine. The tributes from former opponents are notably more complicated. This is exactly how he would have wanted it.

The Draper incident and the price of winning

Any obituary of Lemieux must reckon with May 29, 1996. In Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, Lemieux drove Detroit's Kris Draper face-first into the boards from behind. Draper suffered a broken jaw, broken nose, broken orbital bone, and a concussion. The hit was late, gratuitous, and dangerous even by the standards of an era that tolerated far more violence than today's game.

Lemieux received a two-game suspension. Colorado won the Cup. The incident ignited the legendary Red Wings-Avalanche rivalry that would define NHL hockey for the next half-decade, culminating in the bloody March 1997 game where Darren McCarty exacted revenge while the benches emptied. Lemieux, characteristically, turtled when McCarty came for him — a moment his critics never let him forget.

What his critics often omit: Lemieux was also a genuinely skilled player. His 80 career playoff goals rank among the best in league history. He scored clutch overtime winners. He could actually play the game at a high level, which made his willingness to cross lines all the more maddening to opponents. He wasn't a goon who occasionally got lucky. He was a talented forward who chose to be a villain.

The extinction of his species

The modern NHL has no room for Claude Lemieux. The league has spent two decades implementing rules, supplemental discipline, and cultural pressure designed to eliminate exactly his style of play. Hits from behind carry automatic majors and lengthy suspensions. Instigator penalties discourage the kind of frontier justice that once kept players like Lemieux in check. The Department of Player Safety reviews everything.

This is, on balance, good. Kris Draper's face is a compelling argument against nostalgia for the old ways. But something has also been lost — not the violence itself, but the operatic intensity that surrounded it. The Avalanche-Red Wings rivalry was appointment television precisely because it felt genuinely dangerous, because the hatred was real and the consequences were physical. Modern playoff hockey is excellent, but it rarely achieves that same visceral stakes.

Lemieux understood this intuitively. He knew that playoff hockey was ultimately about will, about which team wanted it more and was willing to pay a higher price. He made opponents pay that price, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. Four rings suggest the strategy worked.

Our take

Claude Lemieux was not a good sportsman. He was, however, an extraordinarily effective hockey player who understood something essential about his sport: in the playoffs, being liked is worthless and being feared is everything. The NHL has decided, correctly, that the game is better without players like him. But the league should be honest that in eliminating the Claude Lemieuxs, it has also eliminated a certain kind of drama that cannot be manufactured or replicated. He was the last of a dying breed, and now that breed is fully extinct. The game is safer. Whether it is better is a question his four championship rings answer one way and Kris Draper's reconstructed face answers another.