Borje Salming - Oldest Player In League

Salming played for Sweden again on several occasions during the Canada Cup game. Twice he came close to winning the James Norris Memorial Trophy for outstanding defense, and by 1980 was the Leafs' highest earner at $275,000 a year. The subsequent decade, however, proved a difficult one for Toronto, and they made continually abysmal showings. His final seasons were problematic: in September of 1986, the Leafs suspended him for the entire season after he admitted in a newspaper article that he had used cocaine; team management relented, however, and he was reinstated after eight games. The following year, he and three other teammates were ejected from a Minnesota hotel after noise complaints, and Salming again missed some games. Despite the absences, he achieved an NHL first a few months later when, in January of 1988, he became the first European player to play 1,000 games in the League. At the end of that season, he ended his Leafs career with a franchise defense record for all-time goals (148) and assists (620).

Salming played the 1989-90 season, his last, with the Detroit Red Wings. At 38 years old, he was the oldest player in the NHL at the time, and was widely rumored to be ready to retire. True to form, Salming refused to speculate on his future. "I just go year by year," he told Detroit Free Press sports writer Keith Gave. "I'm not saying this is the last year. But if it is, I don't want to make a big deal about it, either. I just want to leave quietly." In the end, Salming did retire and returned to Sweden with his two teenaged children and wife Margitta. He played again for the Swedish Elite League, putting in two seasons with AIK Solna Stockholm and part of third before retiring from the ice for good. His last appearance was playing for the Swedish national team during the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France. Four years later Salming became the first European player to be inducted into the National Hockey Hall of Fame.

Following his retirement, Salming returned to Sweden, where he owns a hockey equipment business and runs a youth hockey school. He is also involved with a Stockholm wine-import business, Bornicon and Salming.

Twenty years after Salming's star years, Scandinavian, Russian, Czech, and Slovak players had emerged as some of the NHL's most exciting players. Nicklas Lidstrom, the Wings' Swedish defenseman, won the Norris Trophy two years in a row, and in 2002 was one of forty-seven Swedes in the League. European-born players were so commonplace in the NHL that in 1998 it abandoned its format of Eastern versus Western Conference teams for the All-Star Game; instead, the contest pitted North American players against a World team.