Welcome to NHL99, The Athletic’s countdown of the best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.
Wendel Clark was shooting a Cheerios commercial in Mississauga the day he found out the Maple Leafs had traded him for Mats Sundin.
Cell phones weren’t a thing in 1994, “so nobody knew how to get a hold of me when they were trading me,” he said.
Clark was the Leafs’ blue-collar Canadian captain at the time, and arguably their most popular player. He was coming off a 46-goal season, the best of his career, and a second straight trip to the conference finals.
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Sundin was young and Swedish. He was slick and skilled. He was everything Clark was not.
It was late June, draft day in the NHL. Clark stopped for gas at the Esso station across from the old Molson Brewery in downtown Toronto.
“So I turned the radio on there to see who we drafted,” Clark recalled. “That’s when I heard I got traded.”
Almost 30 years later, the trade for Sundin — the trading of Clark — was indisputably a stroke of brilliance from then-Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher. It’s arguably one of the great trades in NHL history, landing the Leafs a franchise cornerstone, heir apparent to Doug Gilmour and, according to The Athletic, No. 61 on the list of the top 100 players of the modern era of the NHL.
And yet, trading for Sundin was initially reviled in Toronto because it meant losing Clark.
“This isn’t April 1. This has got to be April 1. This is a joke,” Don Cherry, the game’s most influential media voice at the time, remarked to the Toronto Star when told of the deal. “I hope somebody’s kidding me that you would trade Clark for Mats Sundin.”
“A lot of people in Toronto should be up in arms,” Cherry said.
The full deal went like this:
To Toronto: Sundin, Garth Butcher, Todd Warriner and a first-round pick that became defenseman Nolan Baumgartner.
To Quebec: Clark, Sylvain Lefebvre, Landon Wilson and a first-round pick that became Jeff Kealty.
But really, the core of the deal was Sundin for Clark. The big, white-collar Swede for the bluest of blue-collar Canadian players.
It quickly became a heist in the Leafs’ favor.
Clark would play only 37 games for the Nordiques before he was dealt again for Claude Lemieux (in what became a win for the then-Colorado Avalanche). Sundin went on to play 14 years with the Leafs, becoming the franchise’s all-time leader in goals and points and a Hall of Famer.
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He was named the franchise’s fifth-greatest player during the team’s centennial celebration in 2016.
Even Clark, all these years later, will freely acknowledge Fletcher’s genius, his foresight, not to mention the gutsiness of dealing a player as beloved as he was in Toronto.
“He’s trading for a guy that’s gonna be the No. 1 centerman for the next 15 years,” Clark told The Athletic. “And he’s giving up a good power forward, but he’s giving up a power forward that’s 27 for a 23-year-old guy that’s gonna be a horse.”
“Maybe it didn’t make the team better the next year,” Clark added of the Leafs, who lost in the first round of Sundin’s first season. “But for a 15-year window, they had a No. 1 centerman that was top five in the game. And what are teams always looking for in any era?”
Sundin had been the No. 1 overall pick in the 1989 draft.
He was only two seasons removed from a monster 47-goal, 114-point season for the Nordiques, playing alongside Joe Sakic.
Quebec, however, had missed the playoffs for the sixth time in seven seasons. The Nordiques subsequently fired GM Pierre Page in May and replaced him with Pierre Lacroix, a former player agent who had never been a GM in the NHL.
It was Lacroix who decided to move Sundin, passing on a future (possibly for financial reasons) that could have included Sakic, Sundin and Peter Forsberg, who had joined the Nordiques in the infamous Eric Lindros trade.
For Fletcher, the move was about the future.
“I admire and respect what Wendel Clark has done for the Leafs,” Fletcher told The Globe and Mail after the trade went down. “But Mats Sundin is only 23 years old. It will be a great transition in three or four years when Doug Gilmour is not there anymore.”
He added: “Mats will be an impact player for the next 10 years.”
Just how much of a heist was it in the end for the Leafs?
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“Good” NHL data only goes back to 2007-08, so it’s very difficult to know exactly how good either player was at the time of the trade and after. But we can estimate it using Hockey Reference’s point shares.
It’s not perfect, but for forwards it does the trick.
At the time of the trade, Clark and Sundin held comparable value. Over the previous three seasons, Clark was averaging 2.3 wins per 82 games. Sundin was averaging 2.2 wins. That’s pretty comparable, but the big difference-maker was age. Sundin was only 23 when he was traded to Toronto, just about to enter his prime. Clark was 27 going on 28, with some hard city miles already placed on his body, just about to exit his.
Their value wouldn’t be close for long.
By point shares, Clark played six more seasons and was worth just six wins over the remainder of his career. Clark was worth just 1.25 wins per 82 games on average, but also averaged only 55 games per season. It wasn’t just that he lost value after leaving Toronto; he also struggled to stay healthy.
As for Sundin, it took less than three seasons for him to match Clark’s remaining six wins, putting up 1.8 in 47 games in 1994-95, 3.0 in 1995-96, and 3.9 in 1996-97. He played 10 more seasons after that, only running up the score further. The career timeline for each player illustrates that pretty succinctly.
What it also illustrates is just how incredibly consistent Sundin was for Toronto. Year-in, year-out he could be counted on to provide somewhere between three to four wins per season. That may not be MVP-caliber, but it’s a consistently elite level that Sundin managed for an extremely long time. He was that good from the get-go in Toronto and held that level for the entirety of his 13-season tenure with the Leafs. Sundin had just two seasons below the three-win threshold, but both were close enough: 2.7 wins in 2000-01 and 2.6 wins in 2006-07.
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On average, Sundin was worth 3.3 wins per 82 during his 13 seasons with the Leafs, an incredible run of longevity that made the team a playoff contender in almost every season he was with the team.
His consistency during that time was by far his best asset and pretty unparalleled during his era. From 1994-95 to 2007-08, Sundin had 11 seasons played at a three-win pace or higher. Only Jaromir Jagr and Sakic could say the same. Bring the threshold down to 2.5 wins and it’s 13 straight seasons for Sundin, something matched only by Jagr.
That led to a fairly lofty total value by Sundin, who was worth 39.5 wins during his 13 seasons as a Leaf. During that stretch, he ranked fifth in the league in total value, behind only Jagr, Nicklas Lidstrom, Teemu Selanne and Sakic.
Yeah, it’s pretty safe to say the Leafs won the trade.
None of the apparent foresight of the deal made it an easy sell in Toronto. Far from it. Clark was that popular.
The Leafs were trading their farm-tough, mullet-wearing, mustachioed power forward who wasn’t afraid of anyone; the player picked first by the club in the 1985 draft; the winger who stacked up goals and penalty minutes aplenty over nine seasons in Toronto; the captain who scored 19 goals and 36 points in 39 playoff games over the previous two seasons — they were trading him for this guy?
The late Peter Zezel, a teammate of Clark’s at the time, told The Star that he was “shocked” by the deal.
“I’m really sort of numb right now,” Bill Berg, another Leaf teammate, told the paper. “When you think of the Maple Leafs, you think of Wendel Clark.”
Fletcher, in a conversation with The Globe, said he was “very apprehensive” about trading Clark.
“I love Wendel Clark,” Fletcher said. “But, unfortunately, I’m paid to make those decisions which lead to making us a better hockey club.”
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Sundin was just about to set off for a hiking trip with family in northern Sweden when news of the deal reached him. “I was surprised that people were so shocked at first that Wendel Clark was traded to Quebec,” he told Expressen, a Swedish outlet. “I will do my best to show them I’m good as well and to be popular as well.”
Sundin promised he would give Leafs fans “110 percent effort.” (Multiple attempts to reach Sundin for this story were unsuccessful.)
Clark would return to the Leafs in 1996 and see first-hand what made Sundin so great, and so perfectly suited to thrive in spite of all the controversy after the trade.
“No matter what you threw at him, he just came out and played and was your team’s best player,” Clark said. “He didn’t go with what people were thinking. He doesn’t get fazed. He would continually come out and have your 85-point year every year.”
What made Sundin so special, in Clark’s estimation, was the combination of size and skill. Sundin was gigantic, really, at 6-feet-5 and 230 pounds. (For comparison’s sake, Auston Matthews is listed at 6-foot-3, 208 pounds.)
He was too big, too strong for even the peskiest of gnats to slow him down. And yet, he was graceful too.
Clark saw him as among the first in a new wave of skill players.
Before the mid-1990s, Clark observed, finesse players tended to be on the smaller side — 6-feet at best, and under 200 pounds.
“They were all 185, 190 tops,” he said, pointing to Wayne Gretzky as the preeminent example.
“Well now you got this skill coming in that’s 6-3, 225,” Clark said. “So it’s not that they have to throw (their body) around, but the guys that do throw (their body) around don’t affect them. Because, I’m as strong as you are, I can take it.”
Added Clark of Sundin, “There’s only one stronger Swede that I know of and that’s Börje Salming.”
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Sundin was called the “big weed” by teammates. He was impossible to miss that way.
“Mats, he was just a horse,” Clark said. “A lot of times, his strength would make it look easy, because it didn’t look like there was a lot of effort. But as a player you’d go to try to do what he just did and you’d go, ‘My gosh, that was hard.’ And he had a really good shot. And I don’t know if people realized how well he could shoot a puck. … It was a heavy shot.”
Sundin scored 564 goals in his career, tied for 24th in NHL history. He’s the only player in Leafs history to pot 400.
Teammates dubbed his famous backhand “The Davey Keon” because it was old school.
It didn’t seem to matter who Sundin’s linemates were over the years — Jonas Hoglund, Gary Valk, Igor Korolev, Steve Thomas, Sergei Berezin — he delivered consistently. And it didn’t feel like an accident when wingers like Hoglund suddenly had career years by his side.
It wasn’t until 2001 that the Leafs finally got him an All-Star-caliber linemate in Alexander Mogilny.
Sundin reached two Eastern Conference finals with the Leafs. He produced almost a point per game in the playoffs — 70 in 77 — for the franchise.
He replaced Gilmour as captain in 1997 and held the honor with grace for the next decade.
Clark heard a rumor that Sundin sought Salming’s advice before accepting the captaincy. Salming had been offered the captaincy once, the story went, and declined.
Salming told Sundin to take it. It was too big an honor to turn down.
The Leafs’ captain for three seasons himself, Clark says Sundin was adored by his teammates. He was thrilled more by his teammates’ success than his own. He led quietly, by example.
“A lot of times the people think, Oh, look at that, the restaurant bought the team the meal. No, they didn’t. Your captain picked it up. He just didn’t tell anybody,” Clark said.
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Sundin and Clark both have banners hanging in the rafters of Scotiabank Arena.
Oddly, it took trading Clark, maybe the most popular player the franchise has ever had, for the Leafs to land Sundin, maybe the best player the franchise has ever had. The initial sting of the trade was quickly erased as Sundin established himself as a legend in his own right.
“It’s a huge trade,” Clark said. “Mats was unbelievable, what he did for our organization.”
(Top photo: Harry How / Getty Images)