We’ve kept a close eye here at Puckstruck on the evolution of NHL grooming standards, combing through hockey’s history to investigate the league’s earliest moustaches while keeping an eye, too, on the hairstyles of the mid-century Boston Bruins as well as developments on Brent Burns’ face. And so, this past April, as the puck dropped on another season of hockey playoffs, Stan Fischler’s short video post for The Hockey News on the origin of playoff beards caught our interest. You can watch it here, or endure this quick synopsis: according to the venerable broadcaster and historian, the NHL’s favourite unshaven tradition began with the 1980 New York Islanders.

Fischler credits left winger Clark Gillies with the original idea. Heading into the playoffs that spring, Gillies pulled aside New York captain Denis Potvin and suggested that the team stow its razorblades. In Fischler’s imagining of the conversation that ensued goes something like this:

Potvin: Why?

Gillies: It’ll bring camaraderie to the team, we’ll be like the House of David, that baseball team where all these guys had beards.

Potvin: Okay.

And so it was. The Islanders stopped shaving and kept winning. “And guess what,” Fischler narrates: “by the time these guys reached the third round of the playoffs, they all were pretty bearded. They all looked great.” In the Finals in 1980, the Islanders took on the Philadelphia Flyers. “And what do you think happened? The bearded Islanders won the Stanley Cup. How do you beat that?”

Fischler isn’t the first to credit the Islanders in ’80 as the NHL’s original beard-growers: it’s a tale often retailed, reviewed, and re-told. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate.

In fact, another New York team, the Rangers, were whiskering up before the Islanders, and deserve recognition in the annals of unkempt hockey players, if any team does. If indeed Gillies was the one to suggest that the Islanders stop shaving in 1980, chances are that he borrowed the idea from the Rangers five years earlier.

It was in the spring of 1975, in their third season in the NHL, that the upstart Islanders made the playoffs for the first time, with Al Arbour’s team matching up with Emile Francis’ Rangers in the best-of-three preliminary round. Two days before that series got started, the Rangers and Islanders met at Madison Square Garden to wrap up the regular-season schedule. Here’s Wes Gaffer writing about the Ranger coach after that game in the New York Daily News:

… Emile (Cat) Francis, who now finds himself the coach of a Ranger team sprouting incipient beards, a team calls itself hockey’s House of David. The House of David Rangers lost to the Islanders, 6-4, for the first time ever in the Garden.

Gaffer elaborated later in his dispatch:

No word on who the “non-signers” were. Giacomin does seem to have been the one to have dubbed the team the “House of David Rangers.” Defenceman Brad Park apparently preferred the “Raunchy Rangers.”

Elsewhere, Ranger centreman Derek Sanderson claimed credit for the whole caper. Sanderson had arrived in New York via a 1974 trade with Boston with his famous moustache intact, but early in April of ’75 he’d shaved it off after losing a bet. As the playoffs neared, a reporter asked him about the state of his stubble: was he growing a beard?

“The whole team is,” Sanderson repleid. “Nobody is going to shave until the playoffs are over. I was on the plane the other night and I got a little petition up and everybody agreed to it. The Cat went along 100 per cent. He didn’t argue.”

According to a Ranger spokesman, “eight or nine” players were in on the scheme.

“Maybe growing beards will link everybody in a common bond,” Sanderson mused. “Just some little thing to pull things together. Everybody could wear yellow slippers to bed. I don’t know.”

“Little things like that sometimes work. I’ve seen it happen before. Boston had great spirit like that. Boston was a very superstitious club. The Bruins always warmed up the same way, and they always went out in the same order. With Phil Esposito around, nobody could cross sticks. Bobby Orr touched everybody before he went on the ice.”

As it was, the Rangers’ beards had only limited success in 1975, with the Islanders taking the playoff series with a 4-3 win on April 11, freeing the Rangers to shave reach once more for their shaving cream. Clark Gillies scored the opening goal in that game that decided the Patrick Division showdown, with Denis Potvin adding a pair of his own before (a clean-shaven) J.P. Parise scored the OT winner to decide the matter.

So that’s worth noting. As, too, is this: whether Giacomin, Sanderson, Francis, or anyone else at the time knew it or not (probably not), the Rangers had another hairy precedent rattling around in their past, going all the way back to 1938 when (yes) Lester Patrick himself was running the show as New York’s coach and GM.

This wasn’t a playoff thing: back then, in November of ’38, the NHL season was just getting underway when Harold Parrott launched his Brooklyn Daily Eagle column on the Rangers’ home-opener against the Detroit Red Wings with this:

Before the start of tonight’s Ranger homecoming game on Garden ice, you may have to look twice to make sure the combatants aren’t from the House of David, instead of from Lester Patrick’s stable of skaters.

Captain Art Coulter and Murray Patrick, young defencemen, haven’t shaved in three weeks. As you might suspect, there’s a reason. A good one: money, dough, a bonus.

In this case, the idea was hatched during the Rangers’ training camp at Winnipeg. According to Parrott, Lester Patrick had, “in an unguarded moment,” commented on a particularly close-cropped haircut that his captain, Art Coulter, was sporting, calling it (and I quote) “silly” and predicting that the style wouldn’t last. “Those ideas pass quickly,” he’s reported to have said. “Why, I would give a bonus who’d have the nerve to go through a season without shaving.”

Another version of the story had Coulter telling his coach that no-one paid him to grow his hair long. Patrick said (“jokingly”) that he’d pay $500 if Coulter would let his beard grow all season.

That was in Winnipeg. When, a few days later, the team moved on to Saskatoon, Lester’s younger son Murray (a.k.a. Muzz) decided he wanted in on the action, and the challenge was on: the first player to shave would lose out on the purse.

As Doc Holst of the Detroit Free Press told it, Patrick was surprised to learn, a few days later, that the players had taken him seriously. “One of Lester’s prides,” Holst wrote, “is his reputation for never going back on his word to players.” Hence the coach’s problem: “They look like a couple of heathens and I don’t know what to do about it,” the coach told the reporter. “Maybe I can get President Frank Calder to make beards illegal in the National Hockey League. It would be awful if Murray and Art started a fad for beards.”

To wrap up the pre-season, the Rangers played the New York Americans across western Canada, running up a six-game winning streak as they beat the Amerks twice each in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton. When the Rangers won their NHL season-opener on the road in Detroit, Lester Patrick himself must have wondered whether the beards were lending the team some luck.

The Rangers won their next three games, too, but Patrick’s patience didn’t last. By November 22, he’d ended the challenge by opening his wallet, paying his two hirsute holdouts $100 apiece to shave their beards.

He can’t have been happy to pay the price — nor to see his smooth-faced team take its first loss of the season as they did that same Tuesday night, in Boston, losing 4-2 to Eddie Shore and the Bruins.