Life Roughly How Lemieux Remembers

Somewhere, Brett Hull is laughing his head off.

The guffaw replaces the look of wonder he had when Mario Lemieux listed his reasons for putting skates back on in Pittsburgh.

The game is hockey again, Lemieux said. The assault on ice is over, because the NHL’s insistence on enforcing the rules has taken away the hacking and whacking that sent him into premature retirement 3 1/2 years ago.

Hull questioned the view from the owner’s box in Mellon Arena.

“I wonder what game he’s watching,” was the gist of his assessment.

It’s not the same one that’s being played against the Penguins, which is why Craig Patrick, who handles Lemieux’s heavy lifting as general manager of the team, did some serious work over the weekend. He traded for three bodies big enough to put the Steelers in the Super Bowl, getting former King Steve McKenna from Minnesota, winger Krzysztof Oliwa from Columbus and a former Lemieux teammate, Kevin Stevens, from Philadelphia.

Stevens, also a former King, spent last summer in rehab after a St. Louis arrest last season for allegedly smoking crack cocaine with a prostitute. Stevens had 54- and 55-goal seasons while playing on a line with Lemieux in the early 1990s, and rewarded the guy who assisted on most of them with 254 and 177 penalty minutes, respectively.

McKenna is 6 feet 8, 255 pounds; Stevens is 6-3, 230 and Oliwa is 6-5, 235, and their combined mission is to protect the boss.

To punish the Todd Gills of the world when they put a glove in Lemieux’s face, as he did when the Penguins played Boston.

To gain retribution from the Zdeno Charas of the NHL when they whack the owner/winger on the back of the head with a stick, as Chara did when Pittsburgh played the Islanders on Friday night.

“If you look at our past few games, we’ve been pushed around quite a bit,” Lemieux said. “[There has been] a little bit of a lack of respect for our organization, and that’s not good for anybody.”

It’s particularly not good for Lemieux, who said he could handle the rough stuff and that if he thought he couldn’t, he would have stayed in the owner’s box drinking wine.

But he has found the rough stuff is not really any different from when he was a 30-year-old stripling skating with a target on his back.

It hasn’t inhibited his results. Lemieux has nine goals and 10 assists in nine games and is on pace to score 46 goals, which could win him the Richard Trophy after spotting the competition 35 games in this offense-challenged season.

But the fun seems to have worn off.

“Mario had a bit of a honeymoon, but it lasted only two games,” Patrick said. “We have to have a deterrent to that in our lineup.”

So McKenna and Oliwa, deterrents both, are traded from expansion teams and Stevens escapes a Philadelphia nightmare to rejoin a childhood chum.

And Lemieux tries to resume his honeymoon.

WE GOT NO STINKING OFFENSE

Lemieux isn’t the only player disillusioned with the NHL’s proclamation of law and order being supplanted by the reality of business as usual. The early-season marches to the penalty box have largely ended, and not because the players have gotten wise to the system.

There are exceptions, largely the work of six new referees this season, but by and large, the number of power plays in a game on any given night is directly proportional to who is blowing the whistle.

It’s still the referees, as it always has been.

Numbers back up the assessment. Designed to allow the game’s most skilled players to work unhindered by the attempts of the less skilled to keep up, the new policy has generated an average of 1.4 more power plays per game than a year ago.

Scoreboards from Vancouver to the Florida Everglades were supposed to light up, but the average increase in goals per game is an almost imperceptible 0.2, from 5.3 to 5.5.

And the freedom the stars were going to have will produce a scoring champion with fewer than 50 goals, at the current pace. That will mean only Florida’s Pavel Bure, who had 58 goals last season, will eclipse 50 in any of the past three seasons in a league that had at least three 50-plus scorers in every full season since 1977-78.

YOU READY FOR SOME-STAR GAME?

The North American team for the NHL All-Star game will be announced today and the European team on Wednesday, and there will be some deserving players left off because of the league’s mandate that every team be represented.

That means Minnesota and Columbus, populated by players other teams didn’t want in the expansion draft back in June, will each have an all-star, as will the New York Islanders, Nashville Predators and a few others from whose rosters you would be hard-pressed to name a deserving player.

King winger Ziggy Palffy and defenseman Rob Blake figure to be on teams, but the Mighty Ducks’ Teemu Selanne, generally an All-Star game fixture, probably won’t. The Kings’ Luc Robitaille should make it every year, but probably won’t this year because rosters are going to be crowded with players who are largely unrecognizable.

CAN’T BEAT ‘EM, SO DEPORT ‘EM

Bob Nicholson, president of the Canadian Hockey Assn., opines that one of the problems with his country’s hockey development is that it is developing the wrong players.

Let foreigners learn the game back home, he said last week, thereby joining the exalted company of Don Cherry, xenophobia’s poster child.

Canada’s 54 major junior teams can each add up to two foreign-born players, and they have lined up for the talent in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where the best players are these days. The exception is Missisauga of the Ontario Hockey League, which has won only three games all season and is the worst team in junior hockey.

Cherry owns Missisauga.

Nicholson’s remedy comes after the Czech team won the world junior championship with eight players from the Canadian juniors. He, in turn, embarrassed his country with his assessment.

By the way, Nicholson would like the ban to extend only to Europeans. U.S. players still would be invited north, because there are a lot more Canadians getting college educations in the U.S. on hockey scholarships than there are U.S. players on Canadian junior teams. And besides, the U.S. juniors lost to the Canadians at the world championships.

SLAP SHOTS

Defenseman Marty McSorley, in NHL purgatory until February for hitting Vancouver’s Donald Brashear over the head with a stick while with the Boston Bruins last season, struck out trying to find work in Germany. McSorley insisted the Munich team include a clause in his contract that would allow him to leave to join an NHL team if an offer came. So far, none has.

The Lester Patrick Committee designated Detroit Coach Scotty Bowman, Nashville General Manager David Poile and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman to be honored this year. The Patrick Award is presented for outstanding service to hockey in the U.S.

J.J. Daigneault tied a somewhat dubious record last week when he skated for Minnesota, his 10th NHL team. Michel Petit, a childhood friend of Daigneault in Montreal, shares the record.