Johnny Bucyk

can’t stop, won’t stop

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Stop It: Boston goaltender Eddie Johnston gets in the way of J.C. Tremblay’s shot at the Forum in March of 1967. That’s Bobby Orr to the left and, in front of Tremblay, Bruin defenceman Joe Watson. Yvan Cournoyer is the other Canadien on the scene, tussling with Boston’s Ron Stewart. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

The bustling Boston Bruins, who lead the NHL standings by a stretch, visit the Bell Centre tonight to play the Canadiens, who don’t, not even close: middling Montreal sits in 26th place, 35 points back of their Beantown rivals. It was another story on the Wednesday night of March 15, 1967, when the Bruins, last on the ladder in the six-team NHL, stopped in at the old Forum for an 11-2 pasting.

“Every time I looked up, they were shooting at me,” Boston goaltender Eddie Johnston said afterwards. He stayed in the whole game, facing 43 shots in all, including this one from Canadiens’ defenceman J.C. Tremblay, who finished the night with a goal and an assist and was deemed by his coach, Toe Blake, to have played his best game of the season. He praised his centremen, too, Jean Béliveau, Ralph Backstrom, and Henri Richard. “But the Bruins,” Blake added, “weren’t checking.”

The pick of the Bostonese, according to the Gazette’s Pat Curran? That would be 20-year-old rookie defenceman Bobby Orr, on the left here, who took nine shots on Montreal’s rookie goaltender Rogatien Vachon. Bruins’ captain Johnny Bucyk did manage to make some history of this otherwise woeful night, notching a goal and an assist to give him 538 career points as a Bruin. With that, he nudged ahead of Bill Cowley on the team’s all-time scoring list, in behind Milt Schmidt’s 575.

Bucyk would, in shortish order, surpass Schmidt, of course. As of today, he stands second in the points ledger of all-time Bruins with 1,339, behind Ray Bourque’s 1,506. Still-active Bruins who are high on that list are Patrice Bergeron (in third place with 1,019); Brad Marchand (seventh, 839); David Krejci (ninth, 767), and (between Schmidt, in 14th place, and Cowley, in 16th), David Pastrnak (15th, 569).

 

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.

leo boivin, 1931—2021

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Happy to oblige photographer Louis Jaques, captain Leo Boivin smiled for his camera at the end of December, 1963, but the truth is that his Boston Bruins were in a bad patch, losers of five games in a row.

Saddened to hear of Boivin’s death today, at the age of 90. Born in Prescott, Ontario, in August of 1931, he went on to play 19 seasons as an NHL defenceman, serving time with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Minnesota North Stars as well as with the Bruins. Appointed Boston’s 17th captain in ’63, he wore the Bruin C for three seasons. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1986. As a coach Leo Boivin steered the St. Louis Blues for parts of two seasons in the 1970s.

That winter of ’63, the Bruins’ five-game spiral included two losses to the Toronto Maple Leafs, starting with a Christmas-Day rout, 5-1, at the Boston Garden in a game in which Frank Mahovlich scored two goals.

In Toronto on the 28th, Johnny Bower shut them out 2-0. Bruins coach Milt Schmidt wasn’t pleased, of course. He was giving speeches behind closed doors and, in the press, looking to players like Johnny Bucyk to step up. “Bucyk is a guy who could do a lot for us, if he puts his mind to it,” Schmidt was saying. “He just has to go out there and punish himself. He has to work harder and quit taking that big skate. A forward has to take it out of himself with stops and starts to get anywhere. There’s no easy way.”

After Toronto, the Bruins went to Detroit where Schmidt moved Boivin from the defence onto Bucyk’s wing in an effort to keep Gordie Howe under wraps. The Bruins lost again. “We’re hitting a lot of posts,” Schmidt said, “but we’re not scoring those goals.” The new year brought some respite: on January 1, back home, they managed a 3-3 tie with the Montreal Canadiens. No goals for Bucyk, and no game for Leo Boivin: he was out of the line-up with strep throat.

(Photo: Louis Jaques, Library and Archives Canada/e002343751)

 

fred stanfield, 1944—2021

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Saddened to hear the news that former Boston Bruins centreman Fred Stanfield has died at the age of 77. Born in Toronto in 1944, he broke into the NHL with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1964 before he was traded (along with Phil Esposito and Ken Hodge) to the Bruins in 1967 in exchange for Pit Martin, Gilles Marotte, and Jack Norris. In Boston, he often lined up with Johnnys Mackenzie and Bucyk, and in so doing, piled up six successive 20-goal seasons, aiding in a pair of Bruin Stanley Cup championships, in 1970 and ’72. He played two seasons with the Minnesota North Stars and parts of four others with the Sabres in Buffalo before he stowed his skates in 1978.

four-score and 50 years ago: bobby soared as boston won the 1970 stanley cup

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Show And Tell: Bruins’ captain Johnny Bucyk shows off the Stanley Cup to the Boston Garden faithful on Sunday, May 10, 1970, after Bobby Orr’s inimitable overtime goal won the team their first NHL championship since 1941. (Image: Brearley Collection, Boston Public Library)

Boston Bruins’ fans won’t soon forget the most famous goal to have been scored in the old Garden, but just in case there’s an 800-pound statue of Bobby Orr flying bronzely through across the concourse in front of the rink the nowadays Bruins play in, when they’re playing, the TD Garden. It was 50 years ago today, on another Sunday, Mother’s Day of 1970, that Orr scored the memorable overtime goal, just prior to take-off, that put paid to the St. Louis Blues and won the Bruins their first Stanley Cup since 1941.

Fans of that famous goal and/or of the unforgettable image that Boston Record-American photographer Ray Lussier snapped of it have plenty to keep them busy this anniversary weekend.

I recommend Dan Robson’s new oral history of the goal at The Athletic, where you’ll hear from Orr himself along with Derek Sanderson, Phil Esposito, Bruins coach Harry Sinden, and his counterpart from St. Louis, Scotty Bowman.

Also? At NHL.com, Dave Stubbs has a piece previewing an NHL Network Originals documentary that’s debuting tonight. The 1970 Boston Bruins: Big, Bad & Bobby is on-screen tonight across North America (8 p.m. ET on Sportsnet and the NHL Network).

In the flurry of remembrances, would we note how, 50 years ago, in the immediate chaos of the Bruins’ championship celebrations, a 22-year-old Orr accounted for what he’d done a few minutes earlier?

“I don’t know what I did,” Mike Widmer from UPI quoted him saying the dressing-room aftermath. “I saw it go in the net as I was flying in the air. Then I hit the ice and before I could get up the guys were on top of me.”

Embed from Getty Images

Another unbylined UPI dispatch started with this:

How would you expect a 22-year-old to describe the biggest moment of his spectacular young life?

How about: “The Stanley Cup! Wheeeeee!!!”

A little in that same piece, Orr did venture a little further into detail:

“Turk [Sanderson] made a helluva play out of the corner,” Orr recalled while pleading with the team doctor “to please prescribe a beer for me.”

“I saw it go in,” Kevin Walsh from Boston’s Globe managed to glean from Orr. “Oh ya, it was in.”

“I didn’t know where it was going. I just shot the darn thing. I think it went between his [St. Louis goaltender Glenn Hall’s] legs.”

“Don’t ask me how the play started. I don’t remember. I don’t know how it happened.”

“I know what this win is for me. It’s so great.”

Something I would like to get cleared up — maybe tonight, in the documentary, we’ll learn the truth? — is just where Orr’s mother, Arva, was during all the nostalgic rejoicing that night in 1970.

Reading Gerald Eskenazi in the May 11 edition of the New York Times, you might have been gladdened to hear this:

Scoring in today’s game, the only close one of the series, started with Rick Smith of the Bruins getting a rising shot past Glenn Hall, underneath a sign that read ‘Happy Mother’s Day Mrs. Orr.’

This was for Bobby’s mother who had come from their home in Canada.

Orr himself mentions this Mother’s Day banner in his 2013 memoir, My Story, though he doesn’t say one way or the other whether the woman to whom it paid tribute was actually on the property.  

The Canadian Press report that ran across Canada had her in the building, too:

Bobby Orr, the 22-year-old wonder defenceman who scored the winning goal in overtime, stood grinning under television lights as his father fought through the crowd toward him.

Doug Orr, who came down from his Parry Sound, Ont., home with Mrs. Orr, left his wife outside the dressing room.

“This is the best day of my life,” he said.

Mr. Orr spilled more of his teeming heart to the Boston Globe’s Martin Pave. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but tonight I don’t care if Bobby gets higher than a kite. He deserves it. I’ve never seen him drunk, but the way we’re all feeling, who cares?”

Wheeeeee! Sculptor Harry Weber bronzed Orr flies through the Boston air in front of the modern-day TD Garden.

Pave wondered how Mr. Orr had reacted when his son scored. “I jumped,” the ebullient father said. “I screamed. Then I rushed to the phone to call my wife in Parry Sound. I can’t even remember what she said because she was crying her eyes out.”

“Then,” Pave continued, “Doug rushed to the Bruins dressing room and embraced his son. He grabbed a bottle and joined the celebration.”

Definitely in the tumultuous room, even if Mrs. Orr wasn’t: Dit Clapper. He’d been the Bruins’ captain, of course, back when they’d last lifted the Cup in 1941. Remarkably, he’d played on all three of the Bruins’ previous Stanley Cup-winning teams, in 1929, 1939, and ’41.

Now 63, he’d flown in from his home in Peterborough, Ontario. “This is a helluva club,” he said in the team’s dressing room as 1970 celebrations turned increasingly liquid. He was up on a bench, surveying the scene, as Globe columnist Harold Kaese told it.

“It was never like this when we won in 1941,” he quoted Clapper as saying. “I think we had a bottle of beer, maybe.”

The Goal: Photographer Chad Coombs echoed Number Four’s famous goal in “Hockey Night In Canada: A Bobby Orr Tribute.’ For more of his work, visit http://www.chadcoombs.com. (Image courtesy of Chad Coombs.)

whalers won, but the cup was a no-show

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No Show: The New England Whalers eventually got to see the Avco World Trophy in all its Lucite and Britannia silver glory, but on the May day they won it in 1973, the winners of the first WHA championship had to make do with a stand-in.

Ted Green won a Stanley Cup in 1972, his second as an unforgiving defenceman on the Boston Bruins’ blueline, but by all accounts it was a forlorn experience for the 32-year-old veteran of 11 NHL seasons. “The man nobody seems to care about anymore,” a columnist called Green a couple of May days before the Bruins claimed the Cup with a 3-0 win over the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden. “The only time Green ever gets on the ice is when [Bobby] Orr needs a quick ice pack on his sore knee.”

He’d slowed down, lost his edge, his grit. “The fans at Boston Garden were tolerant of him for a long time,” Dwayne Netland wrote in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “They cheered his good plays and ignored his mistakes, but finally they turned on him and now they roast him for every bad pass, every missed check.” Bruins’ coach Tom Johnson’s merciful solution: “He just doesn’t put Green on the ice unless he has to.” Game five at the Boston Garden, with Orr playing every shift, Green took none: he never left the bench. “He had not felt part of the team, part of the victory,” Fran Rosa later recalled in the local Globe. When the Bruins returned to Boston with the Cup, Green slipped away from his teammates and the crowds awaiting them at Logan Airport to hitchhike into the city on his own.

That sad story got a happy ending: a year later, almost to the day, Green was back at Boston Garden captaining his new team to a championship, the very first in WHA history. Forty-seven years ago today, on a Sunday of this date in 1973, Green’s New England Whalers beat Bobby Hull’s Winnipeg Jets to claim the inaugural Avco World Trophy in five games.

“I can’t say I was thinking about last year,” Green said in the aftermath. “When they gave me the cup and told me to skate around with it, I might have thought a little about Johnny Bucyk skating around with the Stanley Cup last year.”

In The Moment: Ted Green and (not the Avco) cup on the ice at Boston Garden on May 6, 1973.

Green’s joyful teammates that day included Larry Pleau, Tom Webster, Rick Ley, and goaltender Al Smith. Together they paraded their cup and kissed it, filled it with Gold Seal champagne, which they drank and also dumped on one another.

But if the feeling was right, the cup was (as Fran Rosa put it) wrong: instead of the Avco World Trophy, the silverware that WHA president Gary Davidson handed to Green was a stand-in. The next day’s Boston Globe identified it as “the Division Cup” — i.e. the Whalers’ reward for topping the WHA’s Eastern bracket.

Whalers’ owner Harold Baldwin told Ed Willes a different tale for the latter’s 2004 history, The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association. While the league had sold naming rights for the cup to Avco Financial Services before the season started, it occurred to Baldwin ahead of game five that he had yet to see an actual trophy.

“Everyone’s going, ‘Where’s the Cup? We don’t have a Cup,’” he told Willes. “I sent my PR guy out, and he came back with this huge trophy he bought from a sporting-goods store. I think it cost $1.99, but it looked good on television. It kind of looked like the U.S. Open tennis trophy.”

With Steve Milton assisting on the writing, Baldwin published his own memoir in 2014, and in Slim To None: My Wild Ride From The WHA To The NHL All The Way to Hollywood, he refines the story a little. “Right before the game I had this vague feeling I’d never seen the league championship trophy,” he writes. This time it’s his co-owner, Bill Barnes, who dispatches an unnamed PR guy to a local sporting goods store. “He comes back with this large trophy that cost 20 bucks. It was cheap but big, and it was shiny, so it looked good on 1973 television.”

No word on what became of that temporary trophy after its brief fling with the limelight. Let me know if you have it, or know where it ended up.

The real thing was designed in Toronto by Donald Murphy, creative director of the ad firm Vickers and Benson, and rendered, in all its Lucite and Britannia-silver’d glory, by Birks jewelers at a cost of $8,000 (about $50,500 in 2020 money).

The first public sighting Boston seems to have had of the Avco World Trophy, as far as I can discern, came in September of ’73, at an event at a new restaurant on the city’s waterfront. I don’t know if there was a formal presentation. Accounts of the Whalers’ 1973-74 home opener that October don’t mention it.

Back in May, while Ted Green still had the faux Avco in his clutches back at the Boston Garden, Howard Baldwin was quick to issue a Stanley Cup challenge. The Montreal Canadiens were still a few days away from beating the Chicago Black Hawks for their 18th Cup as Baldwin offered to play the winner in a one-game, neutral-site playoff for all the toys.

He meant no disrespect, he said, “to either of those two fine teams or the National Hockey League.”

“This is a challenge intended only to restore to the people to see a true champion decided in this, the world’s fastest sport.”

The Boston Globe duly reported all this, amid the coverage of Ted Green’s redemption, while also noting this: “No reply was expected from the National Hockey League.”

Whaler King: “Kind of looked like the U.S. Open tennis trophy,” Harold Baldwin said of the trophy that Ted Green held close on May 6, 1973.

ave, cesare

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Born in Trail, British Columbia, on January 13 of 1939, a Friday, Cesare Maniago turns 81 today. He fended the nets for five NHL teams, making his debut for the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1961 with a win over the Detroit Red Wings. After brief stops with the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Ranger, he settled in for a nine-year stint with the Minnesota North Stars. He finished his NHL career in 1978 after two seasons with the Vancouver Canucks.

From Jason Ferris’ 2006 scrapbookish biography Hail Cesare! Trail Through The NHLwe know that Maniago’s boyhood hero was Leafs’ legend Turk Broda and that he first wore a mask when he was with Canadiens in 1962-63 — “but I stopped after Toe Blake gave me heck.” (Detroit trainer Lefty Wilson made him the one, above, he donned in Minnesota). In 568 NHL regular-season games, Maniago won 190, along with 15 of the 36 playoff games he played. Ferris calculated that he defended an NHL net for a total of 34,814 minutes during his career, or almost 25 days. He faced 19,004 NHL shots, 1,873 of which went by him for goals. Phil Esposito solved him more often than any other NHL shooter, beating him 30 times in all. Red Berenson was next with 22, followed by Johnny Bucyk and Frank Mahovlich, each of whom scored 19 career goals on him. The opposing goaltender Maniago beat most in his time? Gary Smith, over whom he was triumphant 13 times. Ed Johnston beat Maniago 20 times. In his first year signed to an NHL contract, 1960, Maniago was paid $4,000 by the Leafs. His final year in Vancouver he made $130,000.

bronco horvath, 1930—2019

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Ukeliner: Johnny Bucyk and Vic Stasiuk were Boston centre Bronco Horvath’s wingers on the Bruins’ renowned Uke Line in the late 1950s. While Horvath, who died this week at the age of 89, missed out on winning the Art Ross Trophy by a single point in 1959-60, he did end up tied for the NHL’s goalscoring title that year, matching Bobby Hull’s 39 goals. Here he stands sentrylike in January of 1960. (Photo: 9 Jan. 1960 Credit: Louis Jaques / Library and Archives Canada/e002343733)

 

 

 

johnny b goods

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Chiefly: Born in Edmonton on this date in 1935 (it was a Sunday then, too), Hall-of-Fame left winger Johnny Bucyk turns 84 today. Mostly he was a Bruin, of course, playing 21 seasons in Boston, where he captained the team and won two Stanley Cups while compiling 16 20-goal seasons and winning a Lady Byng Trophy. But Bucyk, pictured here in 1955, started his NHL career in Detroit, where he played parts of two seasons before the Red Wings traded him away in a 1957 deal that brought Terry Sawchuk back to Detroit. Summers Bucyk worked at a gas station back home in Edmonton, and that’s where the news reached him one June day. “One of the fellows I worked with came running in to tell me he had just heard on the radio that I hade been traded,” Bucyk later recalled. “So I stuck my ear to the radio and sure enough, it was on the noon sports program. … As soon as work was out I went to the nearest store and picked up the Edmonton Journal, our city newspaper, and took it home to read about the trade. … I didn’t get any official notification of the trade until I got a letter from the Bruins in the middle of July. I was beginning to wonder if they knew I existed.”

change ’em up

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Shifty: “The figures caught in a split second, seemingly in defiance of gravity as they float through the air with a grace not customarily associated with hockey.” That’s art dealer Alan Klinkhoff describing the scene depicted in “Changing Lines, A Self-Portrait, 1960-1970” by the renowned painter (like Klinkoff, also a Montrealer) Philip Surrey (1910-90). Surrey’s oil-on-canvas portrait of the Boston Bruins doing battle with Canadiens dates to 1970, a Stanley-Cup-winning year for Boston. The painting featured in the Klinkoff Galley’s 2016 exhibition “Fine Art and Hockey: A Point of View.” It’s Klinkhoff’s thinking that this is the Bruins’ vaunted powerplay taking the ice, Phil Esposito (7, with a fanciful helmet) leading out Johnny Bucyk (9) and Fred Stanfield (17). Johnny McKenzie, Klinkhoff notes, usually played on a line with Bucyk and Stanfield, with Esposito working between Ken Hodge and Wayne Cashman. But with a man advantage, McKenzie often made room for Esposito by dropping back to the blueline to partner with Bobby Orr. This pairing, we’re assuming, are already out on the ice, ready to take to the attack. (Image: Alan and Helen Klinkhoff collection)

boston for the win

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An exercise in “humanitarian concern,” writer Jack Batten called it. “It will do no less than head off the threat of brain fatigue, emotional delirium, heart murmur, incipient alcoholism, and all the other dread symptoms annually associated with following the spectacular ups and downs of a National Hockey League season.”

I don’t know whether Canadian hockey fans truly appreciated the mission of mercy that Batten and his editors undertook on their behalf at Maclean’s magazine nearly 50 years ago, or whether they only indulged it as an entertaining lark. To spare the faithful the time-consuming and oh-so-stressful trouble inherent in following a season’s worth of NHL hockey, Maclean’s decided they’d get in ahead of the season and ask a computer to figure out how it was all going to play out — a “$500,000 computer,” no less.

If this seems all very Stanley Kubrick, well, it was 1970, a mere two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey made its debut in movie theatres.

Looking back, the magazine’s “bloodless and coolly scientific” effort to determine just how the 1970-71 NHL season would end might be best remembered as the novelty act it was. But it also offers a fascinating glimpse into the state of NHL stats at the time, and just how fancy they were getting.

Leaving the pundits to muddle in their guesswork, Maclean’s arranged early in 1970 to gather up a pile of NHL statistics from the ’69-70 season and drive them out to Scarborough, Ontario, for a visit to the offices of Honeywell Controls Limited, then billing themselves as “The Other Computer Company — or, as Batten puts it, Avis to IBM’s Hertz.

How big a pile? “A staggering load” is Batten’s measurement. For these raw numbers, Maclean’s looked to NHL statistician Ron Andrews, not a household name, to be sure, but an important one in hockey history. A former Canadian Press reporter with (as Batten puts it) a “special numerical curiosity,” Andrews was digging deeply into the numbers the game generates and thinking about how they might be used to analyze how it’s played long before NHL President Clarence Campbell hired him in 1963 to collect and organize the league’s statistics. Calling him Andrews a pioneer of plus-minus may not be the compliment it once was, but no-one did more to build the foundation of hockey analytics than he did. With his 1970 Maclean’s cameo, Andrews, who died in 2003 at the age of 67, offers a view into the sophistication of his operation — including a list of 22 offensive categories, “not all but many” of those he and his hunter-gatherers around the league made it their business to track for each NHL player.

While Andrews provided the league’s ’69-70 stats to Maclean’s, he wasn’t in on the computing. He takes his bow early, with a bit of a growl. “The only trouble with all our statistics,” he says, “is that most fans and writers don’t know how to interpret them properly.”

Uh-huh, says Batten. Who doesknow how to read them?

“Coaches do. They understand the best way to judge a player is to watch him perform on the ice. But they use the figures as a backup, as a confirmation of their own ideas. They use them to work out problems, like which players to put together on the same line. That makes sense.”

Anyone else?

“The computer,” Andrews says. “A computer knows what numbers mean.”

Honeywell’s was a Series 200 Model 1250 — “called Foster by its friends,” Batten writes. The company had a crew of three assigned to the Maclean’s job, including a forecasting expert and a programmer responsible for loading the NHL’s hockey data onto punch-cards to feed to Foster.

This, the project’s lead told Batten, was by no means a blind operation. “We attached different weights to the different factors, so that some pieces of data, goals scored, say, were given more significance than others — minutes in penalties, for instance. We helped the computer along by making judgments from our own intuitive understanding of hockey. After all, the computer’s never seen a game.”

The programming took weeks — “several” of them, Batten says. “We don’t accept the computer’s programming forecasts right off, the Honeywell man tells him. “We look at the trends it’s showing, and we compare them with what we know is actually going on in the real world. Then we adjust our programming accordingly, and feed everything back into the computer again. It’s a continuous process. For example, if the computer started to show a trend favorable to the Buffalo Sabres, we’d know we’d have to make adjustments, right?”

When all was said and done — once Foster had “memorized, digested, juggled, and computed the data” — by then, it was “a bright afternoon early in September,” and the computer “presented on its spinning tape a scientific view” of how the season ahead would unfold.

Foster’s regular-season forecast had Boston finishing first in the East, followed by Montreal, while in the West Chicago would prevail ahead of Minnesota.

Eastern teams had swept past their western rivals three years in a row to win Stanley Cups in the late 1960s. In a bid to make the upcoming ’70-71 finals more competitive, the NHL rejigged the playoff format to bring eastern and western teams together in the semi-finals. With that in mind, Foster saw Boston ousting the Minnesota North Stars at that point, and Chicago bettering Montreal.

This latter scenario, one of the programmers told Maclean’s, was all about Foster’s thinking on the Black Hawks’ youth and vigor. “The computer knows that Montreal, with its older guys, is not going to finish the season as fresh and healthy as Chicago. That’s how the Black Hawks get the winning edge.”

It wouldn’t last against Boston, come the finals. The Bruins, of course, had won the Cup in 1970, with Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and Johnny Bucyk leading the way. They’d do it again in 1971, Foster felt.

“It couldn’t be any other way,” one of his Honeywell handlers explained. According to the computer, the outcome wouldn’t even be close. “I’d have to call it a slaughter.”

It’s worth noting that Maclean’s saw fit to bolster Foster’s findings with an accompanying column by Harry Sinden. He wasn’t what you’d call an entirely disinterested party, having taken his (temporary) retirement after coaching the Bruins to the 1969-70 championship. For him, Honeywell’s Series 200 needed no correcting. “The Bruins,” Sinden computed, “will ultimately whip everybody for the Stanley Cup.”

History, of course, gets the final say. It shows that while Boston did in fact finish top of the 1970-71 NHL regular-season standings, the Bruins foundered early in April when they ran up against a young goaltender named Ken Dryden in the first round of the playoffs. Having adjusted Boston’s and Foster’s programming accordingly, Dryden’s Montreal Canadiens went on to defeat Minnesota and Chicago to win the Stanley Cup they couldn’t convince Honeywell to hand over.

 

willie o’ree, 1961: scored that one for the whole town of fredericton

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Like Bronco Advised: With Montreal defenceman Jean-Guy-Talbot looking on, Willie O’Ree scores his first NHL goal, a game-winner, on Charlie Hodge, January 1, 1961.

Sixty years ago today, Montreal was minus-nine and snowed under, cloudy overhead, with light flurries expected and a risk of freezing drizzle. Normal, then, for a Saturday in January. Marlon Brando’s new movie, Sayonara, was playing at Loew’s downtown. In Ottawa, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was feeling better. Having spent the week confined to his bed with a strained back, he was up and out for a short walk. All was well in the local hockey cosmos: the Montreal Canadiens, Stanley Cup champions for two years running, were once again a top the NHL standings. Coming off a 5-2 Thursday-night win over the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Habs were preparing to host the Boston Bruins and their newly promoted winger, 22-year-old Fredericton, New Brunswick-born Willie O’Ree.

This week, the NHL is remembering that 1958 night, the first to see a Black player play in the league. O’Ree, who’s 82 now, was honoured last night and roundly cheered at Boston’s TD Garden when the modern-day Canadiens played (and lost to) the Bruins. Earlier in the day, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh had proclaimed today Willie O’Ree Day across the city. That was at a press conference dedicating a new street hockey rink in O’Ree’s honour.

Called up in a manpower emergency, O’Ree played only a pair of games during his first NHL stay. It would be three more years before he returned to score his first goal.

Back in ’58, the Bruins and Canadiens were spending all weekend together. Following Saturday’s game, they’d meet again Sunday in Boston. The then-dominant Canadiens were, as mentioned, cruising atop the six-team NHL, 18 points ahead of second-place Detroit, 24 clear of the languishing fifth-place Bruins.

With Leo Labine out with the flu, Boston GM Lynn Patrick summoned 22-year-old O’Ree from the Quebec Aces of the minor-league QHL. In 32 games there, he’d scored 7 goals and 18 points.

“It is believed that O’Ree is the first Negro to ever perform in the National Hockey League,” Montreal’s Gazette ventured, with nods to other black hockey talents, including Herb and Ossie Carnegie and Manny McIntyre, star Aces of the early 1950s, as well as to O’Ree’s teammate in Quebec, centre Stan Maxwell.

Elsewhere, across North America, the headlines were bolder. “Young Negro Star Makes NHL History,” a California paper headlined a United Press story in its pages, noting “the lowering of the last color line among major sports” while also deferring to “most hockey observers” who were said to agree that the only reason there had been such a line was “the fact that there hasn’t been a Negro player qualified to make” the NHL.

O’Ree wore number 18 playing the left wing on Boston’s third line alongside Don McKenney and Jerry Toppazzini.

“His debut was undistinguished as Boston coach Milt Schmidt played him only half a turn at a time,” The Boston Globe recounted, “alternating him with veteran Johnny Pierson.” The thinking there? GM Patrick explained that Schmidt wanted to “ease the pressure” on O’Ree and “reduce the margin of errors for the youngster.”

Dink Carroll of Montreal’s Gazette paid most of his attention on the night to Boston’s new signing, the veteran Harry Lumley, “chubby goalkeeper who looks like a chipmunk with a nut in each cheek.” O’Ree he recognized as “a fleet skater” who had one good scoring chance in the third period in combination with Toppazzini. “He lost it when he was hooked from behind by Tom Johnson.”

Lumley’s revenge was registered in a 3-0 Bruins’ win. “I was really nervous in the first period,” O’Ree said, “but it was much better as the game went on.”

“It’s a day I’ll never forget as long as I live. It’s the greatest thrill of my life.”

Also making an NHL debut at the Forum that night: Prince Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, was on hand to see the hockey sights at the end of a North American visit.

Sunday night at the Garden, O’Ree got one opening, early on, when Don McKenney fed him a leading pass. This time, O’Ree shot into Jacques Plante’s pads. With Canadiens re-asserting themselves as league-leaders with a 6-2 win, O’Ree didn’t play much in the game’s latter stages.

So that was that. Afterwards, O’Ree was reported to be grinning, sitting amid a stack of telegrams from well-wishers back home. He described himself as a “little shaky.” “I’m just happy to get a chance up here, that’s about all I can say.” Leo Labine was back at practice next day, along with another forward who’d been injured, Real Chevrefils, so after another practice or two, O’Ree returned to Quebec.

As a Hull-Ottawa Canadian, 1960.

It was three years before he got back to the NHL and scored his first goal. Canadiens figured prominently again, starting in the summer of 1960, when the Bruins agreed to loan the winger to Montreal. O’Ree was duly assigned to the Hull-Ottawa edition of the Canadiens, in the Eastern Professional Hockey League, where Glen Skov was the coach. The team had a good autumn, but as happens with farm teams, they paid the price in having their best talents stripped away. In November, Canadiens called up Bobby Rousseau and Gilles Tremblay while Boston beckoned O’Ree, now 25, back to the fold. The Bruins were still down at the wrong end of the standings, just a point out of last place, while also suffering adjectivally in the papers where, if they weren’t “listless” they were “punchless.”

Starting off his second stint as a Bruin, he was numbered 22, assigned to a line with Charlie Burns and Gerry Ouellette. As in 1958, newspapers (like Pittsburgh’s Courier) took due note that the “fast, aggressive forward” was “the first of his race to play in the National Hockey League.”

“The Speedy O’Ree” The New York Times annotated him when he made his Garden debut; in Chicago, the Tribune’s Ted Damata was particularly attentive. “The first Negro” was “on the ice four times, three times as a left winger and once as a right winger. He touched the puck twice, losing it each time, once on a hefty body check by Jack Evans of the Hawks.” Continue reading →