Hal Winkler

opening bell: no quit in new york’s 1926 debut

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New York Rangers captain Bill Cook (right) flanks coach and manager Lester Patrick alongside Frank Boucher on the ice at the Chicago Stadium in November of 1934. It was on a Tuesday night eight years earlier that these three featured in the Rangers’ very first regular-season NHL game at Madison Square Garden as the brand-new home team dispensed with the visiting Montreal Maroons by a score of 1-0 on  the night of November 17, 1926 in front of a crowd of 13,000.

It was Cook who scored the first goal in Rangers’ history 96 years ago, beating Clint Benedict in the Montreal net in the second period for the game’s decisive goal. Hal Winkler recorded the shutout for New York. Referee Lou Marsh wielded a bell on the night, notably, instead of a whistle. He put it to use in the third period when the famously peaceable Boucher got into the only fight of his long career, clashing with Montreal’s Bill Phillips. Both players got major penalties for their troubles, and each was fined $15. Boucher was badly cut on the neck in the melee and had to leave the game for repairs.

 

(Image: SDN-077304, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

calgary hal

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Hal Winkler

Tiger King: The bald-pated custodian is a phrase sometimes associated with Hal Winkler when he used to play, back in the 1920s. Born in Gretna, Manitoba, on a Tuesday of this date in 1894, he was tender of nets for the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos when they lost out to the Ottawa Senators in the 1923 Stanley Cup finals. By the time he took this pose, above, it would have been 1925 or so, when he was with the WCHL/WHL Calgary Tigers. He got to the NHL in 1926, when he joined the New York Rangers at 32. With Lorne Chabot proving himself in the New York nets, Winkler was sold to the Boston Bruins that winter. He played only a season-and-a-half for the Bruins before Tiny Thompson took over, but Winkler was so much admired in Boston that the team made sure to include his name on the Stanley Cup they won in 1929, after a season in which Winkler appeared in not a single NHL game. With a few more minor-league campaigns notched on his pads, he retired in 1931, whereupon he returned to Manitoba to run a mink ranch. (Image: Oregon Historical Society. Oregon Journal Negative Collection, Lot 1368; Box 371; 0371N275. Used with permission.)

dental appointment: doc stewart takes to the boston net, 1924

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B List: The 1925-26 Boston Bruins line up, from left, Sprague Cleghorn, Sailor Herbert, Gerry Geran, Carson Cooper, Red Stuart, Norm Shay, Stan Jackson (I think), Hago Harrington, Dr. Charles Stewart.

Born in Carleton Place, Ontario, on a Wednesday of this same date in 1895, Dr. Charles Stewart was the second goaltender to take the net in the history of the Boston Bruins, making his debut on Christmas Day of 1924, after things didn’t quite work out with the team’s original goaler, Hec Fowler.

Stewart was a dentist, which explains his nickname, Doc, as well as the fact that he played in the Senior OHA for the Toronto Dentals, and (also) that he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Dental Corps towards the end of the First World War. In and around and after his hockey career, Stewart had a dental practice in Hamilton, Ontario.

The good Doc lines up with Boston for a 1926 game against Ottawa.

It was to Kingston that Bruins coach and manager Art Ross tracked Stewart in December of 1924. Hec Fowler’s demise is a whole other story: let’s just say that seven games into the Bruins’ debut season, he had worn out his welcome. As well as drilling and capping teeth in Hamilton, Stewart was playing for the local OHA Tigers that winter, and Montreal’s Gazette reported that while Ross was offering him $2,500 to make the jump from amateur to pro ranks, as well paying living expenses in Boston, and the rent on his Hamilton practice, Stewart was holding out for $1,000 more.

I can’t say for certain what they settled on, just that Stewart was in Montreal on the 25th to defend the Bruins’ net against the Montreal Canadiens. Boston lost, 0-5, though Stewart’s effort was roundly praised. He and his Bruins had to wait another five games, until January 10, to celebrate his first win — still only the second in Bruins’ history — when Boston returned to Montreal to eke out a 3-2 overtime decision.

The Bruins finished dead last in the NHL that year, but things did improve the following season, 1925-26, when Doc Stewart went 16-14-4 to help the team to a fourth-place finish in the seven-team NHL. (They still didn’t make the playoffs.)

Stewart played half of the Bruins’ regular-season games the following year, 1926-27, his last in the NHL. That was a season that saw Boston go all the way to the Stanley Cup final, though they lost in four games to the Ottawa Senators. Stewart’s time in Boston was over by then: he played no part in those playoffs. By that point, he’d been supplanted by Hal Winkler.

gone wrong, one on one: a short history of playoff penalty-shot nonfeasance

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Before The Oil: Duke Keats, star of Edmonton’s Eskimos from the old WCHL and a future Hall-of-Famer, out for a country ramble during the 1921-22 season. In 1923, he missed a penalty shot in the Stanley Cup final, but he wasn’t the only one. (Image: Glenbow Archives, NC-6-8095)

Conor Sheary shot wide; when it was his turn, Jonathan Drouin tried for a backhand, but the puck wasn’t interested, and wandered wide.

The Montreal Canadiens exceeded the Pittsburgh Penguins last night in Toronto, 3-2 in overtime, with each team failing to score on a penalty shot. Sheary’s chance came in the third period, while Drouin failed to score in overtime as the NHL resumed its 2019-20 season with a flurry of Stanley Cup Qualifiers yesterday.

In the bold new world of the NHL’s emergency overhaul of its season, we’re not quite into the playoffs, yet — unless you’re talking about statistics and records-keeping. In that case, yes. As the league stipulates in its Return To Play manual, all these August games, round-robin and qualifying-round, “are considered part of the 2020 post-season,” and will go into the books as such.

Got it? Ready, then, for an historical note on the last time a playoff game featured a pair of penalty shots?

Good.

It was 97 years ago, since you’re wondering, on a Thursday at the end of March in 1923, in the first game of the Stanley Cup final.

That night, three penalty shots were awarded and duly taken. All three were failed efforts.

Vancouver was the scene, although (like last night) both of the teams involved were only visiting. In those years, up until 1926, the Stanley Cup final pitted the NHL champions against a western counterpart. In 1923, that meant the mighty Ottawa Senators were playing the Edmonton team from the old WCHL, who were called the Eskimos long before the CFL arrived in town.

The NHL didn’t adopt the penalty shot until 1934, but out west, where the canny Patrick brothers ran the PCHL, it had been in effect (for the WCHL, too) since 1921. The way it was then, when teams from rival leagues played for the Stanley Cup, they alternated rulebooks, game by game. The opening game of the ’23 final was played under western rules. Mickey Ion was the referee.

Ottawa prevailed that night, winning 2-1 in overtime thanks to a goal by Cy Denneny. Before that they’d failed to convert two penalty shots, while Edmonton missed one.

They did it differently, in those years. Instead of rushing in from centre-ice the way Sheary and Drouin did last night, a player 1923 saw the puck placed on one of three three-foot circles that were spread out across the ice in what we’d call the high slot, about 35 feet from the net. The shot would be taken from whichever circle was closest to where the infraction had taken place. Players had a choice: they could take the shot standing still, or they could make a skating start, building up speed as they approached the puck. They had to shoot it; carrying the puck to the net wasn’t allowed.

In 1923, Ottawa papers noted that the Senators’ disadvantage when it came to penalty shots, “something they were entirely unfamiliar with.”

In the first period, Ottawa defenceman Georges Boucher was on the rush when an Edmonton counterpart, Bob Trapp, tripped him. Ottawa sent in their leading scorer, Cy Denneny, to take the shot. Edmonton goaltender foiled him: he “dropped his stick,” the Ottawa Journal noted, “and caught the puck nicely.”

Later in the period, after Trapp took down Denneny, another Ottawa winger, Punch Broadbent, stepped up to take the penalty shot. “Although he directed it straight as a gun barrel,” Ottawa’s Citizen reported, “Winkler blocked it.”

In the third, up 1-0, Edmonton got its chance at a free shot when Ottawa defenceman King Clancy upended Eskimo winger Johnny Shepard. Edmonton sent in their top goalscorer to try his luck, the great Duke Keats, but his shot from the right-side spot didn’t trouble Ottawa goaltender Clint Benedict.

Back in Alberta, fans despairing after Denneny’s overtime winner put Ottawa ahead in the best-of-three final awoke next morning to find a column under Keats’ byline in the Edmonton Journal asking them not to worry. The Eskimos, he guaranteed, weren’t beaten yet — “not by a darn sight.”

It would be good to see something similar in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today from Conor Sheary, though it doesn’t seem to have materialized yet. Or maybe it should be another one for the Journal in Edmonton, this time under Connor McDavid’s name.

Of course, for Duke Keats in 1923, it didn’t work out so well. The Senators would wrap up the series the following day, that March, shutting out Edmonton 1-0 on Punch Broadbent’s goal to claim the Stanley Cup.

hats off to hap holmes

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Only two players in hockey’s history have won the Stanley Cup four times with four different teams. Jack Marshall, a centreman in the game’s early decades, was the first to do it, in 1914, when he aided the Toronto Blueshirts’ championship effort. That was actually Marshall’s sixth Cup — his others came with the Winnipeg Victorias, Montreal HC (two), and Montreal Wanderers (two). Following his lead was the goaltender on that ’14 Blueshirts team, Harry Hap Holmes, pictured above, who died in 1941 on a Friday of this date at the age of 53.

Holmes’ subsequent Cups came in 1917 when he steered the PCHL Seattle Metropolitans past the NHA’s Montreal Canadiens. He was in the nets the very next year for Toronto when they were the first NHL team to raise the Cup, then won again in 1925, when the WCHL’s Victoria Cougars were the last non-NHL team to claim it. His remarkable career wrapped up in the late ’20s in the livery he’s wearing here, that of the NHL’s Detroit Cougars.

In 1972, Hap Holmes was inducted, posthumously, into the Hockey Hall of Fame in distinguished company, joining Gordie Howe, Jean Béliveau, Bernie Geoffrion, Hooley Smith and builder Weston Adams, Sr. in that year’s class.

About the cap: hockey columnist Vern DeGeer used to tell tales of the way the game was played in the rough-and-ready Canadian west, one of them having to do with the Saskatoon Arena and a couple of the goaltenders who visited, Victoria’s Holmes and Hal Winkler, who played for Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary’s Tigers before later joining the Boston Bruins. Both were balding, and both (said DeGeer) were forced to don caps at the Arena with their “old-style hanging galleries.” He explained:

The galleries, located at the ends of the rink, projected directly above the goalies. To those customers who favoured these parking spots, the shining bald domes of Winkler and Holmes presented tempting targets. These boys were known as The Legion of the Dirty Dozen. Membership in the Legion was voluntary.

The only requirements were a quid of tobacco, capable jaws, and ordinary marksmanship. Reward for a direct hit on either bald pate was a healthy slap on the back from other members.

Years later, Holmes recalled his assailants.

“Dirty Dozen!” chuckled Hap. “You mean Dirty Five Hundred. I swear that some of those fellows used to load their tobacco with bird shot. After a game my head often carried so many lumps, the boys claimed I had an attack of chickenpox. My sweater would look as if it had been dragged through a tub of cylinder oil.”

“Those roughnecks became so expert at their business that even a cap didn’t save me at times. They used to fire at my neck. I don’t think they ever missed. Why, it was even said that a fellow was subject to suspension from the gallery if he failed more than twice in a single game.”