Welcome to the Sweater Series (Or Notable Numbers), where the lovable jerks of Raw Charge look back through Lightning history and draw attention to a few of the interesting players to have worn the Bolt. This will be entirely subjective.
The first number in the series is #1, and the player I’ve chosen was the #1 goalie in the team’s #1 season. Who am I talking about? Why, Wendell Young, of course.
An original Bolt, Young came to the Lightning in the 1992 Expansion Draft from the Pittsburgh Penguins, where he’d backed up Tom Barrasso to two straight Stanley Cup championships. And from that peak, he came to the expansion Lightning team, where he would win exactly no Cups in a year and a half.
Young split the net with Pat Jablonski and Jean-Claude Bergeron in the 1992-1993 season, and became an afterthought after the arrival of Daren Puppa before the 1993-1994 season. Young had seven wins in 31 games in 92-93, while Jabber had eight wins in 43 games, and J-C had 8 in 21.
Since Young hardly dominated time in the net in 92-93, how can I definitively declare Wendell the Number One goalie? Because if it’s good enough for EA Sports, it’s good enough for me.
Wendell was Tampa Bay’s ONLY goalie in NHLPA Hockey 93, which I wasted a year of my young life playing on my friend’s SEGA Genesis. Was Young a fantastic SEGA goalie? Umm, his five-hole was a little bit vulnerable. I’ll leave it at that.
After leaving Tampa Bay, Wendell passed back through Pittsburgh and then spent seven seasons in Chicago playing with the AHL’s Wolves. He remains there today, where he is the team’s General Manager.
Oh, and here’s something awesome: Wendell Young is the only player in the hockey universe to have won a Memorial Cup (1982), Calder Cup (AHL-1988), Stanley Cup (1991, 1992), and Turner Cup (IHL-1998, 2000). So suck on that, Scott Niedermayer.
Other Lightning players to wear #1: Jeff Reese, Zac Bierk, Evgeny Konstantinov, and Sean Burke.
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Nolan Whyte is a regular contributor at Raw Charge. His novel Among The Humans will be released in June, 2014. It’s so good it will blow you head off. Find it at Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and many other eBook retailers.
