Throughout the 1980s, Dale Hawerchuk was a quintessential Great Player on a Mediocre Team. After being taken by the Winnipeg Jets with the first pick in the 1981 draft, Hawerchuk had five 100-point seasons with the Jets, and helped lead them to the playoffs eight times. However, the Jets were never able to get past the second round, and after a 1990 trade to the Buffalo Sabres, Hawerchuk met with similar post-season frustration. With his career beginning to wind down on the St. Louis Blues, Hawerchuk was sent to the Flyers on March 15th, 1996 (in exchange for hard-nosed center Craig McTavish, who was an old Edmonton buddy of recent Blues acquisition Wayne Grezky), giving the future Hall-of-Famer one last crack at the Stanley Cup.
"We feel we need more scoring in our lineup," said Flyers president Bobby Clarke of the deal. "Dale's a player who has proven throughout his entire career that he is a premier offensive talent." That offensive talent quickly became abundantly clear to the Flyers as the 'Chukker scored 20 points in the Flyboys' final 16 games of the season, then added twelve more in the playoffs. However, history unfortunately repeated itself with Hawerchuk, and a first-round victory against the Tampa Bay Lightining was followed by a second-round bow-out to the Florida Panthers in six games.
Hawerchuk would get a more legitimate crack at a deep playoff run in his next full season in the Orange-and-Black, though injuries limited him to 51 games in the '96-'97 regular season, and his production slowed in the playoffs, as he scored just seven points in all. Nevertheless, Hawerchuk at least finally got to experience playoff hockey beyond the second round as a Flyer, as Philly tore through the Eastern Conference (losing only three games before the finals) on the way to facing the Detroit Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals. There, they were swept by the Detroit Red Wings.
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Dale Hawerchuk retired at the end of the season, at the relatively young age of 34. He had already appeared in five All-Star Games and scored 1409 career points, which today ranks as the 18th-most in NHL history. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2001.