right wingers

the cat came back

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The diminutive right winger Johnny (Black Cat) Gagnon played most of his hockey for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1930s, often on a line with Howie Morenz and Aurèle Joliat, but midway through the 1939-40 NHL season, Montreal sold his contract to the New York Americans. He and his new team were back at the Forum on Saturday, March 2, 1940. As seen here, there were gifts for him, pre-game, including this handsome cellarette (a liquor cabinet) presented by a deputation of fans from Gagnon’s hometown, Chicoutimi. That’s Le Canada journalist Paul Parizeau on the right, lending a hand, holding his hat.

Once the furniture had been cleared from the ice, New York surged to a 2-0 lead before Montreal tied the game, then went ahead in the second on a goal by Louis Trudel. It was left to Gagnon to come through as the spoiler and tie the game. Set up by Pat Egan and Tommy Anderson, he beat Montreal goaltender Mike Karakas with a slapshot, no less, as described by Montreal’s Gazette.

Ten minutes of overtime solved nothing and the game finished in a 3-3 tie. In fact, the overtime went on longer than it meant to, with the bell failing to chime to end the game, and referee Mickey Ion oblivious to the time. Finally, New York coach Red Dutton jumped on the ice to signal that it was all over.

The following night in New York, the teams met again. By the end of that night, it was almost over for the Canadiens, as the Americans prevailed 3-0 to push Montreal to the brink of mathematical elimination from the playoffs with five games to go in the regular season. Montreal would be the only team to fail to make the post-season grade that year, as they finished dead last in the seven-team NHL, nine points adrift of the Americans.

Johnny Gagnon died on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1984. He was 78.

(Image: Conrad Poirier, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

double boom

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Boom + Boom: Bernie Geoffrion died of stomach cancer on a Saturday of this date in 2006. He was 75. That very night at Montreal’s Bell Centre, the Canadiens retired Geoffrion’s number 5 in a previously scheduled ceremony. On yet another Saturday, March 11, this one in 1961, Geoffrion scored his 47th and 48th goals of the season on Boston goaltender Bruce Gamble. Geoffrion would win the Art Ross Trophy that year as the NHL’s leading scorer, finishing the regular season with 50 goals and 95 points, five points clear of teammate Jean Béliveau. (Image: Tex Coulter)

gaineyesque

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“The curly-headed lad from the lakehead has speed, power, and a vicious shot. He revels in the heavy-going and can carry a big load alone when a team is faltering.” That was the Montreal Gazette‘s 1927 scouting report on Jimmy Ward, the young right winger from Fort William, Ontario, who’d just signed with the local Maroons. A steady scorer and tenacious checker, Ward went on to play 11 seasons with the team, becoming one of its most respected players, and winning a championship, to boot, when the Maroons claimed the Stanley Cup in 1935. He suffered a serious concussion that same year after a mid-season collision with Boston’s Eddie Shore. Ward’s luck was better than Toronto’s Ace Bailey, whose NHL career was ended as the result of a 1933 clash with Shore; Ward was back on the ice after a little more than two weeks’ convalescence. After the Maroons folded in 1938, he played his final NHL season with the Canadiens. In the 1980s, Gazette columnist Tim Burke asked a colleague who, as a boy, had watched Ward play whether he was the Bob Gainey of his time. “Yeah, but I think he was better,” Marc Thibeault opined. “He scored more in the clutch.” Ward died on a Thursday of today’s date in 1990, at the age of 84.

the decider

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Lace Up: The Sudden Death Kid they came to call him, that spring of 1939. Mel Hill was a right winger, at the time, for the Boston Bruins, a 24-year-old product of Argyle, Manitoba, who was playing in his second NHL season. The Bruins’ Stanley Cup semi-finals series against the New York Rangers was the first in NHL history to go to seven games, with Boston prevailing on the strength of Hill’s three overtime winners. In early April of ’39, he ended the deciding game when he Bill Cowley set him up in the third overtime to put a puck past Bert Gardiner. Hill another two (non-overtime) goals in the Finals that year as the Bruins dismissed the Toronto Maple Leafs in five games to take the Cup. Hill won another Cup with Boston in 1941 before going the Leafs, with whom he won a third championship in 1945. Mel Hill died on a Thursday of this date in 1996 at the age of 82. (Image: Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

tuning peg

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It’s A Wrap: Born on a Thursday of this same date in 1913, Peggy O’Neil played the right wing for the Boston Bruins in the 1930s. He was named James at the start, Jim, originating in Semans, Saskatchewan, which you’ll find on the map between Punnichy and Elmer Lach’s hometown of Nokomis. (O’Neil played parts of couple of seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, too.) Here, in a scene from February of 1937, O’Neil undergoes a restorative wrapping by Bruins’ trainer Win Green at Boston Garden. (Image: ©Richard Merrill, Boston Public Library)

guilt trip

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Binned For His Sins: Toronto Maple Leafs’ right winger Bill Ezinicki visits the penalty bench at the Montreal Forum at some point in the late 1940s. The absence of gloves and Ezinicki’s reputation both suggest he’s been exchanging punches with a galled Canadien, maybe Murph Chamberlain or Ken Reardon. A three-time Stanley Cup winner with Toronto, Ezinicki was a bumptious and thereby much-sanctioned member of the Leafs; he led the NHL in penalty minutes in 1948-49 and almost did it again the following year, finishing a minute behind Gus Kyle of the New York Rangers. Off the ice, Ezinicki was an accomplished golfer, turning pro after his hockey career reached its end in the later 1950s.

diesel power

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Benchview: Born in Capreol, Ontario, on a Wednesday of this same date in 1933, Doug Mohns started out a defenceman, winning a pair of Memorial Cups with the Barrie Flyers in 1951 and ’53. In the NHL, the man they called Diesel played a decade with Boston, which is where coach Phil Watson converted him to a winger. With Chicago, he made his name as a member of the Black Hawks’ high-yield Scooter Line, lining up alongside Ken Wharram and Stan Mikita and scoring 20 goals or more in four consecutive seasons. He later played for the Minnesota North Stars, Atlanta Flames, and Washington Capitals before setting skates and sticks aside. The Stanley Cup eluded him: all in all, Mohns played 1,484 NHL games without winning a championship. (Artist: Tex Coulter)

can take care of himself in any kind of sailing

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Hot Shots: Ranger linemates (left to right) Grant Warwick, Ab DeMarco, and Hank Goldup face the camera in January of 1945 during a week in which the trio accounted for seven Ranger goals in two games.

It was on this date in 1999, another Monday, that former New York Rangers right wing Grant Warwick died at the age of 77. He was just 20 in 1942 when he was voted the NHL’s top rookie, winning the Calder Trophy ahead of Montreal’s Buddy O’Connor and Bob Goldham of Toronto. A proud Saskatchewan newspaper reported on the distinction: “Warwick, native of Regina, is just five feet six, but he packs about 175 pounds on that frame and can take care of himself in any kind of sailing on the ice.” He played parts of seven seasons with the Rangers through the ‘40s, twice notching 20 goals; he later had a 22-goal season with the Boston Bruins before finishing up his big-league career with the Montreal Canadiens in 1949-50. Skating alongside his younger brother Bill, he was the playing coach of the Penticton Vs when they represented Canada at the World Championships in West Germany and beat the Soviet Union 5-0 to win gold.

rod gilbert, 1941—2021

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So sorry to hear the news this evening of the death of Rod Gilbert at the age of 80. Born in Montreal in 1941, he only ever skated in the NHL as a New York Ranger. He was a speedy right winger who scored profusely for the Blueshirts: the 406 regular-season goals and 1,021 points he collected in his 18 seasons with New York are still tops among Rangers. In 1979, a year after his retirement, the seven Gilbert wore on his sweater became the first number to be retired by the Rangers. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1982.  

  

who can impress the forest?

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Branch Plant: Born in Sudbury, Ontario, on a Saturday of this same date in 1957, Ron Duguay is 64 today. A sometime centreman and right winger, he was drafted, you’ll maybe remember, by the New York Rangers in 1977, and in his rookie campaign scored 20 goals and 40 points. He reached the goal-scoring peak in 1981-82, when he scored 40 goals. In two stints with the Blueshirts, Duguay played parts of eight seasons with New York. Veteran of a dozen NHL seasons in all, he also suited up for the Detroit Red Wings, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Los Angeles Kings. He played for Canada in the 1981 Canada Cup. In recent years, Duguay worked as a TV analyst on MSG Networks’ Rangers broadcasts. 

mite is right

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“Morenz was small,” I wrote between hardcovers in Puckstruck, page 141, “five foot nine, 165 pounds. His skates were small, one of his teammates remembered later, and so too were his wingers. Howie’s linemates, in fact, were even more diminutive than he was: Aurèle Joliat, five-seven, 136 pounds, on the left, while to the right it was Johnny Gagnon, nicknamed the Black Cat for his speed and his coiffure, five-five, 140 pounds. This miniature man, with his tiny skates, his micro sidekicks — just thinking about the three of them, you start to squint.”

Widen your eyes, if you would, then, for Gagnon, whose birthday falls today: born in Chicoutimi on a Saturday of this date in 1905, he was a Canadien for ten years through the 1930s, which means that he was in on Montreal’s 1931 Stanley Cup. He also saw duty, briefly, for the Boston Bruins and New York Americans. Goalswise, he had his best year, notching 20, the season of Morenz’s untimely death, 1936-37. 

Gagnon went on, later, to serve as a scout for the New York Rangers. He died in 1984 at the age of 78.

Back to the ’30s and his gig as a flyweight partner to Howie Morenz. Here’s Harold C. Burr, writing in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in January of 1931 about the Stratford Streak’s wingers and the rivalry (possibly exaggerated) around what they displaced:

Joliat and Gagnon are two of the lightest men in hockey. Their skates are not the light regulation aluminum blades, for fear they would go right up into the rafter some night, so rumor has it. But that’s likely an exaggeration. You know how newspapers are.

It seems, though, that the little fellows are jealous of their weight, each scheming to be the lighter. Joliat is the taller and looks the heavier. But Gagnon doesn’t take anything for granted in hockey, which is ordinarily a wise precept. One night in Montreal the gamecocks almost came to blows over the question. Joliat shook his gauntleted fist under the Gagnon nose, stopping to get the low altitude, and Gagnon just spluttered back in French.

“Jump on the scales!” taunted Joliat, his volatile nature uppermost.

 “Do it yourself!” screamed Johnny.

So it was arranged. It was a simple question to settle beyond further dispute. The athletes were naked. Possibly there was one more soapsud on Joliat than on Gagnon, but Gagnon wore a drop of perspiration to make up for it. Johnny was first on the scales.

“One hundred and thirty-nine pounds,” intoned the voice of the weigher.

A slight sneer mantled Joliat’s lean bronze face as he lithely took Gagnon’s place.

“One hundred and thirty-six,” cried the voice of the weigher once more.

Johnny Gagnon just gave a stricken gasp and ever since hearing those fatal figures has been trying to lose the three pounds that keep him [sic] for hockey fame. For, after all, it’s quite a distinction to be the smallest man in a game where beef is at a premium. “He’s fast — and heavy,” has been the description of the ideal forward ever since hockey was born in zero prairie weather and grew up in the little crossroads towns.”

In A Minor Key: Johnny Gagnon, Howie Morenz, and Aurèle Joliat.

mini-mitch

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Toy Story: Born in Markham, Ontario, on a Monday of this date in 1997, Toronto Maple Leafs right winger Mitch Marner is 24 today. Already in his fifth season in the NHL, Marner is a sublime talent and one of the best things that ever happened to Auston Matthews; if you’re new to the area, he is has-a-plush-toy-in-his-image famous in the Greater Leaf Region. (The exemplar above was on sale at Scotiabank Arena circa 2019.)