“Of great interest to Saskatoon fans will be that their goaltender George Hainsworth looks like the goods.” That was the Saskatoon Daily Star’s appraisal in the fall of 1923, sizing up the man that Newsy Lalonde had brought in to mind the nets for his WCHL Crescents. Born on another Monday of this same date in 1893, Hainsworth had been playing for his hometown OHA Senior Greenshirts in Kitchener, Ontario. He was already 30, longish in the tooth for a goaltender making his professional debut, particularly when you take into account that Hainsworth’s illustrious 12-year NHL career was still all in the future in 1923.

He went on, of course, to win two Stanley Cup championships with Montreal’s Canadiens (a team he also captained) along with three Vézina trophies as the NHL’s best goaltender. He subsequently played parts of four seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs before his NHL career came to a close in 1936, when he was 43.

In Saskatoon in 1923, the Daily Star also noted that he was a bit of an on-ice orator. “Another thing about him,” the paper reported, “ is an incessant line of chatter that reminds one of the talk of Hughie Lehman, Hap Holmes, and Heck [sic] Fowler, the great coast trio of goalies. He talks all the time while on the ice but off it he seldom has much to say. When the writer saw the boys at their hotel this morning, he had little to say while the rest of the boys talked freely.”