A birthday today for Joe Malone, lanky goalgetter extraordinaire, winner of three Stanley Cups, the NHL’s first scoring champion, the only man to have scored seven goals in a game in the league, the fastest to score 100 goals, a milestone he reached in 62 games, when he was 30.

Born in Sillery, Quebec, on a Friday of this date in 1890, the man they called Phantom Joe did much of his net-filling before the NHL got going, in Quebec City, where he captained the mighty Bulldogs of the long-lost NHA. That’s where he won his first two Stanley Cups, in 1912 and ’13. By 1917, when the old league gave way to the new, he was in Montreal, wearing Canadiens colours. Let’s just consider the work he did that season: in 20 regular-season games, he scored 44 goals. On the NHL’s very first night, in December of ’17, he put five past Ottawa’s Clint Benedict, and he kept on going after that, compiling a 14-game streak through the course of which he scored 35 goals (one of those games wasn’t played; the Montreal Wanderers forfeited just before they withdrew from the league). Toronto finally shut him out in early February; in his next game, Ottawa again, he promptly scored four.

His record-breaking seven-goal outburst came at the end of January in 1920 against the Toronto St. Patricks, by which time he was back in Quebec leading their short-lived NHL experiment. The club was sold at the end of that season and moved to Hamilton, where Malone toiled for a couple of seasons — as playing coach, for at least one of them — before wrapping up his career back with the Canadiens in Montreal.

Joe Malone was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1950. He died at the age of 79 in 1969.

Often cited during his lifetime as having been hockey’s best player, Malone couldn’t agree. For him, he said in 1952, Frank Nighbor was “the greatest player who ever lived, barring none.”