Marleau: “It’s the biggest honor to be the first one there.”

Like many great explorers, Patrick Marleau didn’t really know anything about where he was going, he just went.

“I didn’t know much about San Jose,” Marleau recalled when the San Jose Sharks selected the teenager second overall in the 1997 NHL Draft. “I think in my head I just had a vision of a lot of beach, a lot of sand, a lot of palm trees.”

What Marleau found instead — inland San Jose is about an hour’s drive from the Pacific Ocean — is a home in the city of San Jose, and now, in the league at the SAP Center, as a first baseman for the San Jose Sharks. history that his jersey was retired.

That honor is not lost on Marleau, who skated for the Sharks from 1997-2017 and then again from 2019-2021.

“It’s the biggest honor to be the first one there,” he admitted. “No one else gets that honor.”

In addition to Marleau, I spoke with Shane Doan and Denis Potvin, both of whom were also the first in their respective franchises to have their jerseys retired, to get a better idea of ​​what the honor means.

But first, you have to be a pretty good player to get your jersey retired. And Marleau was more than just pretty good.

“That was one of the things I like, it’s not fair. You can’t be stronger, bigger and faster than everybody on the ice,” Doan, who played more regular-season games against the Sharks than any other team during his own illustrious career, said of the 6-foot-3 Marleau. “If you designed the perfect move, probably he and Scott Niedermayer were the two guys that everybody wanted to skate in our era.”

Marleau retired as the NHL’s all-time games played record holder (1,779). He is also the San Jose Sharks franchise record holder in countless categories with 1,607 games, 522 goals and 1,111 points, the most important of which.

“And yet when he turns and you speak to him afterwards [some highlight-reel goal]he would have that absolutely perfect smile, kind of a sheep and aww shucks smile,” Doan laughed.

This is a comment on the type of person the San Jose Sharks first wanted to honor with a jersey retirement.

Hard-working and loyal, Doan, whose number was retired by the Arizona Coyotes in February 2019, is sure to reflect on this franchise, as Marleau is on the Sharks.

“Patty is an example of the fact that she is more than a hockey player. In the community, who he is as a person, [that’s] the kind of people you want to be around,” Doan said. “Absolutely constant, the perfect professional hockey player who just does, not just the cool stuff really well, but every part of the game. The perfect player and the perfect person, and there’s nothing you want [more].”

Something with Doan, Potvin and Marleau too?

Doan was drafted by the Winnipeg Jets in 1995 and made the switch when the franchise took root in Arizona the following season.

He’s now part of the Coyotes front office trying to secure the franchise’s future in the desert with a new arena. But there’s no question the Coyotes wouldn’t have gotten this far without a standard-bearer like Doan.

Potvin was selected by the New York Islanders in the first season of the 1973 Draft after the inaugural season.

“Franchising was really just getting started,” Potvin noted. He won four Stanley Cups and three Norris Trophies during his 15-year career, all spent on Long Island.

So to see his name on the roof in February 1992 was certainly an indication that something lasting had been accomplished from the ground floor up.

“Being the first overall draft pick, the one getting up on the table and picking up the Stanley Cup as the captain of the team, all those moments, really all coming together in one ceremony. That’s what I really thought, kind of a quick glimpse of everything that happened as an Islander and how great it all was” ,” Potvin said. “It turned me on quite a bit.”

In 1997, Marleau came to a franchise that was just entering its seventh season of existence and was coming off back-to-back playoff appearances. Over the next two decades, the San Jose Sharks would miss the playoffs just twice and would reach four conference finals and one Stanley Cup final. From 2009 to 2014, the Sharks enjoyed a 205-game sellout streak.

“It was just surreal. Just flash in front of your eyes, everything I did leading up to that moment,” Marleau said after the jersey was retired. .”

For Marleau, his jersey retirement was a validation of what he and his teammates established in a fledgling hockey town.

“When I first came here, it was obviously a newer team,” he said. “It’s grown over the years.”

“Patty was here way before me,” said longtime teammate and franchise standard-bearer Joe Thornton, who joined the Sharks in 2005, “but I think we created something here that was special.”

And that might be Marleau’s crowning achievement in San Jose, more than anything else. Case in point, Sharks Ice, where the team practices, has grown from two rinks to six since it opened in 1994. It’s now the largest single-roof ice facility west of the Mississippi River.

“I get a taste of it with my boys when I’m at the rink to see how many kids jump out of their cars with their hockey bags getting ready to take the ice,” Marleau reflected on taking his four sons. Landon, Brody, Jagger and Caleb to hockey practice. “It’s definitely a hockey town.”

And Marleau, like the rest of the San Jose Sharks, put San Jose on the hockey map.