Brett Hull: Quotable

Sunday, November 08, 2009-11:32:pm
/Andrew's Dallas Stars Page                             Bookmark and Share

Here are some quotes from Brett Hull and about Brett Hull, who will be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame Monday in Toronto.

Also going into the Hall of Fame will be Steve Yzerman, Luc Robitaille, Brian Leetch and Lou Lamoriello.

 "I had talked to my junior coach. He said if you're going to go to the next level and do anything, you're going to have to really hunker down and work on your skating. So that's when I went to visit Duluth to see the campus and everything. They explained that program to me. I go, This is kind of a no-brainer. Every Monday, every Wednesday all we do is skate. It's not like punishment skating, it's a program that works on your skating and conditioning without making it seem like torture. It really helped me my two years." Brett Hull on his two years at Minnesota Duluth
“I think Brett found himself while he was here. He was no longer Bobby Hull’s son; he became Brett Hull," Mike Sertich, Hull's coach at Minnesota Duluth (Duluth News Tribune)
 "I've said for years I could never figure out why Calgary ever drafted me. When I got there, I think they had eight or nine right wingers already. ...  These guys were premiere players. It's not like they were extremely late in their careers either. Yeah, if Ron Caron from St. Louis hadn't called and possibly made that trade, I could have fallen through the cracks. But, again, you never know." Brett Hull
"He ripped me from stem to stern. He told me I'm only scratching the surface and that I better come back next season and be ready to pay the price and become a better player. I was like, 'What the hell?' "But you know what? His attitude toward me opened my eyes to what I had a chance to be. I thought if someone could believe in me that much, maybe I should take that and run with it. Maybe I should try to become that player." - Hull the assessment he got from Blues coach Brian Sutter after picking up 41 goals and 43 assists in his first full season in St. Louis (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
"There is one thing about Brett that I don't think people give him enough credit for, because he was so mouthy. People don't realize how smart he is. He's a very smart player. You take that into account with myself — I really liked to pass the puck and he really liked to shoot it. He understood what I was thinking and I understood what he was thinking, and it just was a perfect marriage. In my mind, we were meant for each other." - Adam Oates, Hull's center for a time in St. Louis (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
"To me, he is the most underrated player that ever played the game. Besides the obvious Wayne Gretzky, I think he's the smartest player that ever played the game. He loved to pass the puck and was extraordinary gifted at passing the puck. We had such great chemistry on and off the ice, I don't know, it was like a quarterback and a receiver where he just knows where he's going to be. That's the way we were. It really kind of does bother me that they let him go and the numbers that we could have put up were scary." - Hull on Oates
"I remember we were in Los Angeles one night, and we're tied with less than a minute left to play and (coach Brian Sutter) wants the checking line out there for a faceoff. But Brett jumps over the board and goes and stands by the dot. So now there's too many guys out there and they're arguing over who should be out there and finally the referee comes over and says, 'OK, one of your guys has to get off the ice.'

"Brett looks at Richie Sutter standing next to him and tells him, 'Richie, get the (…) off the ice.' Finally, Richie skates off, they drop the puck, Brett gets possession, carries it down the wing, cuts to the middle and just rips a shot over Kelly Hrudey's shoulder to score.

"Then he skates back to bench, slides to a stop and says with a smirk, 'As if we're going to play overtime in LA.'" - Former St. Louis Blues teammate Kelly Chase (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
"We were on our way to becoming a very good team, but I think when we acquired Brett it really gave us the swagger that we needed." - Joe Nieuwendyk, Dallas Stars teammate, on the free agent signing of Hull (Fox Sports Southwest)
"When I first met him, I was kind of intimidated. He had the reputation of being a really strong person in the dressing room. And then after a while, I found I could really learn a lot from this guy, the way he thought the game." Ken Hitchcock, Hull's coach in Dallas (ESPN.com)
"I got really mad and threw him off the ice. And then, I chased him around the locker room. He was laughing the whole time. He told me he had to go golfing." - Hitchcock on when Hull kept dumping pucks in the corner during practice after Hitchcock said it didn't matter how many goals you scored if you couldn't stop the other team from scoring
"I don't know why, they've always said me and Hitch didn't get along. I always got along great with Hitch. I just had a little problem with the style we had to play under him. He's a great man. I have a ton of respect for Ken." - Hull on Ken Hitchcock
“Brett was one of the most interesting guys I’ve ever played with as far as not being afraid to say what was on his mind. But that shot of his — second to none. He would try to help guys with what he thought was the reason he shot the puck so hard, telling us we used wimpy sticks. I remember using his stick a few times, but I couldn’t even get [the puck] off the ice.” - Jamie Langenbrunner, Dallas Stars teammate (Duluth News Tribune)
"I think it ranks No. 1 to me. There was a boatload of people saying, when I was leaving St. Louis, I think it started there, was that, You're never going to win with Brett Hull on your team. To go to Dallas and be the 'missing piece of the puzzle' that's going to help them win their Cup, and then to go out and score the goal in overtime, who hasn't sat as a kid on the ice with his buddies and dreamt or pretended that's the goal they've scored. To do it in real life was something special." - Brett Hull on his Stanley Cup winning goal with the Dallas Stars in 1999
"We all knew that they had changed the rule. But obviously the NHL decided they weren't going to tell anybody but the teams. If you had control in the crease, and it was because of people getting breakaways on the empty net, it would stay through the crease, lay it in the empty net, they were taking those goals away, they changed the rule to say if you had possession in the crease, and some people's definition of control are different, but if you have control in the crease, you can score the goal, and that's exactly what it was. But nobody knows that. You can tell people that a million times and they just will not listen." - Hull on the controversy over the Cup-winning goal in 1999
"We knew he wanted to play on a winning team. We had a lot of great individual players and he fit in perfectly. He became a very good two-way player. We used him to kill penalties. We had a strong lineup and he was particularly strong in the playoffs.

"He was a terrific clutch player. He just came to play. You didn't have to say much to him. I got along with him because I knew his dad, so I would kid him about his dad and I had a lot of fun with him. He was a fun guy to be with and you knew when the game was on the line he was a gamebreaker.

"He didn't get the ice time with us that he got with other teams, but it was good for him. In the playoffs you have to go four rounds and some series that might go seven games, so obviously he had a lot left and he was 35 or 36. He was a special type of scorer and he fit in very well." - Scotty Bowman, Hull's coach in Detroit (NHL.com)
"To play for Scotty, I kind of put it this way: I was lucky enough to kind of feel what it was like to be an old New York Yankee. I got to play with Babe Ruth of hockey and become one of his good friends. I got to play for Casey Stengel, one of the greatest coaches that ever walked the earth. I had more fun in the one year of playing for Scotty than I did my whole career. We just seemed to have the same philosophy. We thought the game the same way. Like you said, to play on that team with him coaching, it felt, looking back, like you were on a team with [Mickey] Mantle and Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, all those great players, it's scary. - Hull on his time in Detroit, where he won a Stanley Cup in 2002
"You knew that he was going be circling and trying to find that open area. But that was one guy that I think everybody said the same thing, you know, he did not need much room. That shot could be one time from anywhere, and the speed and accuracy was ridiculous. I mean, you would sit in the locker room watching highlights, and all of a sudden, he would go down on one knee there and shoot it at an angle and be up in the top corner. He would have that grin on his face, and you'd look at each other and shake your head. How do you stop that? You can't stop that. Goalie didn't see it. There was no room to get it off, and he would get it off for sure." -  Defenseman Brian Leetch, who is also going into the Hockey Hall of Fame this year, on Brett Hull
"He took pride in scoring. He would never admit to anybody, but he took pride in being an all around player. He wanted to kill penalties, he wanted to be on the ice in the last minute of the game. It was very important to him to be recognized -- maybe not by the outside world, but by his coach -- that he was a complete hockey player." - Steve Yzerman, who is going into the Hockey Hall of Fame this year and was Hull's teammate in Detroit