obituaries

ron ellis, 1945—2024

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Godspeed to Ron Ellis: so sorry t see the news today that the former Leaf right winger has died at the age of 79. Born in Lindsay, Ontario, he was only ever a Toronto Maple Leaf in the NHL: after winning a Memorial Cup with the OHA Toronto Marlboros in 1964, he caught on with the Leafs in 1964-65. A doughty, dutiful winger with a scoring touch — he scored 20 goals or more in 11 of his 16 seasons in the blue and the white — he won a Stanley Cup championship with the Leafs in 1967. In 1972, he was a key member of Canada’s Soviet-downing Summit Series team. Ellis settled in as number 8 early in his Leaf career — as seen here — but in 1968 former Toronto great Ace Bailey made his admiration of Ellis clear by asking the team to unretire his own number 6 so that Ellis could wear it. Ellis did that for the remainder of his career. When he retired in 1981, the number was re-retired.

bob cole, 1933—2024

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He’ll be missed — oh, baby, will he. So sorry to hear that Bob Cole died last night in his hometown, St. John’s, Newfoundland, aged 90. The inimitable Hockey Night In Canada play-by-play man worked his last NHL game in 2019 from Montreal’s Bell Centre, with the Canadiens host the Toronto Maple Leafs. His very first call? That was 55 years ago yesterday when, on Thursday, April 24, 1969, he was in voice in a CBC radio broadcast booth as Montreal beat the hometown Boston Bruins 2-1 in double overtime. Jean Béliveau scored the winner (the only overtime goal of his career) to wrap-up a Stanley Cup semi-final in six games.

 

ed chadwick, 1933—2024

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Sorry to be seeing news today of the death of former Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Ed Chadwick at the age of 90. Born in Fergus, Ontario, on May 8, 1933, he made his NHL debut in February of 1956 at the age of 22, when he stood into the Toronto net as a replacement for an injured Harry Lumley. Chadwick held the powerful Montreal Canadiens to a 1-1 tie that night. The following night he came up with the same result against the Boston Bruins. He went on to play in parts of five seasons with the Leafs, including a run of 140 consecutive games between 1956 and 1958. His last NHL season was 1961-62, when he was a member of the Boston Bruins. Ed Chadwick went on to serve as a scout for the Edmonton Oilers, and as such he was in on five Stanley Cups between 1984 and 1990.

 

dave forbes, 1948—2024

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Sorry to see the reports of the death of Dave Forbes this past week; condolences to his family and friends. He was 75. Born in Montreal in 1948, he was a left winger who signed as a free agent with the Boston Bruins in 1973. He played four seasons with the Bruins and made some noise: in 1974-75, he scored 18 goals and 30 points. He also turned out for the WHA Cincinnati Stingers and played two seasons with the Washington.

His name, unfortunately, lives on in hockey infamy for a 1975 incident in which he butt-ended Henry Boucha of the Minnesota North Stars, injuring his eye and hastening the end of his career. While the NHL suspended Forbes for ten games, a Minnesota DA saw fit to charge him criminally with aggravated assault, making him the first professional athlete in the United States to be charged for an act committed during a game. The trial ended with a hung jury: having deliberating for two days, the jurors reported that they were deadlocked at 9 to 3 in favour of convicting Forbes. The DA did not seek a new trial.

paul masnick, 1931—2024

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The farm system seeded by Canadiens GM Frank Selke in the later 1940s began to bear fruit in the early 1950s. In 1953, it yielded a Stanley Cup, the first of six he’d win with Montreal. Today’s sad news is that the last surviving member of that ’53 Montreal team died earlier this week: the former centre Paul Masnick, pictured above on the left, was 92.

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1931, he played junior for his hometown Pats before joining Montreal in 1950. That’s Selke pictured here, above, sitting in a grove of his recruits in a photograph dating to (at a reasonable guess) the start of that championship ’52-’53 season, which would put all four players at 21 or 22. Arrayed here with Masnick are fellow centremen Reg Abbott and Jean Béliveau with left winger Dickie Moore rounding out the group. Selke, Masnick and Moore got their names etched on the Cup that year; Abbott and Béliveau weren’t so fortunate. Each of those two skated in three regular-season games but neither one saw any ice in the playoffs. Abbott’s statistics were and remain blanks — he failed register a goal or assist, incurred no penalty minutes — and he never played another NHL game. For his part, Béliveau, scored five goals in his three games, launching a career that nobody has to be reminded to celebrate. Masnick played in half of Montreal’s 12 playoff games that year, scoring a single goal against the Boston Bruins in game three of the Final, a 3-0 Montreal win.

Masnick played in parts of five seasons for Montreal. His best offensive numbers came in the regular season of 1953-54, when he scored five goals and 26 points, which was one more than Elmer Lach got that year, and eight behind Béliveau. Masnick went on to play for the Chicago Black Hawks and Toronto Maple Leafs. After playing his last NHL game in 1958, he continued on in the WHL and IHL, skating for the Saskatoon Quakers, Victoria Cougars, and St. Paul Fighting Saints, among other teams.

(Image: Weekend Magazine/ Louis Jaques/ Library and Archives Canada/ e002505710)

jean-guy talbot, 1932—2024

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Sad to hear news that the former defenceman Jean-Guy Talbot died yesterday at the age of 91. (Dave Stubbs has a fine appreciation here.) Born in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, in 1932, he made his debut with the Montreal Canadiens in 1955. Seen here at practice in 1962 (alongside Henri Richard and Dickie Moore), Talbot played 13 seasons with the Habs back when they were mightiest, helping them win seven Stanley Cup championships. After NHL expansion in 1967, Talbot went on to play for the Minnesota North Stars, Detroit Red Wings, and Buffalo Sabres, and spent four seasons with the St. Louis Blues. After retiring in 1971, Talbot coached the Blues as well as the New York Rangers.

It was an unfortunate encounter with Talbot in 1952 ended Scotty Bowman’s career as a player. Talbot was a Trois-Rivieres junior when he high-sticked Bowman, a Junior Canadien, and fractured his skull during a game at the Forum. Talbot was suspended; Bowman never played another game. The latter understood it to have been an accident and the two later became good friends. It was Bowman who brought Talbot to St. Louis when he was coaching there. “He was one of the best buys I ever made in St. Louis,” Bowman would recall. “I got a couple of good years out of him. He played defence or up front and also was a good penalty killer.”

 

(Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

henry boucha, 1951—2023

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Sorry to see yesterday’s news that a Minnesota legend, the Ojibwe centreman Henry Boucha, has died at the age of 72. Born in 1951 on the hockey hotbed of Warroad, Minnesota, Boucha was a 21-year-old playing for the WCHL Winnipeg Jets when he joined Murray Williamson’s 1972 U.S. Olympic team. Playing alongside Robbie Ftorek and Mark Howe, he helped the team win silver in Sapporo, Japan (the Soviet Union took gold). Drafted by the Detroit Red Wings, Boucha made his NHL debut in the 1972-73 season with a strong showing, scoring 14 goals and 28 points. He was ninth in voting for the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie, won that year by Steve Vickers of the New York Rangers. Boucha played six seasons in the NHL in all, skating as well for the Minnesota North Stars, Colorado Rockies, and Kansas City Scouts. He had a season, too, with Minnesota’s WHA Fighting Saints.

That’s him here, numbered 16, sporting his trademark headband, in LeRoy Neiman’s vivid 1973 serigraph, “Red Goal.” His happy teammates are harder to identify. Tim Ecclestone? Nick Libett? The referee has a bit of a Ron Wicks air to him — unless it’s a Lloyd Gilmour look?

bobby baun, 1936—2023

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The Toronto Sun’s Lance Hornby is reporting the sad news of Bobby Baun’s death, last night. He was 86. Born in Lanigan, just east of Wolverine, Saskatchewan, down the road from Esk, he played 17 seasons as an unyielding defenceman in the NHL, earning a bodycheckers’ nickname, Boomer, along the way. He started and starred with the Toronto Maple Leafs, helping them to win four Stanley Cup championships in the 1960s, back when the Leafs were doing that. It was in 1964 that Baun scored his celebrated overtime goal on a leg that had been broken, solving Detroit’s Terry Sawchuk to beat the Red Wings and set the Leafs up to win their third consecutive Cup two nights later, whereby Baun earned himself the chance to injure himself further at the ensuing parade.

Lesser known than that famous injury is the one Baun suffered two years earlier, when someone tossed what was described as a “small bomb” onto the Toronto bench during a game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Left unprotected by the Leafs in the 1967 expansion draft, Baun played a year with the Oakland Seals before taking his talents to Detroit and playing parts of three seasons with the Red Wings. He ended up back in Toronto with the Leafs, with he skated in three more seasons before a neck injury put an end to his playing career in 1972. Baun later went on to coach the WHA Toronto Toros in 1975-76, their final flailing year in the city, though he was fired in February of 1976, after which the team finished the year at the bottom of the standings under GM Gilles Leger’s direction.

gilles gilbert, 1949—2023

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Sorry to see the news tonight reporting Gilles Gilbert’s death at the age of 74. Born in Saint-Esprit, Quebec, in 1949, he started his NHL career in 1970 at the age of 20 with the Minnesota North Stars. He got his first win in the fall of that year at the Montreal Forum, beating the mighty Canadiens 3-1. That’s him here, above, on that night, celebrating with teammates Bobby Rousseau (left) and Walt McKechnie. Later that same season, Gilbert was on hand for another Montreal milestone, this time as the goaltender of record when 39-year-old Jean Béliveau scored the 500th goal of his illustrious career.

After four seasons in Minnesota, Gilbert was traded, in May of 1973, to Boston (Fred Stanfield went the other way), replacing Eddie Johnston as the Bruins’ starter. Gilbert helped the team get all the way to the Stanley Cup finals the following year, though the Bruins lost there in six ganes to the Philadelphia Flyers.

In 1979, Gilbert was back in net at the Forum in Montreal for what turned out to be an infamous night in Bruins’ history: in game 7 of the Stanley Cup semi-final against the Canadiens that year, Boston (you may remember) took a penalty in the last minutes of the game, whereupon Guy Lafleur tied the score to send the game to overtime, where Yvon Lambert decided the issue.

The Bruins traded Gilbert to the Detroit for Rogie Vachon in July of 1980. He played three seasons with the Red Wings before his playing career ended in 1983.

 

(Top image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

bobby hull, 1939—2023

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The NHL Alumni Association is reporting this morning that Bobby Hull has died at the age of 84. His pre-eminence as a left winger who played 15 years for the Chicago Black Hawks can’t be denied. He led the team to a Stanley Cup championship in 1961 and, continuing to unleash his slapshot through the ensuing decade, scored and scored. Hull became the first NHLer to score more than 50 goals in a season when he notched 54 in 1965-66.  Three times he won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer, and he remains Chicago’s all-time leading goalscorer, in both the regular season and playoffs. Twice he won the Hart Trophy; he was ten times a First Team NHL All-Star. He kept scoring in the WHA afters million-dollar defection from the NHL in 1972.  With the Winnipeg Jets, he won a pair of Avco World Trophy championships with the Jets and was twice named the league’s MVP.  He was voted to the Hall of Fame  in 1983.

Hull’s legacy also includes accusations of abuse from two of his wives. He was charged in 1986 in Illinois for an assault on his third wife, Deborah; that charge was subsequently withdrawn when she told the court she did not want to proceed. In that same incident, Hull was fined $150 for assault of a police officer.

 

(Painting by LeRoy Neiman)

dave dryden, 1941—2022

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Bro Show: Dave Dryden, right, congratulates younger brother Ken at the Montreal Forum on the night of April 4, 1973. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

Very sorry to be seeing the news that Dave Dryden died this past Tuesday at the age of 81. He was a goaltender, because that’s what the boys in that family did: his younger brother, of course, Hall-of-Famer Ken, followed him into puckstopping. Born in Hamilton in 1941, Dave played 205 games in the NHL, working the nets in his time for the New York Rangers, Chicago Black Hawks, Buffalo Sabres, and Edmonton Oilers. He played 260 WHA games, too, starting with the Chicago Cougars before joining the Oilers; in 1979, he won both the Ben Hatskin Trophy as the WHA’s top goaltender and the Gordie How Trophy as league MVP.

“I don’t know where we went wrong,” Murray Dryden wrote, wryly, in a 1972 account of his hockey-playing sons, Playing The Shots At Both Ends. “The two boys both graduated from university, but they ended up as goaltenders.”

Murray himself never played hockey, though he could boast some NHL pedigree (and did) insofar as he counted former Leafs Syl Apps and Andy Blair as well as New York Rangers’ ironman Murray Murdoch as cousins.

The family moved from Hamilton to Islington, a suburb of Toronto, in 1949. It was there that young Dave found his future, his father recalled:

One Saturday morning, when he was ten years old, we went to a lumber yard and bought some two-by-fours. Then we got some chicken wire at a hardware store and brought it home, and made a hockey net. It was the first and last thing I ever constructed in my life. The total cost was $6.60.

We set it up in the driveway in front of the garage door and the boys peppered a tennis ball at it for hours on end. And from that moment there didn’t seem much doubt that Dave was going to play hockey and he was going to be a goaltender.

When the two Drydens famously skated out on Forum ice in Montreal on March 20, 1971, it was the first time in NHL history that brothers had faced one another as goaltenders. Ken’s Canadiens prevailed that night over Dave’s Sabres by a score of 5-2.

When the two met again at the Forum the following season, the Canadiens fired 54 shots at the Buffalo net on their way to a 9-3 win. Writing in the Montreal Star, Red Fisher nominated Dave Dryden as “a candidate for the first Purple Heart of the 1971-72 season. Never has one man stopped so much for a team which deserved less. Dryden, who shook hands at game’s end with his only friend in the rink — his brother, Ken — was brilliant on many, many occasions.”

All told, the brothers met eight times in the NHL, with Ken’s Canadiens prevailing on five occasions. Dave’s only win came in December 10, 1972, when the Sabres beat Montreal 4-2 at the Forum. Two other games ended in ties.

The photograph here dates to another brotherly meeting, this one on April 4, 1973, as the Sabres opened their first-round series of the Stanley Cup playoffs against Canadiens at the Forum. Montreal won that one by a score of 2-1, with Ken taking honours as the game’s first star, Dave as the second. The brothers faced off again the following night, with Montreal winning that one 7-3. That was all the goaltending Dave Dryden did that year, with Roger Crozier taking over the Buffalo net as Montreal went on to take the series in six games.

Future Sealed: A young Dave Dryden guards the net his dad Murray built for the princely sum of $6. 60.