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Their Game 5 lo s to the Tampa Bay Lighting on Thursday night not only for the , the end of 's NHL career. Datsyuk would not confirm anything immediately after the game, and Dillan Gibbons Jersey said he "needs some time to cool down," but most signs point to him returning to Ru sia after this season ending what was a brilliant 14-year career in the NHL. What made Datsyuk so special, especially during his peak years, is that he was the ultimate two-way player that was equally dominant offensively and defensively. The latest from SportsLine He was basically two players in one. He was a shutdown center that could eliminate your best offensive player for an entire game. He was also a No. 1 center that could drive his team's offense and be one of the top scorers in the league. There were not many players in his era (or any era, really) that could do both. Some numbers: keeps track of advanced stats as far back as the 2007-08 season, when Datsyuk was leading the Red Wings to a Stanley Cup. Since that time no forward (minimum 5,000 minutes played) when they were on the ice during 5-on-5 play than Datsyuk did (only 42.6 per 60 minutes). He was first by a pretty significant margin. He was also . Not only did he play shut down defense, he did it in a way that was entertaining, something that is nearly impo sible to do it. There are a number of YouTube highlight packages dedicated entirely to him from opponents. Here is one of them. There are a lot of great defensive players in the NHL that are also just good enough offensively (and vice versa) to earn them the "two-way player" label. It is often said about those players that they could put up better offensive numbers "if they weren't so focu sed on playing defense." Or that the great offensive players, depending on the situation with their team, should have to "sacrifice some offense to be better defensively." Here's the Harrison Leonard Jersey thing: No they couldn't. If they could, they would. Most players are not capable of doing both in such a dominant way. It is usually either one or the other. They might be great at one and really good at the other, but they rarely are among the best in the world at both . Datsyuk was. Since the start of the 2002-03 season -- Datsyuk's second year in the league and the first year he really became a prominent player in the Red Wings' lineup -- until now, there have been 640 forwards that played at least 200 games in the NHL. Only 11 of them Elijah Lee Jersey were able . Datsyuk was one of them (he is 10th). That puts him among the top 1 percent of all players during his era offensively. And for as entertaining as it was to watch him steal the puck from opponents, he was even better once he had the puck on his stick. He just simply refused to give it away and consistently made defenders look helple s. Now, combine that with the defensive numbers referenced above. It's just silly production. When you look at those point-per-game players from his era, none of them other than Datsyuk won a Selke Trophy as the NHL's best defensive forward. He won three of them. Only three of those players (Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg and Martin St. Louis) even had a top-10 finish in Selke voting. Along with his three wins, Datsyuk had four other finishes in the top-10. When he won his first two Selke's in 2007-08 and 2008-09, he finished with 97 points. Only three other players that won the award finished with more points in the year they won (Doug Gilmour, Sergei Fedorov and Troy Murray), and two of them (Gilmour and Murray) did it during the pond-hockey era of the 1980s. He did all of that while being a regular on the penalty kill and going up against the other team's best players. Since the start of the 2007 season in terms of ice time is pretty much a list Kenny McIntosh Jersey of the best players in the Western Conference (where the Red Wings played during most of his career): Jonthan Toews, Patrick Marleau, Joe Thornton, Patrick Kane, Anze Kopitar, Daniel Sedin, Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, Marian Ho sa. He consistently got the better of all of them. Datsyuk arrived in Detroit at a time when the Red Wings were the best team in hockey. During Cody Core Jersey his rookie season the team was winning its third Stanley Cup in six years. But that team was getting old, and fast. Datsyuk was the only player in the top-10 in scoring on the team that was under the age of 30, while seven of the top-eight were over the age of 32. What allowed the Red Wings to continue that era of dominance for another decade was the presence of a young Datsyuk and that were able to come in and take the torch from players like Steve Yzerman and Fedorov. They did exactly that and took another Stanley Cup to Detroit. If Thursday's game in Tampa Bay was the last time we saw Pavel Datsyuk in the NHL, it was a heck of a run for him and the Red Wings. Detroit Red Wings forward Pavel Datsyuk was the best two-way player of his era. (USATSI)