from Max Bultman of The Athletic,

For all the things you can say about Yzerman’s storied NHL career — the scoring, the winning, the leading and the longevity — one of the most amusing is that even his professional-athlete teammates could be a bit star struck by him.

Draper had been a teenager through the early days of Yzerman’s Red Wings career, watching from afar as he chased Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux in scoring races in the late 1980s. Now, they were teammates.

“Where my stall was, I was watching just everything,” Draper said. “The way he got dressed, the way he taped his shin pads, his skates, his stick and all that.”

And he was not the only one.

“I’m looking at him (like), ‘What is he doing?'” Martin Lapointe recalled of his own first game as a Red Wing. “‘Which skate does he put on first, or which shin pad?’ Like a young kid would do.”

To this day, Yzerman ranks seventh on the NHL’s all-time scoring list with 1,755 points. His 692 goals and 1,063 assists each rank in the top 10 all-time. He won the Stanley Cup three times and the 1998 Conn Smythe Trophy. He won the 2000 Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward, the 2003 Masterton Trophy for perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication to the game, and while he never won the Hart Trophy as league MVP, he did win the 1989 Pearson Award as the NHL’s Most Outstanding Player, as voted on by his peers.

For all of these reasons, Yzerman ranks No. 15 on The Athletic’s list of the NHL’s 100 greatest players of the post-expansion era.

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