The NHL / Jerry Crowe : Playoffs More Important Than Scoring Title, Says Lemieux

Mario Lemieux told a disbelieving group of reporters gathered here for Tuesday night’s National Hockey League All-Star Game that winning the NHL scoring championship isn’t all that important to him.

However, the Pittsburgh Penguin center also said he scans a newspaper every day to check on the progress of Wayne Gretzky, whose seven-year stranglehold on the scoring title Lemieux has a good chance to break.

“Every player who is ahead at this point in the season is going to try to win it but I don’t pressure myself when I go out on the ice,” Lemieux said of the scoring race. “I don’t think about Wayne pushing me.

“I can’t let my mind be bothered by it. I can’t do that to our team and to the franchise. The most important thing is for us to make the playoffs.”

In a star-crossed career, the 6-feet 4-inch Lemieux has produced at least 100 points in each of his four seasons in the NHL, but has yet to lead the Penguins into the playoffs.

So, doing that, he said, is his No. 1 priority this season.

The scoring race, however, looms large in the eyes of the fans.

While Gretzky was out of the Edmonton Oilers’ lineup for a month because of a knee injury, Lemieux moved past The Great One in The Great Race.

With 23 games left, including the Penguins’ only appearance at the Forum Saturday night against the Kings, Lemieux has 114 points, including a league-leading 52 goals in 54 games.

Gretzky, with 98 points in 42 games, has 25 games left.

When will he catch Lemieux?

“Maybe next September,” he said.

Gretzky said that, from a selfish point of view, he would like to be 40 points ahead at this point in the season, as is usually the case.

But interest in the race, he said, has been good for the NHL.

“It’s something new for people to write about,” he said. “It’s a change of pace. I don’t think there was anybody writing about it the last three or four years. It got to the point where it was stale.”

It’s stale no more.

Criticized in the past as being somewhat less than committed, Lemieux said his eyes were opened during the Canada Cup series last September when he played with Gretzky for Team Canada.

“Every shift he’s on the ice, he tries to do the impossible,” Lemieux said. “I guess that’s what makes him the greatest player in the world.

“I didn’t have as much intensity as Gretzky, game in and game out--and on every shift. I think in the Canada Cup, a lot of people learned from Wayne in the way he came to practice and in the intensity he puts into his work.”

Considering his new-found intensity, would Lemieux be disappointed, then, if he let the scoring title slip away?

“That’s hard to say,” he said. “I would be, but when you get beat by a great player, it’s an honor just to compete.”

What will it take for Gretzky to win the scoring title?

“It might be impossible, although a couple of big games--a couple of six- or seven-point nights--might get me back into it,” Gretzky said. “Other than that, I can’t have any bad nights.”

Twenty-one times in his nine-year career, Gretzky has produced six or more points in a game.

Lemieux has done it twice.

Jimmy Devellano, general manager of the Detroit Red Wings, is tired of hearing disparaging remarks about the Norris Division, which is generally regarded as the weakest in the NHL.

“Let’s go to the Smythe Division,” he said. “They have Los Angeles and Vancouver. They’re no better than Minnesota and Toronto. In some ways, that division is worse. You have Calgary and Edmonton so far ahead of everybody. I think they have the worst division in the league.”

Co-owner Bruce McNall said the Kings have received about 500 suggestions since he announced that he would like to change the team’s colors next season.

“About 10% of them want to keep the same colors but I think those are the people who are too cheap to buy new (souvenir) jerseys,” McNall said.

McNall said the players would prefer their home jerseys to have a white background and their road jerseys to be black with perhaps a silver trim.

“They say they feel tougher in black,” McNall said.