Former Flyers and Colorado Avalanche winger Keith Jones seldom took faceoffs during his nine-year NHL career. But when future Hockey Hall of Famer Peter Forsberg summoned Jones to the dot to take a draw in his place on Jan. 4, 1997, against the Flyers, Jones complied, naive to the challenge that awaited him.

Jones lined up across from 23-year-old Eric Lindros, whom Jones recalled being “already built like a mountain” when he made his NHL debut in 1992 as a 19-year-old at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds. The linesman dropped the puck. Before Jones could flinch, Lindros knocked him onto the seat of his pants with the brute force of an offensive lineman on skates and won the faceoff.

“I remember looking over at Forsberg and he kind of chuckled because I think he knew exactly what was going to be coming,” Jones said. “That’s just kind of what Eric did. So it didn’t matter who he went up against, he was going to try to overpower that player. And in many cases, he was strong enough, big enough to do that.”

In the form of a bruise, Jones felt firsthand just how Lindros combined strength with skill in an unprecedented way. He watched it, too, once he became Lindros’ teammate at the tail end of the centerman’s tenure with the Flyers. That potent blend powered Lindros to a dominant eight-year run with the Flyers — that was sadly cut short because of multiple concussions. As a Flyer, Lindros made six All-Star teams, won the 1995 MVP, and averaged 1.36 points per game, behind only Pittsburgh Penguins Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr during that timeframe.

Lindros centered the massive “Legion of Doom” line with 6-foot-3, 236-pound John LeClair and 6-foot-2, 235-pound Mikael Renberg, who were both formidable players in their own right. But it was Lindros whom opposing coaches like Paul Holmgren, who coached the Hartford Whalers from 1992 to 1996, fixated on when game-planning for the Flyers.

“When we had our pregame talk about playing the Flyers, you never talked about any of the other good players,” Holmgren said. “LeClair, [Mark] Recchi was there, [Rod] Brind’Amour, Éric Desjardins, lots of good players. But the guy you talked about was Lindros. So to me, when he went in the Hall of Fame, it was sort of obvious, for [eight] years he might have been the most impactful player in the league.”

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Long before Lindros became an NHL star and Philadelphia icon, he was “The Next One,” a prospect so highly touted as a teenager that 30 years ago, two teams traded for him at the same time.

In the summer of 1989, then-Flyers head coach Holmgren and general manager Bob Clarke traveled to Ontario to scout several players at a Hockey Canada camp leading up to the 1990 World Juniors. Sixteen-year-old Lindros, who played for the Metro Junior B St. Michael’s Buzzers at the time, physically stuck out “like a sore thumb” among his peers, Holmgren said.

But Holmgren wasn’t wowed by Lindros’ size alone. Unlike other gangly 16-year-olds whom Holmgren scouted in the past, Lindros boasted a rare sense of coordination.

“That’s the first time I’d seen Eric, I don’t know if Bob had seen him before or not,” Holmgren said. “But Clarkie, I remember him saying vividly, ‘Oh, we’ve got to figure out a way to get this guy.’”

Lindros was drafted No. 1 overall by the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in 1989, but Lindros and his parents, Bonnie and Carl, expressed concern over the impact that the travel requirements would have on his studies. They preferred that he play junior hockey closer to his hometown of London, Ontario, which led to his trade to the Oshawa Generals.

“He was a pure winner. All the way up, he won, won, won. … Those are things that nobody else has done.”

He went on to hoard accolades on the junior stage. Lindros won a Memorial Cup with the Generals in 1990, then dominated in a 1990-91 OHL campaign that saw him post 71 goals and 78 assists in 57 games. As a result, he nabbed the Canadian Hockey League’s top draft prospect award, the OHL’s most outstanding player award, and the OHL’s most points award, and was named the CHL’s player of the year.

Paul Henry, who was a scouting coordinator for Team Canada when Lindros was a teenager, has watched plenty of talent come through the CHL over the last 42 years. Lindros remains the best player he has ever seen.

“I remember him in Collingwood making the Canada Cup team at 18,” Henry said. “Just totally unheard of. And earned a spot. He won two gold medals at the World Junior. He was a pure winner. All the way up, he won, won, won. … Those are things that nobody else has done. Eighteen years old on a Canada Cup team? Well, Mark Howe was 16 when he played in the Olympics. It’s just an elite category.”

The Quebec Nordiques selected Lindros No. 1 overall in the 1991 NHL draft, but Lindros said he had made it clear to the organization before the draft that he had no intention of playing for president and CEO Marcel Aubut.

As Lindros requested a trade, willing to hold out of the league until he was eligible to reenter the draft, he played for the Generals and the Canadian national team. Lindros collected a silver medal at the 1992 Olympics while his agent at the time, Rick Curran, fielded calls from interested organizations.

“Clubs obviously reached out quietly because they wanted to know if they were to secure him in a trade, was he comfortable going there?” Curran said. “And so there were four or five places that we discreetly let them know that if they were to acquire Eric’s rights, he would be happy to go there.”

Two teams interested in Lindros — and that Lindros had an interest in playing for — were the Flyers and the New York Rangers. At the 1992 NHL draft in Montréal, the same city that will host this year’s event, former Flyers president Jay Snider and general manager Russ Farwell thought they had agreed to a deal to land Lindros on the morning of the draft. However, later that day, Aubut told Snider that he had traded Lindros to the Rangers.

Snider took the case to arbitration, and after 10 days, arbitrator Larry Bertuzzi declared that Aubut “clearly concluded an enforceable deal with Philadelphia with respect to Lindros.” In return for Lindros, the Flyers sent Forsberg, Steve Duchesne, Ron Hextall, Kerry Huffman, Mike Ricci, Chris Simon, their 1993 first-round pick, their 1994 first-round pick, and $15 million to the Nordiques.

» READ MORE: A detailed look at what the Flyers gave up for Eric Lindros

As he watched the Bertuzzi news conference on a small television in his parents’ kitchen, Lindros felt relieved.

“I just wanted to go play,” Lindros said. “I got lucky to come here. And then it was just, let’s just get going.”

Lindros joined a Flyers organization that had missed the playoffs for three consecutive seasons for the first time in franchise history. The team hadn’t cracked more than 33 wins in any of those campaigns. But Flyers fan surged with excitement after the trade, and the organization would benefit from their interest, too.

“I always consider any player that sells tickets, especially in the sport of hockey, to be iconic. And that’s what Eric did.”

Around the time of Lindros’ arrival, Flyers founder Ed Snider was working on the team’s departure from the Spectrum and the construction of a new arena. All the organization needed was a star to help turn the team’s fortunes around — on and off the ice — and finance the new digs.

“He sold out the building,” Jones said. “Without Eric, the Flyers aren’t selling out in the early ‘90s. I always consider any player that sells tickets, especially in the sport of hockey, to be iconic. And that’s what Eric did.”

At the onset of his NHL career, Lindros flaunted his physical style of play. In one preseason game against the New Jersey Devils, rugged defenseman Ken Daneyko recalled getting fed up with watching Lindros running over his Devils teammates.

Daneyko and Lindros proceeded to drop the gloves. Even Daneyko, who had 117 career regular-season fights according to Hockey Fights, was impressed with Lindros’ combination of talent and toughness.

“He was as strong as a bull,” Daneyko said. “So we had a pretty spirited bout, I remember, in preseason that I go, ‘Man, this kid not only can play and skate and run you over, he can also handle himself.’”

Although Lindros dazzled in his first two seasons with the Flyers, posting 75 points (41 goals, 34 assists) in 61 games in 1992-93 and 97 points (44 goals, 53 assists) in 65 games in 1993-94, the Flyers failed to reach the playoffs.

The team took a big step forward the following season, though, when it traded Recchi to the Montréal Canadiens for LeClair, Desjardins, and Gilbert Dionne on Feb. 9, 1995. Head coach Terry Murray immediately placed the recently anointed captain Lindros on a line with LeClair and Renberg that same day against the Florida Panthers. LeClair recalled that the experiment didn’t go so well, as the contest ended in a 3-0 loss.

» READ MORE: Eric Lindros gets emotional reception from fans as No. 88 is retired

But Murray kept the trio together two days later against the Devils. Lindros, LeClair, and Renberg notched their first goal as a line in the Flyers’ 3-1 victory with a LeClair goal in the first period. Their size and skill confounded their opponents with each passing game.

“They tried to put muscle against muscle,” LeClair said. “Even if they had a big defenseman, there were three of us. So that kind of helped a lot. And then Eric was just a different animal out there, too. So, with him grasping a lot of the attention, it definitely opened a ton of room for Renny and I.”

The group’s chemistry became more apparent to Lindros in practices, when he started to anticipate where his linemates would be on the ice and how they would react in certain situations. Their high-tempo line rushes and breakouts in practice translated into games, as the line finished with 80 goals and 96 assists in the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season. Lindros tied for the league lead with 70 points (29 goals, 41 assists) in 46 games and won the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player.

The following season, Lindros picked up where he left off, setting career highs in goals (47), assists (68), and points (115) in 73 games. In 2½ seasons on a line with LeClair and Renberg, Lindros racked up 108 goals and 264 points in 171 regular-season games, while the trio combined for 305 goals and 666 points during that span.

Lindros notched his 500th point during the 1997-98 season in just his 352nd career game, becoming the fifth-fastest to reach the milestone, behind Wayne Gretzky, Lemieux, Peter Stastny, and Mike Bossy.

“You’re never going to shut him down,” Daneyko said. “But he was just that elite power forward-type player that I loved. Didn’t love playing against them, but loved [having] on my teams if you could find them.”

Despite the team’s regular-season success during Lindros’ eight-year tenure, the Flyers fell short of winning a Stanley Cup. In 1995 and 2000, the Flyers lost to the Devils in the conference finals. The Flyers reached the Stanley Cup Final in 1997, only to be swept by the Detroit Red Wings.

Lindros lamented the team’s playoff shortcomings in various series. In their 1995 conference finals Game 5 loss to the Devils at home to go down 3-2 in the series, “We didn’t need to put ourselves in that position,” he said. In the 2000 conference finals, the Flyers lost Game 7 to the Devils after blowing a three-games-to-one series lead. “I’d love to have that game back and do things a little bit differently and actually get through the whole game,” Lindros said.

The latter marked Lindros’ second game back after suffering his fifth documented concussion in a span of roughly 2½ years. Less than eight minutes into the first period, Devils defenseman Scott Stevens flattened Lindros with a blindside, open-ice check to Lindros’ head, which ultimately marked the end of his Flyers career.

“I went to poke the puck and I thought Johnny [LeClair] would’ve had a breakaway if I could just sneak it through,” Lindros said. “I should have been prepared to ... whatever, I guess there wasn’t a penalty called on the play. But that was a frustrating, frustrating time.”

» READ MORE: The worst injuries in Philly sports history

Just three months earlier, Lindros suffered his fourth concussion and criticized the team’s trainers for not diagnosing it in a timely fashion as he continued to play with symptoms for two weeks. He said that he hoped the team would take him out of the lineup and follow the return-to-play guidelines, but the team stood by its training staff in a statement.

“Based upon Eric Lindros’ comments today, it is obvious that he and the Philadelphia Flyers have different perspectives concerning the medical judgments that were made following his most recent injury,” the Flyers said at the time. “However, this in no way impacts upon the high level of confidence we have in the integrity and skill of our training staff and medical team.”

Clarke stripped Lindros of the captaincy in response, replacing him with Desjardins.

“All the stuff that my parents had to go through... it’s rough. It’s not always easy to go up against people with larger reach.”

According to James Kelly, the neurologist who diagnosed several of Lindros’ concussions, the sports world of the late 1990s was just coming around to accepting the idea that it had a problem with high-speed blows to the head, especially in football and hockey.

“Many people, especially team physicians and trainers, understood the problem and were concerned about it and were participating in the development of guidelines and preventive strategies,” Kelly said. “And oftentimes, the business of the sport and the status of the given player’s presence relative to a team’s performance, that would be in direct conflict with the concern that I shared with others about protecting individuals from concussions and when they had concussions going beyond that, in terms of the necessary steps before they’re cleared to return to play.”

Additionally, the NHL’s Rule 48, which penalizes “illegal” checks to the head, wasn’t introduced until the 2011-12 season. So, hits to the head were largely unregulated until then, leaving players — especially a star player of Lindros’ stature — vulnerable. Lindros managed to play 70 games just twice in eight seasons with the Flyers, missing time mostly because of concussions.

On July 1, 2000, two months after Lindros suffered his sixth concussion, he turned down the Flyers’ qualifying offer and became a restricted free agent. The relationship between Clarke and Lindros and his family — especially his father, Carl, who was Lindros’ agent for most of his career — had deteriorated, as Clarke accused Lindros at the time of bringing “controversies” on himself.

“All the stuff that my parents had to go through, in an effort to represent me, to protect me,” Lindros said, “that’s the job of an agent, right, is protection and they put it out there. And it’s rough. It’s not always easy to go up against people with larger reach.”

After Lindros sat out the entire 2000-01 season, the Flyers dealt him to the Rangers, the team that tried to trade for him eight years earlier. However, Lindros acknowledged that he “wasn’t the player that [he] was before” in the prime of his career.

He went on to play in five seasons with the Rangers, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Dallas Stars before announcing his retirement at age 34 in November 2007.

Lindros, who compiled 865 career points in 760 games, still ranks in the top 10 in Flyers history in goals (290), assists (369), and points (659), despite playing in just 484 games in orange and black. He was inducted into the Flyers Hall of Fame in 2014 and the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2016.

Since hanging up his skates, Lindros has lent his voice to concussion awareness, prevention, and mitigation initiatives. He backed Rowan’s Law, legislation passed by the Ontario government in 2018 designed to create a safer environment for youth sports.

Now, Lindros, 49, would like to see more done at a federal level, especially as it concerns concussion research.

“I just think it’s important to do,” Lindros said. “I know to this day, if you look at the biggest element of healing a concussion, we’re left with time. It’s been that way since you know, the ‘40s, ‘30s. We’ve learned a lot, things have improved, but I think it can be improved tenfold.”

In an alternative universe, where Lindros plays in the current era of the NHL instead of 30 years ago, Daneyko asserts, Lindros would have been an even bigger star. With more rules limiting cross-checking, hooking, and holding, Lindros would have been even harder to contain.

Not only would Lindros be unstoppable, but he would have also been better protected from hits to the head, according to Jones.

“What was deemed legal then is now a five-minute major and a suspension,” Jones said. “And I think that’s probably the one way Eric would have been most noticeably better for because we would have saw him play a lot more.”

Roughly one year after experiencing Lindros’ wrath off the draw, Jones played on a line with Lindros and LeClair. He credits the two Flyers Hall of Famers with extending his career. (Holmgren, somewhat jokingly, said Jones may have “extended his and shortened theirs.”)

“Every shift that I stepped on the ice with Eric and John felt like you had the potential to make something happen.”

But above all of the game-winning goals and momentum-shifting plays he witnessed while playing with the duo, Jones will never forget the swell of energy in the building when Lindros and LeClair hopped onto the ice. That familiar reaction emanated from the Citizens Bank Park crowd at the 2012 Winter Classic alumni game when Lindros and LeClair reunited on the ice for the first time in more than a decade. In the buildup to the alumni game, both Lindros and Clarke acknowledged they had moved on from the bitter events that marked the end of Lindros’ Flyers career.

“It felt warm, it felt really special to walk out and be announced,” said Lindros at the time. “I’m thankful. That was great.”

While several greats have worn the Flyers’ sweater since the late 1990s, from Forsberg to Simon Gagné to Claude Giroux, Jones said Lindros and LeClair brought an unmatchable sense of energy to the ice.

“As soon as you put a leg over the boards, and you’re heading down for an offensive zone faceoff or a power play, there is just a feeling, especially at the Wells Fargo Center, where something great is going to happen,” Jones said. “And you want to throw that big check and you want to make that play that brings the crowd and their intensity up even more.

“Every shift that I stepped on the ice with Eric and John felt like you had the potential to make something happen.”