Bucko McDonald

lone ranger

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Stop Right There: A helmeted Ken McAuley turns away Syd Howe of the Detroit Red Wings during the NHL’s 1944-45 season. Following the action is Rangers’ defenceman Bucko McDonald.

Spare a thought tonight for Ken McAuley, who was born in Edmonton on a Sunday of today’s date in 1921. After a respectable junior career tending goals in Alberta and in Saskatchewan senior hockey, McAuley sat out the 1942-43 season while he recovered from what would seem to have been a spate of concussions. Signed by the New York Rangers’ Patrick in the fall of ’43, the 22-year-old McAuley, who had a full-time job as a probation officer in Edmonton, found himself handed the starting net an hour before the season got underway at the end of October. “I was so nervous,” he later recalled, “they had to help me on with my equipment.” With the history of his head in mind, he added a helmet to his rig as he made his debut in Toronto, where the Leafs fired 52 shots his way on their way to a 5-2 win.

It didn’t get better. McAuley and his Rangers staggered through a 15-game winless streak to start the year. By Christmas, they’d lost games by scores of 10-5 (to the Chicago Black Hawks) and 11-4 (to Toronto). It got worse: in January of ’44, he was on the porous end of a 13-3 loss to the Boston Bruins followed by, eight games later, a 15-0 puncturing at the sticks of the Detroit Red Wings. “Poor Ken McAuley,” as the Detroit Free Press noted, actually made 43 saves for his team before they put away the pucks for the night.

It went on and on. The Red Wings retraumatized McAuley with a 12-2 win a few games later, followed by an 11-2 obliteration by the Montreal Canadiens before the season, mercifully, ended. His heroics were often praised in the New York press, despite all the losing. “Brilliant goaling on young Ken McAuley’s part saved the Rangers from a worse defeat,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle opined in February of 1944, after a 5-2 loss in Montreal. McAuley handled 53 shots that night, the New York Daily News reported, with Canadiens’ Bill Durnan turned away 18.

Rangers bottomed out the NHL that season, finishing last in the six-team standings, in case there was any doubt, anchored down with a record of 6-39-5. McAuley suffered through all 50 games; the only relief he got all season was in December, when the Rangers were playing (again) in Detroit. Struck down by a puck shot by Carl Liscombe of the Red Wings, McAuley was evacuated to Harper Hospital for treatment of a suspected broken jaw. Taking his place on an emergency basis was Detroit’s spare goaltender, 17-year-old Harry Lumley: he played the third period of the Rangers’ 5-3 loss, shutting out his teammates. As it turned out, McAuley’s jaw was lacerated, not broken, and he started New York’s next game, on Christmas Day, a 5-3 Yuletide win over Toronto.

McAuley’s stats for the 1943-44 season are painful to consider: 310 goals allowed in 50 games left him with a 6.24 GAA. He endured a second season with New York, going 11-25-10 through 46 games while putting up a 4.93 GAA, with Doug Stevenson aboard to provide some relief as a back-up.

That was all for Ken McAuley’s NHL career. He went on to coach the Edmonton Oil Kings of the Western Canada Junior Hockey League, and in 1954, with Norm Ullman and Johnny Bucyk in the line-up, guided them to the Memorial Cup final. He sold cars and insurance and carpets in Edmonton before he retired. Ken McAuley died in 1992 at the age of 71.

best friend a goaltender ever had

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Here’s to the blockaders, hats off to their instinct to impede, all hail the higher calling of self-sacrificing interception, and all the fine arts involved in getting in the way of predatory pucks travelling at the speed of punishment.

There will never be a hall of fame for hockey shot-blockers, but maybe would someone organize, I don’t know, a vestibule or a … pantry? It would have to big enough to accommodate Horace Merrill, from the earliest days of the NHL, along with Lionel Conacher, Bucko McDonald, Earl Seibert, Al Arbour, Bob Baun, Rod Langway, Mike Ramsay, Craig Ludwig — oh and the greatest obstructionist, maybe, of them all, Bob Goldham.   

Born in Georgetown, Ontario, northwest of Toronto, on a Friday of this date in 1922, Goldham was renowned for his willingness to drop in front of pucks during his 12-year career as a defenceman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Chicago Black Hawks, and Detroit Red Wings. He played a part in two of the Leafs’ Stanley Cup championships in the 1940s and was a key component with three more Cup-winning teams with Detroit through the ’50s. 

“Goldham was like another goalie back there,” Scotty Bowman recalled in the ’90s. He himself credited Bucko McDonald with having schooled him in just how and when to throw himself in front of a shot. Here’s a sequence showing Goldham with the Wings putting in the work (and paying the price).

He played until 1956, announcing his retirement on the train back to Detroit from Montreal after the Canadiens dethroned the Red Wings and took the Stanley Cup for themselves. He was 33, with a job lined up as a salesman with a Toronto construction firm. Detroit GM Jack Adams praised him as “one who gave his everything in every game as the bulwark of the defence.” 

Looking back over his own career, Goldham noted that he would have liked to have won more Stanley Cups. He had this to report, too: “You know, I’ve never played with a fellow I didn’t like. I’ve played against fellows I didn’t like, but never with one.”

Goldham later went to serve as a popular analyst on Hockey Night in Canada when it was still a CBC enterprise. He died in 1991 at the age of 69.  

mixed-up confusion

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The Detroit Red Wings were up on top of the American Division in the first week of January in 1936, ahead of the Rangers by a point when they went to New York to play. A crowd of more than 10,000 was on hand to watch. Despite the Red Wings’ tendency to defend, the clash was exciting enough. That’s what Joseph C. Nichols wrote in The New York Times: clash, exciting, enough. He said that Ching Johnson, who hailed from Winnipeg, was sterlingon defence for the Rangers, and in attack, too, and came within an ace of tying it. But that was late in the third period.

First, earlier, Pete Kelly, a son of St. Vital, Manitoba, scored for Detroit. The Blueshirts were pressing — charged without stint. Frank Boucher, from Kemptville, Ontario, was in on this, with Cook brothers on the wings, Bun and Bill, from Kingston. They couldn’t break down Detroit’s Normie Smith (Toronto): he wouldn’t break. Herb Lewis (Calgary) added a second goal for the Red Wings with Johnson on the penalty bench for hooking.

This was the second period now. Then came the sequence we’re seeing here: Ranger left winger Butch Keeling dashed in across the Detroit line. He was from Owen Sound, Ontario; that’s him, above, with the part in his hair and the stripy-taped stick. Pete Kelly is with him. This whole sequence lasted just a few seconds. Mix-up is the word in the original caption describing what happened: Kelly barged Keeling into the net, Normie Smith, in his cap, got the puck. I’m pretty sure that’s a young Bucko McDonald from Fergus, Ontario, in the last frame, with the helmet. Kelly went off for holding. Nichols:

The Rangers moved all their skaters forward. After several futile thrusts had been directed at the net, Johnson took Brydson’s pass and scored in 11.29.

Glen Brydson that would be, from Swansea, Ontario. 2-1. In the third, the Red Wings iced the puck when they could, which worked. The Rangers had some chances: Johnson by the post; Keeling on a long drive; a couple of hard raps from Bill Cook. That’s all, though.

Butch Keeling died on a Monday of this date in 1984. He was 79. Melville was the name he was given, but he was a butcher’s son in Owen Sound, and so he got his nickname early on. After making his NHL debut in 1926-27, the year the Toronto St. Patricks transformed into the Maple Leafs, he played ten seasons for the Rangers, helping them win the Stanley Cup in 1933.

fêting fern flaman

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The night the Bruins fêted Fern Flaman at the Boston Garden in 1960, they gave him a hockey-rink cake and a colour TV set, also a freezer, a necktie, a big portrait of himself, some silverware, bicycles for the Flaman kids — and, oh, a six-month supply of meat and ice cream, according a contemporary account of the Boston Globe’s, which, it pains me to report, could easily have but did not itemize what meats and what ice creams, exactly, were involved. This was all before the Bruins faced their old rivals the Montreal Canadiens, and beat them, too, 6-5, though I should say that Flaman’s big present that night, they wheeled it right out on the ice, was a brand-new Rambler station wagon that, when Flaman skated  over and peered within, guess what, his mother, Mary, was sitting there, surprise, just in from her home in Regina.

The Globe reported that it was the first time in Flaman’s career that he’d “cried on the ice.”

“I just couldn’t help it,” he said.

And Mrs. F? “What made this night wonderful,” she told the Globe, “was having others think Ferny is wonderful. I’m a very happy mama.”

Flaman was 34 that, playing in his 17th and final NHL season. The Dysart, Saskatchewan, native, who died at the age of 85 on a Saturday of this date in 2012, was just 18 when he made his start with the Bruins in the winter of 1945, making his debut, a winger, then, in a game against the New York Rangers. “A fast and rugged youngster,” was how the Globe introduced him, “put on the third line to add a body-checking element.”

“He played his part with zest,” Harold Kaese wrote, “so much zest that late in the game he even challenged Bucko McDonald. This, as Flaman learned, was much like challenging a cement-mixer. He was shaken up, but should be ready by Sunday.”

In 1950, the Bruins traded Flaman to the Maple Leafs in a deal that also sent Leo Boivin, Ken Smith, and Phil Maloney north in exchange for Bill Ezinicki and Vic Lynn. He arrived in Toronto in time to win a Stanley Cup in 1951, when Bill Barilko, his partner on the blueline, scored that famous overtime winner of his.

Three times during the ’50s he was named to the NHL’s Second All-Star Team. Montreal’s Doug Harvey owned the Norris Trophy in those years, taking home seven of eight between 1955 and 1962, but Flaman finished third in Norris voting in both ’56-57 (behind Red Kelly) and ’57-58 (trailing Bill Gadsby).

In a poll of NHL coaches in 1958 that ordained Gordie Howe the league’s “smartest player” and Maurice Richard “best man on a breakaway,” Flaman was deemed “best fighter.”

“I played with him and I played against him,” another Bruins’ captain, Milt Schmidt, said at the time of Flaman’s death, “and there was no-one tougher in the National Hockey League.”

Flaman went back to Boston in 1954 in a trade for Dave Creighton. He played a further seven seasons for the Bruins, the last six as team captain, before he moved on to the AHL Providence Reds as playing coach in the fall of 1961. He later coached Northeastern University.

Fern Flaman was inducted into hockey’s Hall of Fame in 1990.

Sask Strong: In 1961, the Boston Garden celebrated Flaman’s Bruin faithful service with gifts of a station wagon, meat, and (above) a big hockey-rink-shaped cake.

 

 

 

gordie’s goals

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Happy Day: The last Leaf to lead the NHL in regular-season scoring, Gordie Drillon, left, poses with coach Hap Day and defenceman (and future MP) Bucko McDonald. (Image: Archives of Ontario)

Question: who’s the last Toronto Maple Leaf to have led the NHL in regular-season scoring?

The answer, of course, is Gordie Drillon, a right winger who topped the table back in 1937-38, when the league’s eight teams played a 48-game schedule. He finished the year with 26 goals and 52 points, just ahead of his Leafly linemate, centreman Syl Apps, who counted 50 points. Moncton-born in 1913, Drillon died on a Tuesday of this date in 1986 at the age of 72. Big, obstinate, and opportunistic in front of the net, he was a purveyor of what in Phil Esposito’s day would come to be known as the garbage goal, the kind you score at close range, mostly out of pure doggedness, because you’re there with your stick on the ice, refusing to be evicted. Drillon served just four penalty minutes in ’38, and that won him a Lady Byng Memorial Trophy to go with his scoring title. He was also named to the NHL’s First All-Star Team that year, and the next. All of this you’ll find listed in his Hall of Fame profile; he was elevated to that hockey pantheon in 1975.

Given that Drillon played six of the seven seasons he skated in the NHL for the Leafs, you’d think he might rate as one of the team’s all-time greats, except for, well, no, he isn’t, is he, having been more or less booed out of town in 1942. Later Leafs (thinking of you, Larry Murphy; hey there, Jake Gardiner) would find themselves similarly hounded by fickle Leafs fans, accused of — what, exactly? Drillon was deemed to be lazy, a floater, not a team man. None of those subsequent Leafs, I’m going to say, suffered so harshly as him. ’42, was the year Toronto roared back in the finals from three games down to overthrow the Detroit Red Wings in seven games and win the championship. Gordie Drillon got his name on the Cup, but he wasn’t on the ice for the heroics. By then, Leafs’ majordomo Conn Smythe had turned on him, too, sending word to coach Hap Day to bench him. Drillon was peddled to the Montreal Canadiens that off-season, but he only lasted a year there. He was out of the NHL at 29.

ott not

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Hella Ranger: New York defender and sometime captain Ott Heller.

Nobody likes a New York Rangers nitpicker. Then again, somebody’s going to have to stand up for Ott Heller. And so, just for the record, that’s not him they’ve got pictured in that new Hockey News spread on greatest New York Rangers.

Launched last month, the glossy 130-page special-edition magazine isn’t going to win any prizes for snappy titles. That’s not to dismiss Top 50 Players of All-Time By Franchise outright — on the contrary, this is an ambitious and absorbing undertaking by THN team and historian James Benesh, with lots to interest fans and historical pointillists alike.

Interesting to see Steve Smith (#17) ranked ahead of Connor McDavid (#19) among Edmonton’s superlatives. Fills me with unearned pride, even. How long before McDavid climbs the list to mingle with Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and Jari Kurri (#s1,2,3)?

The Toronto Maple Leafs kicked off their centenary celebrations last fall by hoisting Dave Keon to the top of the charts of their Top 100 players. THN begs to differ: to their thinking, Keon drops to number five, behind (at four) Ted Kennedy, Tim Horton, Charlie Conacher, and, tip-top, Syl Apps.

Does Earl Seibert (#7) deserve a higher rung on the Chicago ladder ahead of Chris Chelios and Duncan Keith (#8 and #9)? After reading senior editor Brian Costello’s thoughts on trying to measure players from different eras against one another, I’m probably in. As Benesh says: “There will never be a right answer, never a consensus.”

Which is why, I suppose, some of us decrying the many omissions from the NHL’s centenary list might soon stop steaming from the ears. Benesh, at least, has a place for peerless Frank Nighbor ,and the great Hooley Smith. Glad to see the NHL’s defunct teams in the mix, with lists of the greats who skated for the Montreal Maroons, original Ottawa Senators, California Golden Seals, et al.

Not Ott: Bucko McDonald stands in for his Ranger teammate.

It’s with due respect that I note a few scattered errors, starting back with the Rangers, on page 84. I’m not here to argue that Ott Heller (#22) deserves to be up there at the top of the rankings with fellow defencemen Ching Johnson (#9) and Brian Leetch (#2). It’s just that the photo, seen above, isn’t Heller at all: it’s Bucko McDonald.

They were teammates, it’s true, for a couple of years. After spending most of his career patrolling bluelines for Toronto and Detroit, McDonald arrived in New York in 1943, where he played out his two final NHL seasons on teams captained by Heller. That’s another pickable nit, I’m afraid: Heller only captained the Rangers for three seasons. Succeeding Art Coulter in the fall of 1942, he led the team again in ’43-’44 and ’44-’45 before giving way to Neil Colville.