Love him or hate him, Darcy Tucker has made an impact on your NHL fandom. From the Canadiens, to the Lightning, to the Maple Leafs, to the Avalanche, Tucker has left his mark on the NHL and not generally for things that leave a good taste in the fans’ mouths. With a history of dirty hits and generally pugnacious play behind him and no free agent offers coming to him through training camp, Darcy Tucker is calling it a career and retiring. TSN’s Darren Dreger gets the breaking news from the man himself.
“After spending the whole summer anticipating I would play, it got to a point where I knew it was time.”
“I just knew, during workouts I didn’t have that same feeling,” Tucker told TSN, “and I needed to be fair with my family.”
The 35 year old, who played his final season with the Colorado Avalanche, ends his NHL career with 215 goals and 476 points over 15 NHL seasons.
His final season, in Colorado, was marred by a bad concussion which Tucker says, thankfully, he has no lingering affects from, but he still describes the experience as devestating and says while he came back from the hit that earned Carolina’s Tuomo Ruutu a three game suspension, he was never the same and didn’t play well after it.
“It was one of those series and there may never be another like it,” Tucker recalls.
“I’ve talked to Mike about it and I’ve always had a lot of respect for him.”
“It was just one of those things and I was saddened he got hurt, but I was playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs and he was the enemy at the time.”
All that aside, Leafs fans do still love him for being one of the bigger performers for them when the team was making the playoffs year in and year out. That alone helps make the Leafs fanbase unique because most other fans across the NHL are likely happy to hear that Tucker is calling it a career. When you earn a nasty reputation, sometimes the good-byes aren’t always tearful.