Reflecting on the Legacies of Brenden Morrow and Jim Lites after Their Dallas Stars Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
In covering the Stars more closely this year, I’ve been struck by how quickly the familiar can become the incredible. In the same way a beam of light can change the face of someone you care about, so too can the context of a conversation turn it into something far more significant. You can be filling up your coffee in the press box, only to accidentally bump into Joe Sakic (literally, as I did back in 2019) and get 0.01% of the idea of how immovable he was on the ice.
Jim Lites and Brenden Morrow were inducted into the Dallas Stars Hall of Fame on Sunday. It was a big celebration, in which some of the team’s current players and management, along with some of its biggest sponsors and most notable alumni, combined to celebrate the contributions of Lites and the legacy of Morrow.
The event was at the South Side Ballroom in Gilley’s Dallas, a place I was at last year for a Gaslight Anthem concert. If you want to know how that concert was, then I will just say that reunion tours for your favorite bands may be more about generating revenue for said bands than about bringing all of the energy you remember from their fantastic sophomore album. That concert was an evening that soured as the night went on, and I regretted even going after the fact.
But this event was the polar opposite of that experience, thankfully. Everyone was in a good mood that only got better as the evening went along, culminating in a Larry Fleet concert after the conclusion of the induction ceremony.
And of course, it all had to start the only way such dignified events can: with Victor E. Green waiting to open car doors for all the most honored guests, like a bizarre footman:
From there, players and their guests walked up a green carpet before getting their Official Event Picture taken.
Our guests of honor, Jim Lites and Brenden Morrow have arrived on the @Lexus Green Carpet for the 2024 @Truist Dallas Stars Hall of Fame Induction Gala! #TexasHockey pic.twitter.com/NMAUCwpb8u
— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) October 20, 2024
Unless you were Brenden Morrow, of course, in which case you wind up taking the photos of your family while your own photo is being taken by an official photographer (and one less so). Some guys just know how to put their family first.
One funny story Morrow began with, during his speech: He talked about how his friends were giving him a hard time because he’s not a great public speaker, so he tried to take some pointers from his friends who did podcasts and TV work, one of which was in Morrow’s words: “You gotta picture the crowd naked. But they didn’t tell me who was in the front row. Mom and Dad got great seats.”
After the dignitaries arrived, they had a private reception before everyone came together and the event officially started in the main ballroom. You’ll have to pardon the grainy photos taken in a dim room with a cell phone, but I won’t charge you for them.
From there, the event kicked off by having the current players introduced one at a time on stage, with students from St. Phillip’s School and Community Center doing the (rather delightful) introductions.
The boys have arrived to the @Truist Hall of Fame Induction Gala!#TexasHockey pic.twitter.com/tcfs1F6UdN
— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) October 21, 2024
After that, Josh and Razor welcomed the crowd, dinner was had, and then the official proceedings culminated in speeches about, and by, Lites and Morrow. You can watch the introductory videos for each of them at these links: Lites & Morrow
Lites’s introduction was done by Daryl Reaugh, who captured a lot of the experience of interacting with Lites, beginning with his initial contract negotiations back in 1996. It was the sort of humorous, sincere, and loquacious introduction you’d expect from someone who has been around the team for as long as Razor has, and Lites was clearly appreciative, referring to the hiring of Razor as one of the best decisions the franchise ever made.
From there, Lites spoke at length about all of the people he was grateful for and learned from, both during his time in Detroit and then in his multiple stints in Dallas. It was not a short speech, which Razor even alluded to beforehand, but one line that Lites said he heard from Mike Ilitch stuck out to me: “You can do a great job managing people as long as you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Hearing that quote, it was impossible not to think of the infamous Lites moment from 2018 that is still one of the first things fans think of when they hear his name these days. While the whole nature of that profane tirade has been discussed at length, I think it’s pretty well established at this point that Lites was willing to deliver that message precisely because he didn’t care what it did to his own legacy. He simply thought it would be what was best for the team, and he had no problem delivering it in spite of the blowback he surely knew he would get.
To be clear, I’m not praising that deicision. I still think it was an attempt to use a blunt instrument to solve a problem that was more complex than anyone wanted to acknowledge. Sean Shapiro has written before about how Tom Gaglardi actually had designs on hiring a different general manager than Jim Nill–again, that’s revisited here–but that Lites was the one who finally convinced Gaglardi to go with Nill. I think that’s an example of Lites’s brilliance and vision, and it’s a shame he wasn’t able to find a similar solution when it came to the organization’s impatience with the highest-paid players on the team in 2018.
As an aside, it’s also quite ironic that the team’s frustration with their start came in the same season the St. Louis Blues had an even worse start, only to go on to win the Stanley Cup after replacing their head coach in November. In fact, the former Stars’ GM Doug Armstrong, who was present on Sunday, was managing that Blues team, and he still doesn’t get enough credit for the patience he showed, I think. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is wait, and hope.
So, to that end, I couldn’t help but think how Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn must have been feeling on Sunday, seeing Lites honored the way he was. Certainly it’s a testament to Lites’s contributions and reputation within the organization that he was able to move past such an infamous moment six years ago, but I also think it’s significant that the moment was never brought up on Sunday, either. No one felt the need to frame that as “actually, a good thing,” at least puclicly. Not every big decision is going to be perfect, but if you truly don’t care about getting the credit, even a misstep here or there will fade over time if you keep things moving in the right direction. And when it comes to Seguin and Benn, I think they’ve proven that to be true, too. Who on earth would have guessed that all three of those people would be in this same room, celebrating together, six years ago? They chose, I think, to take the Doug Armstrong path of waiting, and hoping. And also playing pretty good hockey despite their bodies making it harder for them with each passing year.
I had a chance to talk with Derian Hatcher later in the evening, and he said that in his opinion, “Lites probably should have been in [the Stars Hall of Fame] before this year, to be honest with you.” And that while Lites may not have been the one to bring hockey to Dallas, “He made it what it is.”
Hatcher also alluded to stories about Lites going to extreme lengths to get players out of Russia, and you can read more about those stories elsewhere, too. It takes all kinds to make a thing like NHL hockey work in Dallas, but Lites has played as big a part as anyone behind the scenes (and sometimes in front) in building this market while other teams have struggled. It takes all kinds.
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Brett Hull then got up to introduce Brenden Morrow. You could sense the crowd had grown a bit listless during Lites’s nearly half-hour speech, and Hull started things off with the best joke of the night: “Another few minutes, Brenden, and you would have been going in next year if Jimmy took any longer.”
Truly, you had to be there, but every single person in that room lost it at that moment, including the players. It was a typical Hull appearance in many ways: he didn’t have to speak for the longest or the loudest, but the jabs he got in landed perfectly. You don’t get to 700 goals without having pretty good timing.
Brett Hull is introducing Brenden Morrow before his Stars HoF induction. pic.twitter.com/371Ee1i20R
— Robert Tiffin (@RobertTiffin) October 21, 2024
Some other things Hull said about Morrow were more poignant. I will now list them here in bullet-point format, like all great writers do:
“He is one of the most special people I have ever been able to call a friend in my life.”
“When you become a teammate, you learn very intimate things about people. And the the first thing you realize about Brenden is, he is everything that he has advertised. When he came to Dallas in 2000, you looked at him and went, ‘He looks like he’s about 12.’ But as soon as he got on the ice, you realized he was just a baby-faced assassin.”
“It’s not always easy…to figure out how you’re gonna grow into the player that you want to be in the NHL. Some of us have a distinct path because you are only good at one thing. But then there’s a guy like Brenden, who is good at everything. So he had to mold himself into Brenden Morrow. And when he did, you knew that Brenden Morrow owned Brenden Morrow, and became exactly what he needed to be, which was a natural born leader.”
Hull also told a story about Morrow sticking up for a teammate that was pretty memorable. As Hull told it, a player on the Stars had “a personal issue” with an opposing player, and the NHL had gone to that Stars player to essentially warn them against starting any altercations on the ice with that other player. And so, because that player was effectively barred from doing anything, Morrow dropped the gloves and went after the other player 25 seconds into the game and, as Hull put it, Morrow “beat the piss out of the guy because he deserved it.”
This elicited one of the loudest cheers of the night from the players, and you can understand why if you’ve heard any of the rumors about the background of the fight, which I feel pretty certain to be this one:
It says something pretty powerful that a legendary player like Brett Hull would take the time to come to Dallas in the first place, let alone to talk about someone like Morrow as “family” (in his words). But then, anybody who watched the Stars from 2000-2012 can remember just what Morrow meant to this team, particularly during the tough transition from the Stanley Cup core to the Jamie Benn era. It’s no surprise someone with elite vision like Hull recognized Morrow for what he was, even then.
You have to remember, too, that Morrow came in and went to the 2000 Stanley Cup Final in his rookie season. Playing with people like Brett Hull and Mike Modano and Guy Carbonneau, who themselves had played with legends. You don’t need six degrees of separation to get from Morrow to the playing days of guys like Guy LaFleur, Bob Gainey, or even Jean Beliveau. And it showed early on, because as Hull said in his introduction, “He was destined to be captain. There was no chance he wasn’t going to be captain.” That’s how his career started.
In fact, you can go back even further. One of my friends grew up in Oregon, and he used to watch Morrow play with the Portland Winter Hawks of the WHL. And that friend was raving about Morrow even before he made the NHL, for all the same reasons people would come to admire during the entirety of Morrow’s career. He oozed leadership, he stood up for his team, and he left everything on the ice.
Everyone knows about that hit, but it’s far from the only jaw-dropping check of Morrow’s career. He was one of the few people to actually knock over Douglas Murray, and he also had a huge playoff hit (as I recall) where he checked one opposing player into another for a two-for-one deal. He really was a man possessed when the stakes were highest.
Another famous moment of Morrow’s tenacious captaincy was in the 2007 series against Vancouver, when an Alex Burrows slash to the back of his knee left Morrow hobbled, but none the less infuriated for that. It won’t let me embed it, so watch it here. It’s one of those moments that came to mind when looking at a room full of hundreds of people who wanted to honor a player nearly a decade after his career wrapped up.
That’s the sort of attitude that Morrow brought, and it’s an attitude that carried fans through those tough bankruptcy days in Dallas, too. It was heartbreaking when Joe Nieuwendyk finally traded Morrow in a sell-off at the deadline in 2013, and the press release had some additional flavor to it when it came out: “Brenden Morrow has represented everything we could ever ask for in a Dallas Star over the past 14 years, giving his heart and soul to this franchise.”
And particularly over the last few years, when players like Modano, Marty Turco, Jere Lehtinen, and Sergei Zubov retired or finished their careers elsewhere, Morrow had the hard job of staying around and trying to lead the team when they knew they didn’t have everything they needed. And to that end, I think its especially fitting that James Neal was there on Sunday night. I asked Neal, and he said he hadn’t been back in Dallas for a long time, but Morrow invited him to the ceremony, so he came. And as another one of those Dallas players who made a dark time better than it otherwise would have been, Neal combined with Morrow to keep the franchise from plummeting to the depths of other franchises that endured bankruptcy. It was appropriate that he (along with others, like Ray Whitney) took the time to recognize everything Morrow gave, even though he never got the ultimate reward for his efforts.
Stars alumni turned out tonight. Here in attendance:
Brett Hull
Derian Hatcher
Jere Lehtinen
Bob Bassen
Ed Belfour
Guy Carbonneau
Gerald Diduck
Russ Courtnall
Craig Ludwig
James Neal
Marty Turco— Robert Tiffin (@RobertTiffin) October 20, 2024
Hatcher, when I asked him about the franchise, made it a point to emphasize that the Stars, as Lites had mentioned, have the best record in the NHL since 1995. That’s something of an arbitrary stat in one sense, but it also speaks to how hard these legacy folks worked to keep the franchise from ever turning into the next Atlanta, Arizona, or even Florida (whose recent Cup win doesn’t totally erase the many years of largely empty buildings). This team’s legacy has been built on the heart and soul of players like Morrow, and yes, also with the unapologetic vision of people like Lites.
There may be only one Stanley Cup win in Dallas’s name, but the team is still the envy of the league. In fact, a Saturday afternoon game against Edmonton was still a sellout even during college football season (and with UT playing Georgia, no less!). That would have been unthinkable during Hatcher’s early days with the Stars, but in Jamie Benn’s day, it’s hardly surprising. The path to where Dallas is now has never been a straight line, but many people have combined to keep the trajectory high, even when stopping in the valleys.
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. But you need a whole lot of people to keep things moving along the way, and no one moved people out of the way like Brenden Morrow. He may not have a Cup ring, but the people in that room on Sunday couldn’t care less. And it was plain to see that Morrow has won respect, love, and admiration than will last far longer than any banner ever could.