May 18 was a Wednesday in Helsinki in 1960, as it was elsewhere, too, but never mind them, it’s Finland we’re interested in here, for the purpose of observing Jari Kurri’s 60^th birthday — here’s to him. His high-scoring, Hall-of-Fame career included stints right-winging for Jokerit and with Los Angeles, the New York Rangers, Anaheim, and Colorado in the NHL, though of course it was as an Oiler in Edmonton, often at Wayne Gretzky’s side, that he had his heydays. He won five Stanley Cups and a Lady Byng Trophy, captaining the team to … wait, what? Kurri captained the Oilers?

Well, no, not according to the team’s own accounting. Doesn’t seem quite right to me, but the fact remains that you won’t find him listed in the list the Oilers make available in their media guide. There and in most other listings, you’ll see that in Kurri’s decade as an Oiler, four non-Finnish players wore the C: Blair MacDonald, Lee Fogolin, Gretzky, and Messier. But it’s true, too, that in the fall of 1988, captain Messier was suspended for six games for the damage he did with his stick to several teeth belonging to Rich Sutter of the Vancouver Canucks. During Messier’s absence, Kurri wore the C. He did it with aplomb, too, scoring a hattrick against Pittsburgh in his debut as skip, and leading the team to a 5-1 record overall. Is that service not deserving of, I don’t know, some sort of recognition or, um, asterisked notation in the Oiler annals? An added oddment: Kevin Lowe and Glenn Anderson were Edmonton’s assistant captains for the 1988-89 season. Kurri didn’t get an A until the following year, his last with the team, when he replaced Anderson. So when Kurri got his (brief) battlefield commission in ’88, he was promoted from the ranks.