Brent Sutter always remembered the spot in the Vancouver Coliseum where Al Arbour pulled him aside after the Islanders won the 1982 Stanley Cup in his rookie season.
Arbour, Sutter recalled in a Zoom call Friday afternoon, grabbed him underneath the chin and asked what he’d learned from the playoff run.
“What do you say? The team’s in there partying, we just won a Stanley Cup,” Sutter said.
He spit out some answer.
“Well, I just made you one of the toughest, mentally strongest players in the National Hockey League,” Sutter recalled Arbour saying. “And you’re gonna have a long career.”
It was a good prediction as Sutter played 18 seasons in the NHL, 12 of them with the Islanders, who will honor him in January by making him the first inductee into the franchise Hall of Fame since 2020 and the 16th player to be inducted overall.
Sutter also will go into the team’s newly unveiled Ring of Honor at UBS Arena, with ceremonies taking place before the Jan. 18 home match against the Sharks.
“It’s not something you ever think about or expect,” Sutter said. “When [GM Lou Lamoriello] called me and let me know, I was pretty emotional through it all. I think as you get older, you look back on your career, you look back and what you really wanted to be, it wasn’t ever about personal goals for me. It was always about getting the most and best out of myself to help your team succeed and wanting to be a great teammate, wanting to be someone that was very coachable.”
Sutter, 62, grew into a dependable centerman and took home Stanley Cup rings in 1982 and ‘83 — teams that also included his brother, Duane.
After retiring as a player in 1998, his second act was built around owning the WHL’s Red Deer Rebels, for whom he is also the general manager and coached until 2021, with a five-year interlude during which he coached the New Jersey Devils and Calgary Flames.
He admitted that he thought about coaching the Islanders “quite a lot” but the opportunity to do so never materialized.
During a nearly 40-minute session with reporters, Sutter spun tale after tale about being a young player joining up with the Dynasty Islanders and idolizing Bryan Trottier, who had played with his brother, Brian, on the WCHL’s Lethbridge Broncos before both went to the NHL.
“I always loved the way that Trots played, that solid two-way guy,” Sutter said. “He was a 5-foot-10 guy that was like 200 pounds and if he wasn’t going around, he was going through you. … Just the details on playing both sides of the puck and the support and how he was, but he was someone I idolized because I knew him when I played junior.”
Now, he will be in the same rare class of Islander honorees as Trottier, too.