Hard-won honor for special player

Combined, those three put up enough goals, assists, and points for the Elias Sports Bureau to hire a five-man lobster shift just to keep the NHL books in order for the better part of two-plus decades.

All three had special skills, bountiful talents.

Bourque was the consummate two-way backliner, with an extra emphasis on making certain matters were always right in his own end of the ice.

By no means was he defense first, last, and always. But he was defense first.

Coffey, in his prime, was a magnificently fluid skater, his strides so clean and crisp and balanced that there were times he looked like an Ice Capades escapee. He was often a defensive liability, but his skate-pass-and-shoot skills were so otheworldly that most of his coaches ignored the debit side of his game.

Murphy, like Coffey, finished his career with his name on four Stanley Cups, and his game was a virtual Bourque-Coffey hybrid. He wasn't as strong as Bourque, or as stylish as Coffey, but that really didn't matter. He was enough of both to be the best player on the ice most every night he played. Got a better standard for Hall worthiness?

We can be well assured, especially with hockey now in a protracted dead puck era, that we will never again see three defensemen dominate the game like Bourque, Coffey, and Murphy. As true as that seemed three years ago when they retired, it's even more a certainty in 2004, when the main role of mobile defensemen is to advance the puck to center ice, dish it off and pray to the hockey gods for a breakdown in the mind-numbing trap that spreads like an oozing tar pit between the blue lines.

At their peaks, Bourque, Coffey, and Murphy all could carry the mail, and deliver that puck virtually to wherever they wanted on the ice.

But they also spent the better part of their careers ahead of the trap-happy tactics that the likes of the Devils and even the Red Wings perfected.

If dropped back into today's Original 30, even if they could return at their mid- or late-20s prime, all three would no doubt be frustrated by the game's end-to-end lack of flow. They would still be effective, and their skills abundant, but their beauty would be somewhat lost, like three roses blooming amid a bed of tomato plants.