Top Ten: The great Guy Lafleur died on a Friday of today’s date in 2022. He was 70. A five-time Stanley Cup winner with the Montreal Canadiens, his other cups ranneth over, too: there were three Art Rosses, two Harts, and a Conn Smythe, among others, in his trophy case.
Ranger Recessional: Wayne Gretzky played his last NHL game 25 years ago today, bowing out as his New York Rangers fell 2-1 to the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins on this date in 1999. The 38-year-old centre played 22 minutes and 30 seconds that Sunday afternoon, leaving the ice on a shift-change at the at 5:55 p.m. EST, just before Pittsburgh’s Jaromir Jagr put a definitive end to Gretzky’s career with an overtime goal. The Rangers had failed, for the second consecutive season, to make the playoffs, so that’s all he wrote. Gretzky registered two shots on that final afternoon, and assisted on Brian Leetch’s second-period goal. The Madison Square Garden crowd of 18,200 gave number 99 a 15-minute ovation before he skated into retirement. “This is a great game, but it’s a hard game,” he told reporters. “Time does something to you, and it’s time.”
On Point: Born in Parry Sound, Ontario, on a Saturday of this very date in 1948, Bobby Orr is 76 today. In late August of 1976, when he was 28, hockey’s greatest defenceman suited up for his country in an intra-squad as Team Canada prepped for the Canada Cup in early September. He was no longer a Boston Bruin: once the tournament ended, his surgically repaired left knee willing, Orr would be on the job for the first time with the Chicago Black Hawks. On this day, in front of 18,002 fans, Orr’s team won, 7-3, with Marcel Dionne leading the way with a pair of goals. Orr contributed an assist. “The knee’s fine,” he said after the game. “It’s the conditioning that needs some work. Practices are all right, but what you need to get into shape are games like tonight.” The tournament went as well as it could have, with Canada sweeping Czechoslovakia in the best-of three final. Orr was named to the All-Star team and selected as tournament MVP. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Former Wings Wingers: A titan of the Detroit Red Wings (and, for a bit, the Chicago Blackhawks), Ted Lindsay died on a Monday of this same date in 2019. He was 93. Pictured here at 66, that’s Lindsay lining up with Frank Mahovlich for an outing in Montreal with NHL oldtimers in 1991. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Dog Days: The great Joe Malone was born in Sillery, Quebec, on a Friday of today’s date in 1890. In 1913, when he was 23, he was captaining the Quebec Bulldogs, the incumbent Stanley Cup champions. That February, they were on their way to defending their title, claiming the NHA championship, then batting back a challenge from the Sydney Millionaires. Malone led the NHA in scoring that year, notching 43 goals in 20 games. The team featured (back row, left to right): Trainer Dave Beland, Billy Creighton, Walter Rooney, Jeff Malone, coach Mike Quinn. Up front: Tommy Smith, Rusty Crawford, Paddy Moran, Joe Malone, Joe Hall, Jack Marks, and Harry Mummery. The trophies are the O’Brien Trophy, which went in those years to the NHA champion, and the Stanley Cup . The dog was Joe Hall’s. His name was Togo.
Czeching In: Jaromir Jagr turned 52 this week, on Thursday; tonight he’s in Pittsburgh, where the Penguins will retire his number 68 in recognition of his starry 11-year career with the team, his first in the NHL. He was a Stanley Cup champion with Pittsburgh in 1991 and ’92. He’s the second-highest scoring player in NHL history, after Wayne Gretzky; his list of achievements is long, and would burst any caption that attempted to contain it. He’s still playing, in Czechia, for his hometown team (he owns it, too), Rytíři Kladno. Jagr scored the first of his 766 regular-season NHL goals in his second game, in October of 1990, against the New Jersey Devils. His English was limited at that time. “I don’t know if he knows the expressions to celebrate,” said teammate Bryan Trottier, “but he’ll learn them quick enough.”
Best In Show: “He’s had one of the finest careers of any player who ever played, ever, in the NHL at any position,” is what Boston Bruins president Harry Sinden said in 2001 when Ray Bourque announced his retirement. Bourque had played 22 years in the league by then, more than 20 of those with the Bruins. “Trying to be as objective as I can be rather than being naturally subjective about Ray,” Sinden continued, “I say he’s right there with [Bobby] Orr and [Doug] Harvey, Brad Park, [Larry] Robinson, [Denis] Potvin, and people like that who are the best who ever played.” Born in Montreal on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1960, Ray Bourque is 63 today, so here’s saluting him. (Image: Denis Courville, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Jolting Joe: “They say, as a puck-carrying defenceman, there never was another hockey player who came close to Joe Simpson in his prime.” That was Jim Coleman writing in 1973, on the occasion of Simpson’s death on Christmas day that year at the age of 80. Here he is in 1921 when he was starring for the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos. He was 28 by then, a decorated veteran of the First World War. Coleman suggested that his best years came before he went to war, and that may have been so, but the fact is, too, that in 1923 Newsy Lalonde told NHL President Frank Calder that Simpson was the greatest hockey player on the planet, bar none. Simpson eventually made it to the NHL, playing with and coaching the New York Americans in the later ’20s. (Image: McDermid Studio, courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary)
End Run: Bobby Orr takes on Montreal defenceman Jacques Laperriere (#2) at the Forum on the Wednesday night of March 31, 1971. That’s Canadiens winger Marc Tardif (#11) lending a defensive hand; background Bruins are, I think, Derek Sanderson on the left and Wayne Carleton to the right. Boston prevailed on the night, by a score of 6-3, with Boston’s Gerry Cheevers getting the better of Rogie Vachon in goal. Orr contributed an assist — his 97th that season — as Phil Esposito scored his 70th goal. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Happy 50th To You: A birthday today for the inexorable Phil Esposito, who was born in 1942 on a Friday of today’s date in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario: happy 81st to him. He made a habit, on birthdays past, of scoring milestone goals: on this date in 1971, as he was turning 29, he scored for his Boston Bruins in a 5-4 loss to the Kings in Los Angeles to became the fourth player in NHL history (after Maurice Richard, Bernie Geoffrion, and Bobby Hull) to score 50 goals in a season. (He would finish, that year, with 76.) Three years to the day later, on his 32nd birthday, Esposito became to first NHLer to register four 50-goal seasons in a row as he notched a hattrick (the 21st of his career) in a 5-5 Bruins with the North Stars in Bloomington, Minnesota. That regular season he scored 68 all in. Esposito had one more landmark season left in him: the following year, 1974-75, he scored 61 goals.
Fulll Wool: Born on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1918 in Nokomis, Saskatchewan, Elmer Lach centred Montreal’s famous Punch Line, when he was healthy, skating between Toe Blake and Maurice Richard. He’s pictured here (in glorious woolens) in October of 1945. Lach died in April of 2015 at the age of 97. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Marie-Philip Poulin is the winner of the Northern Star Award as Canada’s top athlete, so here’s a sustained flourish of a Bauer Vapor 1X Composite stick to her. The 31-year-old forward, who hails from Beauceville, Quebec, captained Canada to golden finishes this year at both the World Championships in Denmark and the Olympics in China.
The Northern Star is the former Lou Marsh Trophy, of course; the name change happened in November. Poulin is the tenth hockey player to win the award since its inception in 1936, and the first woman among those. She joins an august company: since Maurice Richard won it in 1957, the others have been Bobby Orr (’72), Phil Esposito (’70), Bobby Clarke (’75), Guy Lafleur (’77), Wayne Gretzky (’82, ’83, ’85, ’89), Mario Lemieux (’93), Sidney Crosby (’07, ’09), and Carey Price (’15).
puckstruck 