It’s been an unusual holiday season for Brick native Jim Dowd. After spending half of his lifetime on the road playing as a center with 10 National Hockey League teams, Dowd spent Thanksgiving with family and the last few weeks at home, including his 40th birthday celebration on Christmas Day. He played last season with the Philadelphia Flyers as a penalty-killing center, but no teams picked him up for a 20th season as the Flyers turned to their younger players.
“And I’m really looking forward to New Year’s,” said Dowd, who lives in Point Pleasant these days. “I’m just staying close to home. It’s great. It’s one of those things where I went 18 to 20 years with college (Lake Superior State) and then the NHL and never could really relax around the holidays. That’s the biggest thing. There were years I was off on Christmas Day but now I can relax around the holidays.”
That means not boarding a flight back to a distant team like he did during the years he played with the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Montreal Canadiens, Minnesota Wild, Chicago Blackhawks and Colorado Avalanche before spending the last two seasons closer to home with a one-year stint with the New Jersey Devils and then hooking up with the Flyers during training camp a year ago.
Dowd said he caught up with friends from Brick over the holidays and played for the first time in the Brick Township hockey alumni game earlier this month. He said he had talks with the Flyers, whom he helped last season to make the biggest turnaround, from the worst team in the league two seasons ago to the Stanley Cup semifinals, but neither they nor any other team came forward to sign him.
Does he miss a 19-year career of 728 games that included 71 goals, 168 assists, and a Stanley Cup championship with the New Jersey Devils in the 1995-96 season?
“So far, a little bit,” said Dowd. “But it’s not even three full months [retired]. I was trying to get in another year to 40. It was not meant to be.”
“This is a little bit of an adjustment.” But Dowd has not strayed far from the game. He coaches his son, Jimmy, who is 8, on a Squirt team that plays out of Red Bank and also started sitting in on the “NHL Live” radio show a month ago on XM 204 Satellite Radio Network, and Sirius 208, and also on the NHL.com webcast out of a studio above the NHL store on 47th Street in Manhattan.
“It’s great. I love it,” Dowd said of the radio program where he sits in with co-anchor Don LaGreca. “I do it two, three times a week. We recap games from the night before, and if there is a big story, we talk about it. We take some phone calls and e-mails. Hey, it’s hockey. It’s a perfect way for me to stay in the game.”
And his knowledge and savvy at the mic comes from someone who stayed in the game with his aggressive, enforcer style of playing longer than the vast majority of players.
Smart enough to hook up with an NHL team as an assistant coach?
“No question, I’d like to coach. Nashville talked to me about it a couple of years ago,” Dowd said of one of the few teams in the league that he did not play for. “And Lou [Lamoriello, Devils general manager] wanted me to play with the Devils and then I played with the Flyers. I talked with the director of hockey operations there about coaching. I’d like to coach in the Devils’ system.”
And he also plans to continue directing the Jim Dowd Shoot for the Stars Foundation, in which a summer high school allstar game pits the best players from Monmouth County against the best from Ocean County, a fundraiser for the past 11 years. The foundation gives the proceeds to a family in need who is faced with a catastrophic illness, and is carefully screened by the foundation. Monmouth continued its dominance in recent years last summer with a 6-5 victory in overtime.
But does Dowd have any special NHL memory? Most of his friends and fans say it’s when he scored the winning goal with 1:24 left that gave the Devils a 2-0 lead in the 1996 Stanley Cup finals. The Devils went on to sweep the Detroit Red Wings. Then there was his first multi-goal game just two seasons ago with the Devils, and last season when he scored his first goal with the Flyers in a game against the Devils.
“No, I don’t have any one memory,” said Dowd. “There are so many seasons to look back on and so many teams. It’s all been good.”