Marleau Says Goodbye: Press Conference, Private Media Scrum (+)

An NHL-record 1,779 games played. 566 goals scored. 1,179 points.

Those are the Patrick Marleau numbers you know. Here are the numbers you might not know.

37 percent. That’s the percentage of NHL players that have ever played the game of hockey who have either played with Marleau or played against him. That’s from San Jose Sharks president Jonathan Becher, who pointed this out at Marleau’s retirement press conference earlier today.

Seventeen. That’s how old Marleau was when he started his first training camp with the San Jose Sharks in Sept. 1997. “We reached out to HR actually to ask, do we need any permission or anything like that?” Sharks interim general manager Joe Will revealed, chuckling. “We never heard anything back from Cal/OSHA. So I think we’re okay.”

Besides Becher and Will, Sharks luminaries like Dan Rusanowsky, Randy Hahn, Mike Ricci, Evgeni Nabokov, Dan Boyle, Scott Hannan, Devin Setoguchi, Curtis Brown, and Jonathan Cheechoo were on hand to pay homage to Patty today.

Gary Bettman, Logan Couture, Joe Pavelski, and Joe Thornton also paid tribute via video.

And of course, the man of the hour spoke too, in a public press conference and a private media scrum, where he touched on how close he was to playing hockey this past season, if he’d like to return to the San Jose Sharks in some capacity in the future, and the possibility of having his jersey retired alongside Thornton’s.

Here’s everything you missed, including the exclusive media scrum.