In 2005, longtime NHL star Brendan Shanahan was nearing the end of what would be a Hockey-Hall-of-Fame on-ice career. But something else was happening at that time -- Shanahan was in the early days of being an architect of the way the game is played today: with an emphasis on skill, speed and determination that wasn't there when the NHL was in the midst of its clutch-and-grab era. And in this cover story from THN's Oct. 25, 2005 edition, senior writer Mike Brophy interviewed Shanahan about his growing impact on the game and the elimination of a style of the sport whose best days had come and gone:

THE SHANNY SHOW

By Mike Brophy

Way back in 1992, Mario Lemieux, sick and tired of the way the game was being played, called the clutch-and-grab NHL a “garage league.” Few listened.

Super Mario was the best player in the NHL at the time, and he was frustrated at not being allowed to play the game the way it was intended. Lemieux had a vision of how the game should evolve, but it was not shared by others.

Fast forward to 2004. With the NHL shut down because of a labor dispute between the players and owners, Brendan Shanahan makes a public plea for changes to open up the game and – voila! – the times, they are a-changin’.

Thanks to a number of tweaks that include making the offensive zones bigger and goalie equipment smaller, allowing two-line passes, and most of all, an honest crackdown on interference, hockey is exciting again. We’re seeing goals galore. Teams are staging third period comebacks. Even the low-scoring games are fast and exciting with plenty of scoring chances.

Shanahan is not singlehandedly responsible for all that is good in the NHL today, but he definitely gets the first assist.

Last winter, the Detroit Red Wings star left winger organized a meeting in Toronto, the “Shanahan Summit” as some have coined it, that brought together players, coaches, GMs, on-ice officials and even some members of the media to discuss how the game could be improved.

“I thought about it for a couple of weeks and mentioned it to a couple of people who told me all the reasons why it wouldn’t work,” Shanahan said.

“You will always have some people who will say, ‘Who is this guy?’ or ‘Who does he think he is?’ I did hear that secondhand, but most things worthwhile are also subject to second-guessing and criticism. For most people, it was like, ‘Yeah, what a good idea. Let’s do it.’”

After years of saying there was nothing wrong with the game, the NHL finally admitted otherwise. Everyone could see most NHL games were boring. The clutching and grabbing and interference were out of control and having no games in 2003-04 was only marginally worse than the action witnessed the previous season. Obstruction had crept into the game to the point where cheating was not only accepted, it was encouraged. The league catered to third- and fourth-liners instead of the stars.

Just about everyone agreed changes were necessary, but who would step up and get the puck rolling?

Enter Shanny.

Shortly after his wife gave birth to their third child, Shanahan’s mind turned to hockey. The player who is well-known for his off-the-cuff sense of humor was dead serious about wanting changes for the game he loves. After a one-year lockout, it would have been suicidal for the NHL to return with the same old boring product. Shanahan felt the time was ripe for change.

The first thing he did was to phone then-NHL Players’ Association boss Bob Goodenow for clearance and advice. He also called NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

“I told them it would be a non-political meeting,” Shanahan said. “I wasn’t trying to embarrass or upstage anybody. We weren’t going to talk about the CBA. We were going to talk about hockey.”

Getting people together proved to be more of a challenge than Shanahan anticipated.

“I spent about 10 days where I basically got up in the morning and got right on my cell phone and was on the phone until I went to bed that night,” Shanahan said. “I followed up with people on second calls and third calls and, without naming names, some guys it took six phone calls.

“It was sometimes a little embarrassing calling guys I didn’t know in this atmosphere of non-work – a guy such as (Montreal Canadiens GM) Bob Gainey. I threw a sales pitch at them in order to get them to trust that there was no one else behind this. The reaction from those people encouraged me. I got a couple of ‘No, thank yous’ and a couple of ‘Why bothers?’”

Shanahan gathered together some great hockey minds who were also interested in addressing the issue of making the game more entertaining.

“What Brendan found out was, players all sit around over a few beers after the game and they have all the answers for all the problems in hockey because they’re frustrated,” said NHL vice-president Colin Campbell.

“But pursuing that frustration and coming up with answers through a process is a different thing. The first thing he found out was, players don’t call back. You need guys to call you right back, not three or four days later.

Shanahan forged ahead. On Dec. 7-8, some of hockey’s most respected individuals gathered in Toronto.

The group included veteran star players Curtis Joseph, Al MacInnis, Alexander Mogilny and Mats Sundin; GMs Gainey and Brian Burke (Vancouver); coaches Marc Crawford (Vancouver) and John Tortorella (Tampa Bay); TV personalities Glenn Healy, John Davidson, John Shannon and Ron MacLean; and, retired referee Terry Gregson, among others.

More than anything, Shanahan wanted the NHL to establish a competition committee, like the one the National Football League has. And that is exactly what transpired. Shanahan said the dialogue was terrific, that having people from different aspects of the game together in the same room was enlightening.

At the end of the day, a competition committee was established. It was comprised of players Shanahan, Trevor Linden, Jarome Iginla and Rob Blake; GMs Gainey, Kevin Lowe (Edmonton), David Poile (Nashville) and Don Waddell (Atlanta); and, owner Ed Snider (Philadelphia) and Campbell representing the NHL.

“Players talk to players and coaches talk to coaches,” Shanahan said. “GMs have their meetings and referees get left in the dust. No one even bothers to ask the TV people what they think. I wanted, No. 1, to talk hockey, but I also wanted to create what I thought would be a better model. Why can’t all these people and all these diverse groups from the sport of hockey who have the same goal lean on each other and share information like partners?

“I always wondered why rule changes were made without consulting the players. In fairness to the GMs, they are all hockey people who have committed their lives to hockey. I didn’t want to take away at all from the way things were done in the past. I just thought it was important to share information.”

The results have been staggering. Watch a game in today’s NHL and you are likely to see more scoring chances in a single night than you saw in an entire week during the 2003-04 snore-a-thon. In Nashville’s opening game, Steve Sullivan got the puck in the corner in the San Jose zone, beat Sharks winger Marco Sturm with a deke and then turned defenseman Tom Preissing inside-out before passing to winger Scott Walker at the far post for a tap-in.

“Sullivan said in an interview, ‘If I had tried that a few years ago, after my second move someone would have put their stick between my legs and pushed me against the glass and pinned me there,’” Shanahan said. “That is stuff that I haven’t seen since (Steve) Yzerman and (Denis) Savard were doing their dipsy-dos. Somewhere that got lost.”

Campbell said Shanahan was the perfect player to organize the event because he has credibility.

“Having played major junior hockey and then being traded in the NHL a couple of times and being a tough, physical player, guys won’t question Brendan because he answers the bell (physically) and he scores,” Campbell said. “He has won a gold medal and Stanley Cups and he’s not afraid to get his nose bloody. He’s not a small, soft player calling for less bodychecking or less physical play. He was good to work with and he was contentious.”

Added Gainey: “He certainly has credibility. He has been an elite player in the NHL and on his country’s national team for a long period of time. He is well-spoken and a clear thinker. “Brendan took the initiative in a period when it didn’t seem logical for the people who normally address those kinds of things to bring it up. Where we were in November and December a year ago, there were a lot of other things that needed to be done. It was a good initiative that was well thought out and the timing was good.”

Shanahan knows he might have made him-self a target by calling for changes to the game. While most people agree that NHL hockey is better now than it has been for a decade, there will be players who have trouble adjusting to the new rules who will curse Shanahan for his efforts. Still, Shanahan said changes needed to be made, no matter who they affected.

“Hey, the old style suited me fine,” Shanahan said. “Clutching and grabbing was easy. Was it as much fun? No. But it was something I could use to my advantage playing against a guy such as Steve Sullivan or Paul Kariya. It was a bit of an equalizer.

“Now when you’re on the ice, you just go non-stop and it’s hard. You come off the ice completely winded. Playing hockey is fun. Going out and hooking and holding really isn’t fun. People shouldn’t confuse fun with not working. I think it’s a lot harder to play defense now. For a guy who played the left-wing lock the past eight years, I can say it was a lot easier for me to wait for my guy to come up toward me and to lock onto him and ride him into the boards. This is a lot harder.”

Shanahan said he is reluctant to throw his arms in the air in victory just yet. The NHL has a long history of backing off strict penalty standards as the season wears on. That said, he hopes the NHL is serious this time about maintaining high vigilance right through the playoffs.

“The smartest and most skilled players are in the NHL,” Shanahan said. “They’ll adapt if they believe this is going to last.

“The biggest key is, we can’t change the standard when we get to the playoffs. You can’t punish a team for believing that you’re going to stick with it. You see some teams right now that don’t believe this will last and you can tell by the way they are building their team. You can see other teams that do believe it will last and you can’t throw them under the bus when playoff time comes and say, ‘Start the rodeo!’”

If that happens, heads should roll because the NHL has finally gotten it right, and to allow clutch-and-grab obstruction back into the game would be reprehensible.