It just makes sense.
After waiting for months to find a new team, Martin Brodeur decided to call it quits and join the St. Louis Blues front office.
It makes sense, because Brodeur did it his way throughout his whole career and now he goes out on his terms. With Brian Elliott back, there just wasn’t any room in the Blues inn for the first ballot Hall of Famer, but he still had choices.
He could have waited to see if another team had goaltending problems or he could have seen if some team would have traded for him at the deadline.
Waiting isn’t Brodeur’s style and the 42 year-old hangs them up after 691 wins for his NHL career.
Sure, there are those who say he should have gone out as a Devil, but those seven games in the Show Me State gave the netminder closure for his career.
And it was the right move by the Devils to let Brodeur go and see if there were other options. New Jersey needed to move on and having Keith Kinkaid back up Cory Schneider does more for the future of the organization than one last hurrah from No. 30.
All there’s left is praise. Most wins of all time and most shutouts (125). Most games played (1266) and most losses (397). And no one had stood on the NHL ice longer as Brodeur with 74,438 minutes to his credit.
But it’s what Brodeur did on the ice that was amazing. He wasn’t always graceful out there and flopped over the crease to make a save. However, he would be the first one to defend his crease at all costs. Just ask Sean Avery, who almost came to blows with Brodeur on more than one occasion.
His lasting legacy, though, is the change the NHL made to combat his advantage. That trapezoid behind the net was put there to curtail Brodeur’s puck handling skills. No. 30 would wander away from the net so much that the NHL felt it was an unfair advantage for the Devils.
Even Avery had to get creative by screening Brodeur to his face back in 2008. He was that unstoppable, much like the way Mariano Rivera was for the Yankees.
Now they are both gone.
Rivera went out on his own terms in 2013 and now Brodeur does it today.
It just makes sense.
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