Frank Brimsek

shot clocking: linus ullmark < tiny thompson (but who’s counting)

/ puckstruck

Tiny Dancer: Thompson in the workplace, circa the 1930s. (Image: Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Tiny Thompson did some counting before he retired in 1940. Thompson, of course, was a fixture in goal for the Boston Bruins for a decade in the ’20s and ’30s, helping them win their first Stanley Cup championship in his rookie year. After Frank Brimsek displaced him in Boston, Thompson played a couple of seasons with the Detroit Red Wings before calling quits on his NHL career. That’s when he came up with the estimate that he had stopped 100,000 shots in his time tending goals.

Whether or not Thompson notched his stick to keep track of shots incoming, I don’t know. Hard, really, to say whether that’s a realistic number or pure fiction. Thompson, we know, played 553 regular-season games in a 12-year NHL career and another 44 in the playoffs. He played another nine or so in minor leagues, before that, in the 1920s. No-one was keeping official track of shots on goal in those years, so it’s impossible to pronounce on Thompson’s tally one way or the other. We do know that the all-time NHL leader in saves, Martin Brodeur, made 33,758 of them through 1,471 games, regular-season and playoffs. Does that help?

The incumbent Boston goaltender, Linus Ullmark, has played in 199 NHL games, and his save count is up to 5,353. As you maybe noticed, the 31-year-old Swede and his numbers were much this week as he had himself, well, a week, right in the middle of having himself, well, a year.

Both have been extraordinary, but let’s focus here on the week’s doings.

Heading into Boston’s game in Vancouver on Saturday, February 25, Ullmark had nothing but wins to his credit for the month, winning all of his four starts to that point. Against the Canucks, Ullmark and his Bruins won again, 3-1, with the goaltender hoisting a late-game shot at Vancouver’s empty net to finish the night in style, scoring the first goalie goal in Boston’s 99-year franchise history. (He still has some work to do before he catches the all-time NHL goalscoring leader: Brodeur collected three in his day, including a game-winning goal.)

Still, that was exciting.

Three nights later, on Tuesday, February 28, Ullmark was the hero in Calgary as the mighty Bruins rolled on, beating the Flames 3-2 in overtime. Again the goaltender made history, this time for prodigious puck-stopping, as Ullmark turned away 54 Calgary shots, setting a new franchise high for a single game.

The Bruins, thrilled, were quick to herald this on Twitter, broadcasting the image below. If they didn’t quite get it right on the night, well, it was a big thrill, and facts can be hard to corral when you’re so very … thrilled.

Not to take anything away from Ullmark, but the finer points of the case do deserve an airing. As the NHL’s PR department was careful to clarify, Ullmark’s achievement involved, in fact, a somewhat narrower time-frame than all of eternity.

As reported next morning in the NHL’s Morning Skate daily news digest, “Ullmark made a career-high 54 saves and registered the most on record by a Bruins goaltender (since 1955-56 when shots on goal began being tracked), besting Tim Thomas(51 saves on March 1, 2007).”

Good to know. As is what came next in the NHL release: “Of note, Boston has featured one instance of a netminder making more saves in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: Tuukka Rask (59 saves in Game 1 of 2013 SCF).”

Right you are. Just why there should be, in this case, a distinction made between a regular-season feat of this nature and one performed in the playoffs isn’t clear (to me, at least), but then again the dubious distincting between regular season and playoffs is not anything unseen before in NHL record-keeping. It does, nevertheless, seem like a bit of a statistical slight to Tuukka Rask.

Which brings us back to Tiny Thompson. As the PR people at the NHL pointed out, the league didn’t start officially accounting for shots (and thereby, saves) until 1955, well after Thompson’s time, which means there’s no reliable official record of what he and his early netminding brethren were doing in the early decades of the league. That’s too bad.

It doesn’t mean that shots and saves were never counted in the pre-1955 NHL: sometimes they were. Not in every arena, not all the time, nor in any systematic way. There’s no verifying the accuracy of the tallies that contemporary newspapers reported in those years. But report they did, sometimes, and even if those records are anecdotal, these numbers hold their places in hockey history if not in official ledgers.

For instance?

Well, the 90 shots that Normie Smith of the Detroit Red Wings was reported to have diverted in March of 1936. That’s some goaltending. That game still stands as the longest game in NHL history, wherein Detroit beat the Montreal Maroons 1-0 in the sixth overtime of a Stanley Cup semi-final. (Lorne Chabot of the Maroons stopped 68 shots.)

Or what about Chicago Black Hawks goaltender Sam LoPresti, who stopped 83 Bruin shots in a game in 1941. (Three others that got by him secured a 3-2 win for Boston, who had Brimsek in their goal). Also something.

You’ll find, too, in the annals of Bruins history a Stanley Cup game played in April of 1933 that the Bruins themselves may well have forgotten, something the team tends to do when it comes to its own history, bizarrely, given how rich that history is — but that’s another story, one you can read about here (and here), if you feel the need.

But. 1933. Boston met the defending Cup champions, Toronto’s Maple Leafs, that year in a best-of-five semi-final series that was decided at Maple Leaf Gardens in another epic six-overtimes battle. Tiny Thompson was in the Boston net, facing Lorne Chabot at the other end. Both men were nursing shutouts when Leaf right winger Ken Doraty finally ended the thing (and the series) at five to two in the morning when he beat Thompson for the winning goal.

Leafs Win: Artist’s impression of the game-winning goal Ken Doraty put past Tiny Thompson in April of 1933.

Distressed by the loss, exhausted, Thompson probably didn’t care how many shots he saved that night, but the number does seem to have been a remarkable one nonetheless. As reported in the Toronto Daily Star the following day, the Leafs fired 115 shots at Thompson, who saved 114 of them. 114! Chabot, for his troubles, stymied 93.

Tiny Tally: The Windsor Star clocks the shots, April 4, 1933.

It’s worth noting that most of the summaries that went out from Toronto that night included shot counts, period-by-period. Some, including in the Boston Globe and in both Montreal’s Gazette and Daily Star, offered different numbers when it came to saves, 111 for Thompson and 89 for Chabot. Again, there was no official count. These lesser totals seem to have been the result of someone, somewhere along the line leaving out shots fired (by both teams) the final (sixth) overtime period.

This, again, doesn’t change anything that Linus Ullmark achieved last week. Well done, him. But Tiny Thompson does seem to have stopped more than twice as many shots one long in Toronto in 1933. That seems pertinent, and of interest to Bruins’ fans, according to me.

As is (finally) another entirely unofficial incident from two seasons earlier.

Tiny Thompson is, again, our man. He was 27 in February of 1931 and (apparently) feeling frisky. It wouldn’t happen nowadays, but midway through that NHL season, Boston took the time between two of its scheduled regular-season games to travel to Providence, Rhode Island, to play a benefit against the minor-league Reds of the Canadian-American League. The cause was a good one in those Depression years: all proceeds from the game — $3,800 — went to support the unemployed.

“For the Bruins,” the Boston Globe reported, “it was little more than a workout.” They won easily, by a score of 7-1, powered by a pair of goals by Harry Oliver.

“Everything was in all seriousness until the final minute,” the paper assured its readers. Then? Tiny Thompson decided that he wanted in on the scoring action. So he headed up the ice. Stickhandling the whole way? Maybe. It sounds like the Providence defence parted for him. Did he have any kind of wrist shot? I can’t say. The Globe: “He went in alone from the blueline and beat [Reds goaltender] Mickey Murray on the far side of the nets.”

All in all, it was “a spectacular finish,” the Globe decided — a goalie goal that Linus Ullmark himself might have been proud to score, 92 years later.

On The Go: Boston newspaper clipping from 1932 showing Tiny Thompson heading up ice during a Bruins practice.

 

gaoledtenders: a short history of time served

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Box Seats: Chicago’s Mike Karakas was the last NHL goaltender to serve out a penalty, in New York in 1936. That’s Rangers’ trainer Harry Westerby standing by and, in the hat, Ranger coach and GM Lester Patrick.

Clint Benedict’s violations were out in the open, many of them, whether he was upsetting Corb Denneny behind the net or (another time) dropping Toronto captain Frank Heffernan “with a clout on the dome.”

In the decisive game of the 1923 Stanley Cup finals, with Benedict’s Ottawa Senators on the way to beating the WCHL-champion Edmonton Eskimos to claim hockey’s ultimate trophy, referee Mickey Ion sanctioned the goaltender for a first-period slash on Edmonton defenceman Joe Simpson. “Benedict tried to separate Joe from his legs behind the goal,” Andy Lyle wrote in the Edmonton Journal. This particular game was being played under eastern (NHL) rules, so Benedict headed for the penalty bench.

Foul but no harm: with Ottawa nursing a 1-0, Benedict’s teammates were able to defend the lead without their goaltender’s help. This was at the end of the famous series during which Senators defenceman King Clancy ended  playing defence, forward, and goal. In a 1997 memoir written with Brian McFarlane, Clancy describes the moment that he headed for the latter: Benedict chucked over his goalstick and said, “You take care of this place ’til I get back.”

After that, Clancy’s time was mostly an exercise in standing around, though not entirely. In the memoir, Clancy recalls that when, at one point, he smothered the puck near the net, Ion threatened him with a penalty.

But while Clancy says that he didn’t face a single Edmonton shot, contemporary accounts tell a different tale. By Ottawa manager Tommy Gorman’s account, Clancy faced down two Edmonton shots. “Once Joe Simpson whipped in a long one,” he wrote, “whereupon ‘King’ dropped his stick, caught the puck with the skill of a baseball catcher, and tossed it aside while the crowd roared its approval.”

Count it, I guess, as the first shared shutout in Stanley Cup history.

Nowadays, when it comes to penalties for goalies, the NHL rule book gets right to the point with Rule 27:

Minor Penalty to Goalkeeper — A goalkeeper shall not be sent to the penalty bench for an offense which incurs a minor penalty, but instead, the minor penalty shall be served by another member of his team who was on the ice when the offense was committed. This player is to be designated by the Coach of the offending team through the playing Captain and such substitute shall not be changed.

But for the first three decades of NHL history — in the regular season as well as in Stanley Cup play— goaltenders themselves served the penalties they were assessed, departing the ice while a teammate did his best to fill in.

This happened more than a dozen times in those early years, and was cause for considerable chaos and excitement. In the 1920s, Clint Benedict was (as mentioned) often in the mix, while in the ’30s, Lorne Chabot featured prominently. Among the temporary goaltenders, King Clancy continued to stand out, along with Sprague Cleghorn. Goals would have been easy to score in these circumstances — you’d think. In fact, none was scored on the first eight occasions — it wasn’t until 1931, when Chicago’s Tommy Cook punished the Canadiens, that anyone was able to take advantage of an absent goaltender to score.

Despite what you may have read in a recent feature on NHL.com, the last time a goaltender went to the box wasn’t in March of 1932, after a particular fractious game in Boston, though the NHL did adjust some language in the rule book that year.

No, the final goaltender to do his own time would seem to have been Mike Karakas of the Chicago Black Hawks at the end of December in 1936. After that — but we’ll come back to the shifting of the rules that went on for more than a decade before goaltenders were fully and finally excused from going to the box.

Ahead of that, herewith, a helpful review of the NHL’s history of goaltenders who were binned for their sins, listed chronologically from earliest to last, starting in the league’s second season on ice and wandering along to its 20th.

None of the six goalies who tended nets during the NHL’s inaugural season, 1917-18, was penalized. That’s worth a note, if only because, until the rule was changed a couple of weeks into the schedule, goalies were forbidden, on pain of penalty, from falling to their knees to stop the puck. Benedict, again, was front and centre in the discussion that led to the change. In the old National Hockey Association, his collapses were as renowned as his penalties. Indeed, in announcing in January of 1918 that goaltenders would now be allowed to “adopt any attitude” to stop the puck, NHL President Frank Calder made specific mention of Benedict before going on to explain the rationale for the change. “Very few of the teams carry a spare netminder,” Calder explained, “and if the goaler is ruled off it means a long delay in equipping another player, and in a close contest would undoubtedly cost the penalized team the game. The old rule made it hard for the referees, so everybody will be helped.”

Free to flop, Benedict was left to find other means of catching the attention of referees. Which he duly did:

Tuesday, February 18, 1919
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto Arenas 3 (OT)
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referees: Lou Marsh, Steve Vair

The NHL was a three-team affair in its second season, and not exactly robust, at that: the anemic Toronto Arenas ended up dropping out before the season was over, suspending operations with two games left to play in the schedule. Their sparsely-attended penultimate game — no more than 1,000 fans showed up — saw Ottawa’s goaltender penalized with ten minutes left in the third period. Yes, this was unruly Benedict once again: with Toronto leading 2-1, he was sanctioned for upsetting Corb Denneny behind the Ottawa net, incurring a three-minute penalty (that was a thing, then).

Ottawa defenceman Sprague Cleghorn took over Benedict’s net. The Ottawa Journal: “Torontos tried hard but their sharp shooters were kept at long range by the defensive work of the Senators. Finally goalkeeper Cleghorn himself secured the puck and made an end to end rush, almost scoring.” An added detail from the Citizen: with Cleghorn absent on his rush, Senators’ winger Cy Denneny took to the net where he stopped at least one shot. After Benedict’s return, Toronto stretched their lead to 3-1 before Ottawa got goals from Frank Nighbor and (not one to be denied) Sprague Cleghorn before Punch Broadbent sealed the win for the Senators in overtime.

Hors De Combat: Seen here in the first uniform of Montreal’s Maroons, Clint Benedict was an early protagonist when it came to goaltenders serving time in penalty boxes.

Saturday, January 24, 1920
Ottawa Senators 3 Toronto St. Patricks 5
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Cooper Smeaton

The call on Clint Benedict this time, apparently, was for slashing Toronto captain Frank Heffernan. Referee Smeaton had already warned him for swinging his stick at Corb Denneny before sending Benedict to the penalty bench. The Ottawa Citizen described the goaltender as having swung his stick “heavily,” catching Heffernan across the forehead, while the Journal saw Heffernan go down “with a clout on the dome.” The Toronto faithful, the Globe reported, weren’t pleased: “the crowd hissed and hooted him.” Sprague Cleghorn was still manning the Ottawa defence, but this time it was winger Jack Darragh subbed in while Benedict served his three minutes. The Journal noted several “sensational stops,” and no goals against.

Wednesday, February 1, 1922
Montreal Canadiens 2 Ottawa Senators 4
Laurier Avenue Arena, Ottawa
Referee: Lou Marsh

“At times,” the Ottawa Journal reported, “Sprague Cleghorn played like a master and at other times like a gunman.” It was Cleghorn’s violence that made headlines this night, drawing the attention of Ottawa police, who showed up in Montreal’s dressing room after the game. Cleghorn was a Canadien now, turning out against his old teammates (including Clint Benedict in Ottawa’s goal), and proving a one-man wrecking crew. He accumulated 29 minutes in penalties for transgressions that included cutting Ottawa captain Eddie Gerard over the eye with a butt-end; breaking Frank Nighbor’s arm; and putting Cy Denneny out of the game in its final minutes. For the latter, Cleghorn was assessed a match penalty and fined for using indecent language. Canadiens managing director Leo Dandurand turned back the police who tried to apprehend Cleghorn, telling them to come back when they had a warrant.

Amid all this, Cleghorn also stepped into the Montreal net after Georges Vézina was sent off for slashing King Clancy. Notwithstanding the Ottawa Citizen’s verdict, calling Cleghorn “the present day disgrace of the National winter game,” Montreal’s Gazette reported that as an emergency goaltender he “made several fine stops.”

Saturday, March 31, 1923
Ottawa Senators 1 Edmonton Eskimos 0
Denman Arena, Vancouver
Referee: Mickey Ion

Clint Benedict’s Stanley Cup penalty was for a second-period slash across the knees of Edmonton’s Bullet Joe Simpson. (The Citizen: “the Ottawa goalie used his stick roughly.”) After multi-purpose King Clancy, stepped in, as mentioned, to replace him, his Senator teammates made sure that Edmonton didn’t get a single shot on net.

Saturday, December 20, 1924
Montreal Maroons 1 Hamilton Tigers 3
Barton Street Arena, Hamilton
Referee: Mike Rodden

Montreal Daily Star, 1924.

Clint Benedict, again. He was a Montreal Maroon by now, and still swinging; this time, in Hamilton, he was sent off for (the Gazette alleged) “trying to get Bouchard.” Eddie Bouchard that was, a Hamilton winger. Maroons captain Dunc Munro stepped into the breach while Benedict cooled his heels, and temper. The Gazette: “nothing happened while he was off.”

Saturday, December 27, 1924
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Lou Marsh

For the first time in NHL history, Clint Benedict wasn’t in the building when a penalty was called on a goaltender. He was in Montreal, for the record, taking no penalties as he tended the Maroons’ net in a 1-1 tie with the Canadiens that overtime couldn’t settle.

Offending this time was Senators’ stopper Alec Connell, who was in Toronto and (the Gazette said) “earned a penalty when he took a wallop at big Bert Corbeau. The latter was engaged in a fencing exhibition with Frank Nighbor late in the second period when Connell rushed out and aimed a blow at the local defence man. Connell missed by many metres, but nevertheless, he was given two minutes and Corbeau drew five. ‘King’ Clancy then took charge of the big stick and he made several fine saves, St. Patricks failing to score.”

During the fracas in which Connell was penalized, I can report, Ottawa’s Buck Boucher was fined $10 for (the Toronto Daily Star said) “being too lurid in his comments to the referee.” The Star also noted that when, playing goal, Clancy was elbowed by Jack Adams, the temporary Ottawa goaltender retaliated with a butt-end “just to show the rotund Irish centre player that he wasn’t at all afraid of him and wouldn’t take any nonsense.”

Saturday, February 14, 1925
Hamilton Tigers 1 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Eddie O’Leary

In the second period, Hamilton goaltender Jake Forbes was penalized for (as the Gazette saw it) “turning [Bert] Corbeau over as the big defenceman was passing by the Hamilton goal.” Hamilton winger Charlie Langlois was already serving a penalty as the defenceman Jesse Spring took the net, but the Tigers survived the scare: “Both Langlois and Forbes got back on the ice without any damage being done while they were absent, the other players checking St. Pats so well that they could not get near the Hamilton net.”

Wednesday, December 2, 1931
Montreal Canadiens 1 Chicago Black Hawks 2
Chicago Stadium
Referee: Mike Rodden, Bill Shaver

Montreal Gazette, 1931.

A first for Chicago and indeed for the USA at large: never before had an NHL goaltender served his own penalty beyond a Canadian border. Notable, too: after seven tries and more than a decade, a team facing a substitute goaltender finally scored a goal. On this occasion, it was a decisive one, too.

The game was tied 1-1 in the third period when Montreal’s George Hainsworth tripped Chicago winger Vic Ripley. With just three minutes left in regular time, Ripley, who’d scored Chicago’s opening goal, hit the boards hard. He was carried off.

Hainsworth headed for the penalty bench. He had a teammate already there, Aurèle Joliat, so when defenceman Battleship Leduc took the net, the situation was grim for Montreal. The Gazette:

Albert Leduc armed himself with Hainsworth’s stick and stood between the posts with only three men to protect him. His position was almost helpless and when [Johnny] Gottselig and [Tommy] Cook came tearing in, the former passed to the centre player and Cook burned one past Leduc for the winning counter. Then Joliat returned and Leduc made one stop. When Hainsworth came back into the nets, Canadiens staged a rousing rally and the final gong found the champions peppering [Chicago goaltender Charlie] Gardiner unsuccessfully.

Tuesday, March 15, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 2 Boston Bruins 6
Boston Garden
Referee: Bill Stewart, Odie Cleghorn

Boston saw its first goaltender-in-box when, three minutes in, Toronto’s Lorne Chabot was called for tripping Boston centreman Cooney Weiland. “The latter,” wrote Victor Jones in the Boston Globe, “entirely out of a play, was free-skating a la Sonja Henie in the vicinity of the Leaf cage.” Toronto’s Globe: “The Leafs protested loudly, but Stewart remained firm.”

It was a costly decision for the Leafs. At the time, a penalty didn’t come to its end, as it does today, with a goal by the team with the advantage: come what might, Chabot would serve out his full time for his trip.

Victor Jones spun up a whole comical bit in his dispatch around Leaf coach Dick Irvin’s decision to hand Chabot’s duties (along with his stick) to defenceman Red Horner. The upshot was that Bruins’ centre Marty Barry scored on him after ten seconds. Irvin replaced Horner with defenceman Alex Levinsky, without discernible effect: Barry scored on him, too, ten seconds later. When King Clancy tried his luck, Boston captain George Owen scored another goal, giving the Bruins a 3-0 lead by the time Chabot returned to service.

There was a subsequent kerfuffle involving Toronto GM Conn Smythe, a practiced kerfuffler, particularly in Boston. He’d arrived late to the game, to find his team down by a pair of goals and Clancy tending the net. Smythe ended up reaching out from the Toronto bench to lay hands on referee Bill Stewart, who (he said) was blocking his view. Backed by a pair of Boston policemen, the Garden superintendent tried to evict Smythe, whereupon the Toronto players intervened.

“For some minutes,” Victor Jones recounted, “there was a better than fair chance that there would be a riot.” Bruins’ owner Charles F. Adams arrived on the scene to keep the peace and arrange a stay for Smythe who was allowed to keep his seat on the Leaf bench (in Jones’ telling) “on condition he would not further pinch, grab, or otherwise molest” the referee.

Boston didn’t squander its early boon, powering on to a 6-2 victory.

A couple of other notes from Jones’ notebook: “Stewart may have ruined the game, but he called the penalty as it’s written in the book and that’s all that concerns him.”

Also: “The best crack of the evening was made by Horner, after the game in the Toronto dressing room: ‘You fellows made a big mistake when you didn’t let me finish out my goal tending. I was just getting my eye on ’em, and after four or five more I’d have stopped everything.”

Leaf On The Loose: Lorne Chabot was a habitual visitor to NHL penalty boxes in the 1930s.

Sunday, November 20, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 New York Rangers 7
Madison Square Garden III, New York
Referees: Eusebe Daigneault, Jerry Goodman

The Leafs were the defending Stanley Cup champions in the fall of 1932, but that didn’t help them on this night in New York as they took on the team they’d defeated in the championship finals the previous April. This time out, Lorne Chabot’s troubles started in the second period, when he wandered too far from his net, whereupon a Rangers’ winger saw fit to bodycheck him. Cause and effect: “Chabot was banished,” Toronto’s Daily Star reported, “for flailing Murray Murdoch with his stick.” (Murdoch was penalized, too.)

Leafs’ winger Charlie Conacher took to the net, and in style. “He made six dazzling stops during this [two-minute] time,” Joseph C. Nichols reported in the New York Times, “playing without the pads and shin-guards always worn by regular goalies.” When Chabot returned, Conacher received a thundering ovation from the New York crowd. Chabot worked hard on the night, too, stopping a total of 41 Ranger shots. Unfortunately, there were also seven that got past him before the game was over.

Thursday, March 16, 1933
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 Detroit Red Wings 1
Detroit Olympia
Referee: Cooper Smeaton, Clarence Bush

Lorne Chabot’s next visit to the penalty box came during what the Montreal Gazette graded one of the wildest games ever to be played at the Detroit Olympia. In the third period, when Detroit centreman Ebbie Goodfellow passed the Leaf goalmouth, Chabot (wrote Jack Carveth of the Detroit Free Press) “clipped him over the head with his over-sized stick.”

“That was the signal for Ebbie to lead with his left and cross with his right,” Carveth narrated. “Chabot went down with Goodfellow on top of him.”

Both players got minor penalties for their troubles, which continued once they were seated side-by-side the penalty box. “After they had been separated,” wrote Carveth, “a policeman was stationed between them to prevent another outbreak.”

Just as things seemed to be settling down, Detroit coach Jack Adams threw a punch that connected with the chin of Toronto’s Bob Gracie, who stood accused of loosing “a vile remark” in Adams’ direction. “Players from both benches were over the fence in a jiffy but nothing more serious than a lot of pushing developed.”

Toronto winger Charlie Conacher took up Chabot’s stick in his absence. “But he didn’t have to do any work,” according to the Canadian Press. “King Clancy ragged the puck cleverly,” and the Wings failed to get even a shot at Conacher. They were already ahead 1-0 at the time, and that’s the way the game ended, with the shutout going to Detroit’s John Ross Roach.

Tuesday, November 28, 1933
Montreal Maroons 4 Montreal Canadiens 1
Montreal Forum
Referees: Bill Stewart, A.G. Smith

Lorne Chabot may have moved from Toronto to Montreal by 1933, but he was still battling. On this night, he contrived to get into what the Montreal Daily Star called a “high voltage scrap” with Maroons centreman Dave Trottier. The latter’s stick hit Chabot on the head as he dove to retrieve a puck in the third period, it seems. “Thinking it intentional,” the Gazette reported, “Chabot grabbed one of Trottier’s legs and pulled him to the ice with a football tackle. They rose and came to grips.” Later that same brouhaha, Chabot interceded in a fight between teammate Wildor Larochelle and the Maroons’ Hooley Smith, whereupon (somehow) Trottier and Larochelle were sentenced to major penalties while Smith and Chabot earned only minors.

With two minutes left in the game and Maroons up by three goals, Canadiens’ coach Newsy Lalonde elected not to fill Chabot’s net. Maroons couldn’t hit the empty net, though winger Wally Kilrea came close with a long-distance shot that drifted wide.

Sunday, December 27, 1936
Chicago Black Hawks 0 New York Rangers 1
Madison Square Garden III
Referee: Bill Stewart, Babe Dye

“One of hockey’s rarest spectacles,” New York Times’ correspondent Joseph C. Nichols called the second-period tripping penalty that was called when Chicago’s Mike Karakas tripped New York’s Phil Watson. Filling in for Karakas was none other than Tommy Cook who, you might recall, scored a goal against Battleship Leduc in 1931 when he’d replaced Montreal’s George Hainsworth. This time, Nichols reported, the net might as well have been empty for all the chances the rangers had to score. With Chicago’s Johnny Gottselig, Paul Thompson, and Art Wiebe doing yeoman’s work on the defensive, Cook faced no shots during his stint as a stand-in — the last one, as it turned out, in NHL history.

Both Sides Now: Chicago centreman Tommy Cook was the first NHLer to score a goal with a goaltender in the box, in 1931. In 1936, he was also the last player to take a penalized goaltender’s place.

Tracing the evolution of the NHL’s rule book generally involves a certain amount of sleuthing. James Duplacey’s The Rules of Hockey (1996) is helpful up to a point, but it’s not it’s not without bugs and oversights.

This is specifically the case, too, when it comes to goaltenders and their penalties. When in 1918 goaltenders were freed to fall to their knees without risk of punishment, this freedom never enshrined in writing. For most if not all of the league’s first decade, the only language in the rule book governing goaltenders had to do with holding the puck — not allowed — and the face-off arrangement that applied if they dared to commit this misdemeanor.

This changed in 1932, after that Leaf game in Boston in March when Toronto’s three emergency goaltenders yielded three goals and Conn Smythe got into (another) melee. Did he draft or drive the addition of the paragraph that was added to the rule book that year? It’s possible. It was procedural only, and didn’t change the way things had been done since the beginning. The language added to Rule 12 read:

If a goal-keeper is removed from the ice to serve a penalty the manager of the club shall appoint a substitute and the referee shall be advised of the name of the substitute appointed. The substitute goal-keeper shall be subject to the rules governing goal-keepers and have the same privileges.

The last part does suggest that stand-ins would be within their rights to strap on goaltending pads, and maybe that happened, though I’ve never seen any archival or anecdotal evidence that it did in any of the instances cited above.

Goaltenders were boxed on four more occasions (as we’ve seen) after this change in rule-book wording. It was six years later that the sentencing of rule-breaking goaltenders changed materially, in September of 1938. No goaltender had, to date, ever been assessed a major penalty, but if that were to happen, the new rule stipulated that he would go to the box, with his substitute accorded all the privileges of a regular netminder, “including the use of the goal-keeper’s stick and gloves.”

And for lesser infractions? Now The Official Rule Book declared that:

No goal-keeper shall be sent to the penalty bench for an offence which incurs a minor penalty but instead of the minor penalty, a penalty shot shall be given against him.

It didn’t take long for the statute to get its first test, once the 1938-39 season got underway. There was, it’s true, some confusion on the ice when the Detroit Red Wings hosted the Chicago Black Hawks, the reigning NHL champions, on Thursday, November 24.

It was a busy night for referee Clarence Campbell. The future NHL president wasn’t a favourite in Detroit, as Doc Holst of the local Free Press outlined:

Anytime Mr. Campbell is referee on Mr. [Jack] Adams’ ice, you can wager your grandma that there will be plenty of difficult problems and that he will never solve them to the satisfaction of the Red Wings. He’s their ogre, no matter how the other club praises his abilities.

Campbell infuriated both teams on this night. In the first period, he disallowed a goal that the Wings’ Marty Barry thought he’d score. Next, Campbell awarded the Wings a penalty shot after Hawks’ defenceman Alex Levinsky held back the Wings’ Ebbie Goodfellow on his way in on Chicago’s Mike Karakas. Levinsky objected so vociferously that Campbell gave him a ten-misconduct. Mud Bruneteau took Detroit’s penalty shot: Karakas saved.

Things got even more interesting in the third. It started with Detroit’s Pete Kelly skating in on the Chicago net and colliding with Karakas. Doc Holst: “The two of them came out of the net and started to roll, Pete holding on to Mike for dear life. The only thing Mike could think of was to tap Pete on the head with his big goalie stick.”

Campbell penalized both, sending Kelly to the box for holding and awarding Detroit a penalty shot for Karakas’ slash. The Wings weren’t having it — they wanted the Chicago goaltender sent off. “Campbell pulled the rule book on the Wings,” a wire service account of the proceedings reported, “and showed them goalies do not go to penalty boxes” Once again Mud Bruneteau stepped up to shoot on Karakas and, once again, failed to score. The Red Wings did eventually prevail in the game, winning 4-2, despite all the goals denied them.

Goaltenders did keep on taking penalties, some of them for contravening a new rule added to the books in 1938 barring them from throwing pucks into the crowd to stop play. In Detroit, if not elsewhere, this rule was said to be aimed at curbing the Red Wings’ Normie Smith, who’d been known in his time for disposing of (said the Free Press) “as many as a dozen pucks a night over the screen.” Chicago’s Karakas was, apparently, another enthusiastic puck-tosser.

And so, in February of 1939, Clarence Campbell called Wilf Cude of the Montreal Canadiens for flinging a puck over the screen against the New York Americans. Cude took his medicine and kicked out Johnny Sorrell’s penalty shot. In January, 1941, when Toronto’s Turk Broda tripped Canadiens’ Murph Chamberlain, he was pleased to redeem himself by foiling a penalty shot from Tony Demers.

The NHL continued to tweak the rule through the 1940s. In September of ’41, the league split the penalty shot: now there were major and minor versions. The major was what we know now, applied when a skater was impeded on a clear chance at goal. The player taking the shot was free to skate in on the goaltender to shoot from wherever he pleased. A minor penalty shot applied when a goaltender committed a foul: he would be sentenced to face an opposing player who could wheel in from centre-ice but had to shoot the puck before he crossed a line drawn 28 feet in front of the goal.

By 1945, the rules had changed again, with a penalty shot only applying when a goaltender incurred a major penalty. That meant that when, in a February game in New York, referee Bill Chadwick whistled down Rangers’ goaltender Chuck Rayner for tossing the puck up the ice (just as prohibited as hurling it into the stands), Rayner stayed in his net while teammate Ab DeMarco went to the penalty box. From there, he watched  Chicago’s Pete Horeck score the opening goal in what ended as a 2-2 tie.

This continued over the next few years. Boston’s Frank Brimsek slung a puck into the Montreal crowd and teammate Bep Guidolin did his time for him. Detroit’s Gerry Couture went to the box when his goaltender, Harry Lumley, high-sticked Boston’s Bill Cowley. In the October of 1947, in a game at Chicago Stadium between the Black Hawks and Red Wings, Chadwick saw fit to call (in separate incidents) penalties on both team’s goaltenders, Lumley for tripping (Red Kelly went to the box) and Chicago’s Emile Francis for high-sticking (Dick Butler did the time).

A few days later Francis was penalized again, this time against Montreal, after a “mix-up” with Canadiens’ winger Jimmy Peters. By some accounts, this was an out-and-out fight, though Peters and Francis were assessed minors for roughing. Is it possible that referee Georges Gravel downgraded the charge to avoid the spectacle of Francis having to face a penalty shot for his temper?

The rule does seem generally to have fallen into disrepute in these final years before it was rewritten. Witness the game at Maple Leaf Gardens in January of 1946 when the Leafs beat the Red Wings 9-3 in a game refereed by King Clancy. Late in the third period, Detroit’s Joe Carveth took a shot on the Leaf goal only to see it saved by goaltender Frank McCool. The Globe and Mail’s Vern DeGeer described what happened next:

The puck rebounded back to Carveth’s stick as a whistle sounded. Carveth fired the puck again. It hit McCool on the shoulder. The Toronto goalie dropped his stick and darted from his cage. He headed straight for Carveth and enveloped the Detroiter in a bear hug that would have done credit to one of Frank Tunney’s mightiest wrestling warriors, and bore him to the ice.

DeGeer’s description of the aftermath came with a derisive subhed: Who Wrote This Rule?

The sheer stupidity of major hockey rules developed out of the McCool-Carveth affair. Carveth was given a two-minute penalty for firing the puck after the whistle and an additional two minutes for fighting. A major penalty shot play was given against McCool. Carl Liscombe made the play and hit the goalpost at McCool’s right side. There’s neither rhyme nor reason for such a severe penalty against a goaltender, but it’s in the rule book.

Carveth was in the penalty box when the game ended. First thing the former Regina boy did was skate to the Toronto fence and apologize to Frank for taking the extra shot after the whistle.

The NHL made another change ahead of the 1949-50 season: from then on, major penalties, too, that were incurred by goaltenders would see a teammate designated to serve time in the box rather than resulting in a penalty shot.

flyby

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Lift-Off: Posing here in 1940-41, Sam LoPresti puts Emile Francis to shame, I’d say, when it comes to sailing across his net in search of a puck that may or may not ever show up.

Like Frank Brimsek and Mike Karakas (Bob Dylan, too), Sam LoPresti hailed from Minnesota’s Iron Range. Born on a Tuesday of this date in 1917 in the now-ghostly mining town of Elcor, LoPresti grew up in nearby Eveleth. He played two seasons for the Chicago Black Hawks, and was a stand-out in his team’s (ultimately unsuccessful) playoff series in the 1942 playoffs against the Boston Bruins.

In March of 1941, as a rookie, LoPresti played another famous game against the Bruins. In this one, he faced 83 shots, stopping all but three in a 3-2 Boston win. LoPresti’s teammate Doug Bentley was, for one, disgusted … with Boston. “They must have been lucky because they certainly weren’t good,” the winger told a reporter next day. “Any team which has to take 83 shots at a goalie isn’t good in my book. What a bunch of Deadeye Dicks. Phooey.” (Doug Bentley did not himself score in this game, it might be pointed out, though his brother, Max, did.)

“I couldn’t sleep all night,” offered LoPresti. “I was so exhausted from the game that I kept tossing and turning in bed.” When he did manage, finally, to sleep, his roommate, Chicago’s Eveleth-born defenceman John Mariucci, woke him up to remind LoPresti how wonderfully he’d played. “I’m so tired now I’m going to sleep all the way back to Chicago,” LoPresti said.

Following the 1942 season, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, then transferred to the Navy. In February of 1943, he was serving as a gunner’s mate on a merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on an Atlantic crossing. Along with 20 or so shipmates, he spent 42 days in a lifeboat before being rescued off the coast of Brazil. He did eventually return to hockey, though never to the NHL: he played senior hockey in Duluth and Eveleth before retiring from the ice in 1951. LoPresti was a charter member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, inducted in 1973. His son, Pete, followed him into the crease, tending NHL goals in the 1970s for the Minnesota North Stars and (briefly) the Edmonton Oilers.

Sam LoPresti died in 1984 at the age of 67.

dave kerr turns a blind eye

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Born in Toronto on another Tuesday of today’s date, this one in 1910, Dave Kerr got his NHL start in 1930 with the Montreal Maroons. He played seven seasons with the New York Rangers, with whom he had a very good year in 1940, winning a Stanley Cup championship and a Vézina Trophy. In 1944, Wilf Cude rated his old friend Charlie Gardiner as the best goaltender he’d ever seen, with Frank Brimsek and Kerr tied for second in his estimation. The Hockey Hall of Fame’s selection committee discussed Kerr’s candidacy in 1969 and ’75, but he didn’t get the support he needed to be inducted, and I guess his time has passed. Kerr died in 1978 at the age of 68.

In the 1980s, Montreal Gazette columnist Dink Carroll recalled his keen eyesight and extraordinary reflexes. Nobody could score on him on a breakaway or a penalty. “Like Ted Williams,” Carroll said, “he went out of his way to protect his eyes, wearing sunglasses and refusing to refusing to look out a train window at the snow.”

I haven’t seen Kerr talking about that, but in 1935 he did have an answer when Harold Parrott of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle asked him how many of the shots coming at him he failed to see because his vision was blocked.

“Fully 50 per cent,” he volunteered. “The rubber will come out of a scuffle, out from behind somebody, and you have to grab in the dark for those kind. Then they yell at you from the stands that you’re blind.”

 

lapses in the legacy: checking in on boston’s still-forgotten captains

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Special Ed: The epic Eddie Shore, as seen in a Boston Garden program from March of 1936.

If the measure of NHL success is whether or not your team hoists the Stanley Cup to finish a given season, then Patrice Bergeron’s first campaign as captain of the Boston Bruins was a flop.

The season itself wasn’t so dire. The Bruins, you’ll recall, finished third in their division, the old MassMutual East, accumulating 73 points, which was good enough for tenth overall in the NHL’s regular-season standings — just three points behind the eventual Stanley Cup champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning. Boston won their first-round playoff series, dismissing the Washington Capitals in five games. Then, of course, they faltered, losing out in six to the frisky New York Islanders.  

Historically, in the annals of Bruinly seasons going back to the team’s founding in 1924, Bergeron’s first as captain rates … fairly well. Measured by the percentage of points earned during the regular season, Bergeron’s Bruins (who went 33-16-7 in wins/losses/overtime losses) come in at .652, which ties them for 21st on the chart showing 96 seasons played to date. 

That’s well behind the Bruins best season, 1929-30, when the team compiled a .875 record in Lionel Hitchman’s second year as captain. But it’s better than a whole raft of other Boston seasons, including those in which some of the greatest names in team history took over as captain. 

Nels Stewart’s 1934-35 Bruins registered a .604 record before departing the playoffs in the semi-finals. Red Beattie’s 1936-37 team put together a .552 record, losing out in the quarter-finals. Bobby Bauer oversaw a .525 Bruins season in 1946-47; his Bruins lost in the semi-finals. Eddie Shore? He led Boston to a .521 record in 1935-36 and then out of the post-season in the quarter-finals. Marty Barry and Bill Cowley fared worse still: their respective teams, from 1933-34 and 1944-45 respectively, show points percentages of .427 and .350. Cowley’s team failed to get through the semi-finals; Barry’s missed the playoffs altogether.

Six times the Bruins have won the Stanley Cup in their history; it’s not unreasonable to imagine Patrice Bergeron raising a seventh during his tenure as Boston captain. Until that happens, he can take solace (maybe?) in the fact that the team he plays for actually acknowledges his captaincy.

It’s the least the Bruins could do, of course, though not (for the Bruins) so straightforward as you might think. Because while Boston does celebrate (and proudly) Bergeron’s role as team captain, the team still doesn’t allow that Barry, Stewart, Shore, Beattie, Cowley, and Bauer preceded him in the role. 

Yes, it’s back to that refrain again, which is to say, this one. 

To sum up, quick-like: at some point in the Bruins’ 97-year history, the team has mislaid a prominent chunk of that history, somehow overlooking the captaincies of at least six of their most famous players. Bergeron isn’t the 20th man to captain the Bruins, as the team is content to claim: he’s the 26th (or possibly the 28th).  

Red Beattie captained the Bruins in 1936-37, as noted in a Garden program from that season; according to the team’s erring record, it was Dit Clapper.

It’s not clear when exactly the forgetting originated, just that it’s well-entrenched and, now, widespread: the team’s erroneous record-keeping has become the standard for a bevy of (mostly otherwise) reputable online registers of hockey history. I could go on (and have) about the team’s carelessness when it comes to its own rich past. I took an interest in Bobby Bauer’s unacknowledged captaincy in 2019, following where others, like Bruins historian Kevin Vautour, have gone before. Finding evidence of Bauer’s tenure wasn’t hard, and before long I happened on references to all the others — Barry, Beattie, Shore, Cowley, et al — who’ve been ignored. 

I first contacted the Bruins in December of 2019 to ask about this and (politely) to offer to share my files. I’ve previously quoted the response I got, but it’s worth repeating here. It was Heidi Holland I heard back from, the Bruins’ the team’s director of publications and information, and thereby the gatekeeper of the team’s history, statistical and otherwise, as enshrined in the team’s annual Guide & Record Book.

Focussing on Bobby Bauer’s claim, she wrote:

This question has come up a couple of times over the past several years but unfortunately, I have no way of confirming it. The list of captains from earlier media guides lists John Crawford as captain in that season. The earliest media guide that I have is 1947-48 and Crawford’s bio in that book only says that he has “been captain or assistant captain of the Bruins in recent seasons.” Bauer does not have a bio in that guide.

When the subject first came up, I asked Milt Schmidt (as the only person who was active at that time) if he remembered Bobby being named Boston’s captain and he did not have any recollection that he did.

Fair enough, I guess … if also fairly dismissive of the idea that there just might be proofs out there that go beyond Milt Schmidt’s memory.

News of Bobby Bauer’s appointment reached the pages of Herb Ralby’s Boston’s Globe on October 17 of 1946.

Evidence of the overlooked captains has been out there, of course, for going on 90 years, available for the finding by anyone, including club employees, willing to bother to take the initiative to look for it. I keep coming across references in my archival wanderings, as do others, like Kevin Vautour and Jeff Miclash, a researcher in Burlington, Ontario, who’s working on a book about the Bruins in the 1930s. At this point, we have a regular online marketplace going where we gather to share newfound references to the snubbed captains and roll digital eyes at the Bruins’ ongoing oblivion. It was this past January, as Patrice Bergeron inherited the C, that I piled up the evidence and made my case in that puckstruck.com post of mine. I cc’d that to Heidi Holland and several other interested parties attached to the team without hearing anything back. At the risk of annoying these same people, I got back in touch in July, in the quietude of Boston’s post-season, in the interest of getting the record straightened out in time for the upcoming season. The response, again, was … none. 

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Bruins are doubling down on the institutional inattention to detail that’s prevailed to this point. The end of their willful neglect of this history of theirs might well be on the horizon, even if we can’t see it yet, or access it on our browsers. 

Because here’s the thing: as a new NHL season approaches, the Bruins will be, in the next few weeks, unveiling their 2021-22 Guide & Record Book. It’s entirely possible that the team has tidied up the register of captains altogether quietly, on their own, righting the record that’s been wrong.

I’ll be happy to see it; I’ll salute their diligence. Meet me back here when — if — that happens. 

Meantime, I’m happy to barge back into the question of just how the Bruins came to not remember that Bobby Bauer and Eddie Shore et al. served the team as captains. The answer is probably lost for good, actually — but maybe can we narrow in to take a look at the timeline of the neglect?   

In that e-mail of hers, Heidi Holland mentioned the 1947-48 Bruins guide as the earliest edition she’s seen. That’s the one with Milt Schmidt on the cover, proudly wearing his C in the centre of his sweater. I haven’t tracked down a copy of that one, but I do have in hand the guide published ahead of the previous season, 1946-47 — that is, the one over which Bobby Bauer presided as captain. 

It’s hard to discern just how involved the team was in this producing this 64-page booklet that bears the subtitle “The complete story of a great hockey team” on its opening page. Compiled by a pair of Boston Globe sportswriters, Harold Kaese and Herb Ralby, it was promoted and sold through the paper (35 cents a copy, plus another five for postage), I’m surmising that it was a Bruin production through and through. I think it may be the very first Bruin guide to have been published, though I can’t confirm that. It’s packed with player profiles, historical rosters, team records — all the usual fodder you’d expect, if not (notably) a comprehensive listing of team captains. 

There’s no mention, in fact, of any captain in this ’46-47 guide. As the Bruins erringly tell it, defenceman John (a.k.a. Jack) Crawford skippered the team that season, continuing in the role he’d had the previous year. As I’ve noted before, Bauer had changed his mind about retiring in the fall of 1946, rejoining the team for one more campaign. On October 16, he was named captain of the team.

The Bruins guidebook pictured above was published a month later, on November 13. I’m speculating here, but my guess is that it was already in production when Bauer was crowned. That would explain why his captaincy isn’t mentioned.

Game for a little more esoterica? I thought so. The NHL had an official guide of its own in the 1940s. Overseen by a former newspaperman from Vancouver, Jim Hendy, it had been keeping scores and stats since the early 1930s. By the start of the 1947-48 season, it had split into two publications: Who’s Who In Hockey, which compiled active player data, and the Official Guide and Record Book, overseeing the NHL as a whole as well as minor and amateur leagues. 

It’s the latter of these booklets that’s of interest here: specifically, the write-up on page 37 and the photograph following on page 56. The former commemorates the winner of the 1947 Lady Byng Trophy: “Bobby Bauer, Boston Bruins’ great little captain.” 

The latter, reproduced here, shows Bauer front and centre, proudly wearing the C denoting his rank between the 1 and the 7 on his sweater. As previously noted, the 1946-47 season was the first in which letters were added to NHL sweaters to denote captains and their alternates. Bauer’s deputies show their As here: Murray Henderson standing tall beside coach Dit Clapper and, seated three places to Bauer’s left, then-former captain Jack Crawford. 

One last (for now) thread from the fabric. Fast-forwarding through the decades, we find the Bruins heading into the NHL’s 1973-74 season looking forward to their 50th anniversary. This is duly noted on the cover of the team guide they published that fall:

A gallery of remarkable hockey players on that cover, you’ll agree. Of the 11 depicted, all but four (goaltenders Frank Brimsek and Tiny Thompson, along with Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito) served with distinction as Bruin captains.

And yet two of them shown here — Bill Cowley and Eddie Shore — are still (then as now) missing from the historical record.

Their captaincies, along with those of Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Red Beattie, and Bobby Bauer, are plain facts, despite what the Bruins recall. What the ’73-74 guide tells us is that the neglect that still seems to be in place goes back at least 48 years. The proof that the team was getting it as wrong in 1973 as it was in 2021 is on page 38:

Error Page: Boston’s overlooked captains have been missing from the record for at least 48 years, dating back to the team’s 1973-74 Official Guide.

What this may also illuminate is the how — and the who — of just what happened here. I don’t mean to be casting blame, or getting anybody into historical trouble, but, well, um, the man in charge of the ’73-74 guide was, somewhat remarkably, one of the men who’d collaborated on that ’46-47 edition, 27 years earlier. 

Herb Ralby was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe starting in the 1930s, when he was in his early 20s, and he was on the job until 1970, when he left journalism to join the Bruins full-time as the team’s director of publicity. (He died in 1994 at the age of 81.) Ralby was on the scene, that’s to say, going back all the way to the time Eddie Shore’s tenure as captain, and even reported on Bobby Bauer’s tenure (below), well before he took charge of — and didn’t repair — the Bruins’ not-so-well-tended history that nobody since has bothered to set right.  

Stitches In Time: News you can use from a Herb Ralby column in the Boston Globe from November of 1946, a quarter century before he became the Bruins’ director of publicity.

 

not to scale

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Antechamber: By the winter of 1932, eight goaltenders had guarded the Boston Bruins’ net in the course of their nine NHL seasons. On a Thursday of this date that year, Tiny Thompson became the first of them to record 30 regular-season shutouts when he blanked the Black Hawks 1-0 in Chicago. Starting into his fifth season in the league that year, he’d had three more in the playoffs to that point. Thompson’s regular-season total of 74 career shutouts is the most in Bruins’ history, ahead of Tuukka Rask (50) and Frank Brimsek (35). He had a total of seven career shutouts. Showing off his paltry pads, Thompson is pictured here at the Boston Garden in 1937. (Image: © Richard Merrill, Boston Public Library)

mr. zero

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Let Me Be Frank: Born on a Friday of this very date in 1913, Frank Brimsek defended the Boston net for nine years between 1938 and 1949, earning the nickname Mr. Zero while he was at it. His stay in Boston was interrupted in 1943 when he joined  the U.S. Coast Guard in their war effort. He served both in the Pacific theatre of operations and on Maryland ice, playing with the Coast Guard Cutters when they took up in the EAHL, based in Baltimore. His teammates included several fellow NHLers, including Bob, Dill, Art Coulter and Johnny Mariucci. After returning to the Bruins, Brimsek  played a final NHL season, 1949-50, with the Chicago Black Hawks. Above, circa 1938ish, Brimsek stretches his stuff at Boston Garden. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

bonnie prince chuck

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Sew-Sew: Rangers’ doctor Dr. Vincent Nardiello stitches up long-suffering New York goaltender Charlie Rayner in February of 1951.

Born in Sutherland, Saskatchewan, on a Wednesday of this very date in 1920, Charlie Rayner played a couple of seasons with the New York/Brooklyn Americans before he made his mark with the New York Rangers through the late 1940s and into the ’50s. For all his heroics in those years, they were mostly strugglesome for the Rangers, though the team did make it to the Stanley Cup final in 1950, the year Rayner won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s MVP, outpolling Ted Kennedy and Maurice Richard. He was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1973.

To play goal in the early decades of the NHL was to be cut, contused, and concussed, by even by the painful standards of the profession, Rayner stands out for his suffering. In a feature published midway through the 1950-51 NHL campaign, The New York Post noted that Rayner had already been carried from the ice eight times to date.

“So far this season, he’s lost five front teeth and required a total of 20 stitches.” Several of the latter were applied in an October game at the Montreal Forum, when Rayner was cut once (on the nose) and then a second time (on the back of his head) by skates belonging to Canadiens forward Frank King.

All in all, the Post calculated, Rayner’s 12 years of hockey goaling had cost him four broken noses and “innumerable stitches” along with fractures of the jaw and cheekbone. It was a knee injury that put an end to his NHL career, in the winter of 1953, when he was 32. A 23-year-old Gump Worsley was his successor in the New York net.

Down And Out: Rangers’ staff attend to Charlie Rayner after a shot by Boston defenceman Jack Crawford felled him at Madison Square Garden in November of 1947. The referee leaning down is Bill Chadwick; linesman George Hayes is beside him. Boston goaltender Frank Brimsek looks on at left along with teammates Joe Carveth (9) and Milt Schmidt (15). The gloveless Ranger looks to me like Alf Pike, except that he wasn’t with New York that year. Could be … Neil Colville?

 

once and for all

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Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on a Monday of this date in 1916, Nick Damore did yeoman’s work as a minor-league goaltender in a career that spanned three decades and more than 700 games. He made just one appearance in the NHL, in the winter of 1942, when Boston’s defending Stanley Cup champions summoned him from the AHL’s Hershey Bears for Sunday-night duty at the Garden against the Montreal Canadiens. The night before, in Montreal, the Bruins’ 26-year-old mainstay Frank Brimsek appeared in his 194th consecutive game, holding Canadiens to a 2-2 tie that overtime couldn’t settle. It was in the last minute of the extra frame that night that Brimsek dove for the puck as Montreal’s Murph Chamberlain swung his stick. Brimsek snagged the former, but with a cost: the latter cut and fractured his nose.

Brimsek finished the game, but ceded the net the following night to 25-year-old Damore. Bruins’ captain Dit Clapper was displeased that Damore played in his maroon-coloured Hershey hockey pants, but otherwise the operation was a success. Damore’s teammates ran up a 5-0 lead before Montreal managed to answer back. Toe Blake, Johnny Quilty, and Buddy O’Connor all ended up beating him on the night, which ended as a 7-3 Bruins’ win. “Pudgy Nicky Damore,” the Boston Globe’s Gerry Moore blithely dubbed him for his trouble. Two nights later, “Frigid Frank Brimsek” was back in the Bruins’ net, freezing out the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs in a goalless tie.

(Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

maroosh

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Now Hear This: John Mariucci makes his point with an unidentified member of the post-war Montreal Canadiens. That’s Chicago coach Johnny Gottselig looking in from behind (the second hatted man from the right); Montreal defenceman Kenny Reardon is the Canadian interceding on Mariucci’s right. The other Montrealer looks to me to be numbered 15, which means he could be George Allen or Bob Fillion or … Floyd Curry? The Chicago player nearest the camera could be a 3 but might be an 8, so who knows: Joe Cooper, possibly?

“To be sure there was hockey before Mariucci. But it was Mariucci who made hockey a game for more than Canadians. It was Mariucci who, by force of his play and his personality, made the game a Minnesota game, and then a U.S. game, as well. Pee Wee leagues and summer camps and a state high school hockey tournament and Brotens and Herbies and gold medals … all those things, which have become so much a part of Minnesota’s culture, can be traced to the toughest member of the Hay Street gang, John Mariucci.”

That was Doug Grow writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, paying tribute to the man they called Maroosh — also the godfather of Minnesota hockey —in the days following his death, at the age of 70, in 1987. A long-serving coach of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, Mariucci also steered the U.S. team to a silver medal at the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy. He spent his latter years managing and assisting with the coaching of the Minnesota North Stars.

To mention that he was born on a Monday of this date in 1916 in Eveleth, Minnesota, is to circle back to Hay Street, where he grew up, and where the Mariuccis’ neighbours included the LoPrestis (Sam tended goal for the Chicago Black Hawks) and the Brimseks (Frank, a Hall-of-Famer, made his name with the Boston Bruins).

After a late start — by some accounts, Mariucci didn’t play organized hockey until he was 17 — he starred at hockey and football at the University of Minnesota before joining the Black Hawks in 1940. The adjectives his play as an NHLer generated include rugged and feisty and bruising, as well as the associated phrase never one to miss a bodycheck. “Mariucci Thinks It’s Silly To Fight; He Has Been In About 100 Battles,” ran the headline of a 1948 profile when he was playing for the AHL St. Louis Flyers.

“I’m really sorry every time I get into a fight,” he volunteered, “and I swear I’ll never fight again. … But I hope no opposing player takes advantage of me. I won’t stand for it.”

Top Hawk: Mariucci with the C (and a big old pair of gauntlets)  during the 1947-48 season, his last in the NHL.

His NHL career only lasted five seasons, interrupted as it was by the two wartime years he served with the U.S. Coast Guard. He did play some EAHL hockey in the service —Frank Brimsek was a teammate — with the formidable Cutters.

Back with the Black Hawks after the war, the quality of his leadership saw him named captain of the team. That was a distinction in its own right, of course, and press reports at the time suggested that Mariucci’s appointment was even more notable since he was the first American-born player to serve as captain of an NHL team. That wasn’t the case, in fact: Billy Burch, the man named as the New York Americans’ first captain in 1925, was born in Yonkers, New York — though it’s true, too, that he moved with his family at a young age to Toronto, where his hockey skills were mostly refined.

Not Quite So: The Blackhawks’ 2019-20 media guide errs on Mariucci’s dates.

There is a more noteworthy glitch in what passes as the official record regarding Mariucci’s captaincy that could do with some correcting. Could we fix that, somebody? Many of the standard sources you might find yourself consulting — including both the Blackhawks’ own website and the team’s 2019-20 Media Guide — assert that Mariucci was captain for two seasons, 1945-46 and 1947-48.

That’s not so. The first of those, 1945-46, did see Mariucci return to Chicago ranks from the Coast Guard, but it was left winger Red Hamill, a Toronto-born Chicago veteran making a return from a year on duty (and playing hockey) with the Canadian Army, who was elected captain that season, succeeding Clint Smith.

Hamill continued as captain the following year. And he was still with the team in October of 1947 when Mariucci supplanted him. That was Mariucci’s last year with Chicago and in the NHL: in the fall of ’48, when he was 32, the Black Hawks released him, and Gaye Stewart took over as captain. That’s when Mariucci joined the St. Louis Flyers of the AHL. He was named captain there; press reports from the time also note that he’d be doing some work, too, in his new Midwest home as a scout for the Black Hawks.

Right Said Red: The Chicago Tribune noted Red Hamill’s appointment as Chicago’s first post-war captain in October of 1945.

and the band played paree

/ puckstruck

It was on a Sunday of this date in 1939 that the Boston Bruins upended the Toronto Maple Leafs by a score of 3-1 at Boston Garden to win their second Stanley Cup, with Roy Conacher scored the winning goal to wrap up the best-of-seven series 4 to 1. “The scenes following the sounding of the final bell almost beggar description,” Victor Jones wrote in his dispatch for the Boston Globe. “Conny Smythe hopped the dasher and ran over to congratulate Arthur H. Ross, while the players shook hands all around, firecrackers rent the air, fans screamed and shouted, while the band broke in to ‘Paree.’” NHL president Frank Calder presented the Cup to Ross, who handed it to captain Cooney Weiland. “The trophy was lugged off to the Bruins’ dressing room,” Jones went on, “where Sam Simon, the Garden concessionaire, lost no time in filling it and refilling it and refilling it with the finest vintage champagne.” This image of that night doesn’t catch any of that, unfortunately. Standing from left to right are goaltender Frank Brimsek, Jack Crawford, Eddie Shore, and (on the other side) Jack Portland, and Ray Getliffe. Arrayed in front, from the right, are Conacher, Mel Hill, Red Hamill, Cooney Weiland, Woody Dumart, Bobby Bauer, Dit Clapper, and Bill Cowley. At the fore, that’s a single-skated Milt Schmidt alongside Gord Pettinger and Flash Hollett.

(Top image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose

/ puckstruck

Eddie Shore was 36 in 1939, playing out the last few years of his spectacular career as a defenceman for the Boston Bruins. He was into his 13th and penultimate season for Boston that year, making a salary of $7,000 (the league maximum), which works out to about $130,000 in today’s dollars. In the spring of the year, he’d help the Bruins win their second Stanley Cup, their first since 1929. This day in that year, it so happens, is the infamous one on which the Montreal Maroons stopped short of killing Shore.

Almost a decade later, Shore’s brand of hockey was as physical and unyielding as ever. He was, as ever, a punishing and occasionally vicious opponent. He suffered, too, for his sins; the story of the bandaging seen here attests to that. It dates to March of ’39, when the Bruins were battling the New York Rangers in a Stanley Cup semi-final series.

Having topped the NHL’s regular-season standings, the Bruins only played a single playoff series that year on the way to the championship round. Under the league’s quirky playoff format, they rode a bye to the semi-final against the second-place Rangers while four teams that had finished lower down in the table battled through two rounds on the other side of the bracket. Dispensing with the Rangers, Boston went on to beat the Toronto Maple Leafs to earn the Cup.

But that was later. The Bruins/Rangers series was the first in the NHL’s 22-year history to go to seven games. It’s the fourth game we’re concerned with here, played on Tuesday, March 28, 1939, at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. The Rangers prevailed on the night by a score of 2-1, with left winger Lynn Patrick scoring the winner shorthanded in the second period.

In those years, the Rangers featured a plurality of Patricks. Father Lester was still coaching and GM’ing a team while he counted on Lynn, 25, and his defence-playing brother, 23-year-old Murray — a.k.a. Muzz — in his line-up.

It was Muzz who featured in the game’s first period, along with Shore, when the hockey gave way to chaos.

Newspaper accounts trot out all the old epithets: melee, pitched battle, and free-for-all. Canadian Press called it a “five-star punching bee,” while the Associated Press went with “one of the largest and bloodiest fights in a good many years. The New York Times settled on “the mass fist-fight.”

To sum up: it was just another old-time instance of hockey players swinging sticks and fists to concuss one another, after which a few penalties were called, repairs more or rendered, and everybody carried on despite the damage done.

Melee: The fracas unfolds. Shore is number 2, with Muzz Patrick in front of him. Number 8 is Jack Portland, 16 is Red Hamill. Boston goaltender Frank Brimsek stands alongside referee Mickey Ion.

It all got going halfway through the period, when the score was tied 1-1. Joseph Nichols from the Times testified that the situation began mildly enough with Bruins’ defenceman Portland meeting pesky Rangers forward Phil Watson in a corner back of the Bruins’ net. But let’s go to the eyewitness account that Lynn Patrick gave many years later:

I can see it now: Jack Portland and Phil Watson got into a high-sticking duel down in the 49th Street — 8th Avenue corner of the rink.

Shore, who never liked Watson anyway, went charging into it. As soon as Muzz saw that, he went in and pulled Shore off. As he did, Eddie swung at him. Muzz let his big one go … booooom. Shore was out for the rest of the period, but he came back wearing a lot of plaster across his face.

Victor Jones of the Boston Globe saw it from a different perspective. His account went like this:

… there’s no doubt that the Rangers started the jam and that they concentrated their best efforts on Shore.

The original battlers were Jack Portland and Phil Watson, who engaged in a bumping and high-sticking duel in the corner.

That blew over and Portland was skating away when [Bryan] Hextall climbed up his back. Shore then went over to aid Portland in his affair with the two Ranger forwards and this was the signal for Murray Patrick and Art Coulter, the Ranger defence pair, to skate the length of the ice and gang up on Shore.

Eddie of course got all the worst of it. He’s no match for Murray Patrick, former Canadian boxing champion, with his fists. He was outweighed 20 or 30 pounds and for a while seemed to be fighting the whole team single-handed.

Mickey Ion was the referee. He fell to the ice, or was knocked down, twice before the fracas was over. Restored to his skates, Ion assigned six major penalties, to Shore, Jack Portland, and Gord Pettinger of the Bruins, as well as to New York’s Phil Watson, Muzz Patrick, and Dutch Hiller.

Shore went to the dressing room for medical attention, so Ray Getliffe sat on the penalty bench in his stead.

Muzz Patrick in 1935, when he won the Dominion Heavyweight boxing title.

As mentioned, Patrick did have a particular punching pedigree: in 1935, in Edmonton, he boxed his way to the Dominion Heavyweight crown with an upset TKO of Tommy Osborne, the challenger from Quebec. A contemporary account of the championship bout is as instructive as it is dispiriting, an historical case study for retrospective concussion spotters and students of punch-drunk syndrome alike.

Four years later, in New York in ’39, Shore was almost certainly concussed when he returned to the ice midway through the second period. “I told him not to play any more after it happened,” Boston coach Art Ross later said. “But he insisted on getting out there again. He was fighting mad.”

Edmonton Eddie’s dented and bent prow was Harold Parrott’s jovial description in the next morning’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “It was smeared over on the right side of Eddie’s face by three Muzz Patrick punches, and only a band of adhesive tape held it back in place when Shore returned to the wars.

Papers in New York, Boston, and beyond would spend the next several days cultivating a discussion of just how Shore had sustained his damage. “Patrick didn’t do that,” the man himself told Parrott, gesturing to his nose, which he said had been shattered “for about the tenth time.”

“Watson hit me with the butt-end of his stick even before the scrapping started.”

But Muzz Patrick was adamant. “I hit him three clean shots. I felt his nose give way.”

Hy Hurwitz of the Boston Globe later got Patrick on the record regarding his erstwhile boxing career. He tracked him down in the coffee shop of the Manger Hotel, next to Boston Garden, where Patrick started off by saying, “I’m a hockey player, not a fighter.”

“Sure,” he said, “I used to box as an amateur, but I haven’t fought since 1935, and the fight the other night was the first I’ve had since I quit boxing.”

Following up his Canadian heavyweight crown with several other titles, he’d considered trying to represent his country at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He was having trouble with his own nose, though, and underwent surgery for a deviated septum.

So that was what ended his career in the ring?

“Oh, no,” Muzz Patrick told Hurwitz, “my mother was against it. She never liked it from the start. It was all right for me to come home from a hockey game with seven stitches in my head, but if I ever came home from a fight with a little black eye, it was terrible. I gave it up for her.”

Aftermath: Shore adjusts his helmet next to referee Ion. That’s Ranger goaltender Bert Gardiner restraining (I think) Brimsek. The Rangers in front of him include Muzz Patrick, whom Boston number 11, Gord Pettinger, is about to punch. Jack Portland, number 8, is all done.

(Top image © Arthur Griffin Courtesy of the Griffin Museum of Photography; photograph may not be reproduced in any form per the copyright holder. All rights reserved.)