salary

hockey players at home: behind the eight-ball with connor mcdavid + maurice richard

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Cue The Rocket: Maurice Richard lines up a shot in his basement pool room at home in north-end Montreal. Late 1960s? The photo isn’t dated, so that’s a guess. Another one: that’s his youngest son, Jean, at the table with him. Richard and his wife Lucille raised their seven children at the house on Péloquin Avenue. (Image: Antoine Desilets, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

Jimi Thing: The set-up for pool at the house in Edmonton that Connor McDavid shares with girlfriend Lauren Kyle, circa 2021. (Image: Architectural Digest)

On The Couch: McDavid and his Bernedoodle, Lenard. As per Cap Friendly, McDavid is earning a base salary of $12.5-million for the 2022-23 season. His career earnings over his eight years in the NHL amount to more than $71-million. (Image: Architectural Digest)

Home Front: Richard in his living room in the late ’60s. When his playing days were done, Richard stayed on with Montreal as a team ambassador, until he tired of that, quitting to concentrate on his home-based fishing-line business. In his final year on the wing for Montreal, 1959-60, he’s said to have taken in a base salary in the region of $14,000, earning a further $100 in bonus money for each of the 20 goals he scored in the regular season and playoffs. In 2022 terms, he made about $160,000 all told that year. (Image: Antoine Desilets, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

why be a coach, anyway?

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Flyer + Friend: Philadelphia coach Fred Shero in the mid-1970s, with his Siberian husky, given to him as a gift by Flyers’ captain Bobby Clarke. Sorry to say, I don’t know the dog’s name.

“Why be a coach, anyway? The money is not great; usually less than a team’s greenest player. The future is absolutely certain: you’ll be fired. The wise, the safe, or the lucky are the ones who take the first chance to get higher into management. Be a general manager, and fire somebody else: be a Harry Sinden, Sam Pollock, Jim Gregory, Tommy Ivan.”

That was the great Scott Young writing in a Globe and Mail column headlined “A Coach’s Fate is to Get the Chop” back in 1977, not long after the Toronto Maple Leafs sacked Red Kelly. Today, when Alain Vigneault lost his job with the underwhelming Philadelphia Flyers, he was the second NHL coach to go in just 24 hours, joining Travis Green, formerly of the Vancouver Canucks. Young’s theory of sanctuary in management isn’t looking so good today: Canucks GM Jim Benning was also let go yesterday, not a week after his (former) Montreal counterpart Marc Bergevin was shown the Bell Centre door.

And the money? What’s the deal on coaching dollars 44 years on from Red Kelly’s day? I don’t have good sources on his exact Leaf salary, but the Globe reported in ’77 that his successor on the Toronto bench, Roger Neilson, signed a one-year deal with Harold Ballard that the Toronto owner said was “about the same salary Red had,” but with more opportunities for bonuses.

That, the Globe asserted, put Neilson “in the $40,000 bracket, or roughly half the average salary of players in the National Hockey League.”

Today? Under the CBA, the minimum an NHLer can be paid annually is $750,000. When it comes to an average, as Bryan Murphy at NBC Sports writes here, there’s no such definitive number. “However, given that each team has $81.5 million in cap space for this season, with 23 players allowed on the active roster, the average of that comes out to around $3.5 million per player.”

According to CapFriendly, Vigneault was in the third year of a five-year deal that’s been paying him $5-million annually. That’s less than the Flyers’ best-paid player, Claude Giroux, who makes $8.275 a year, and six other of the team’s more valuable members. Travis Green’s 2021-22 salary isn’t listed, but last year he was making $1-million. Looking at this year’s Canucks’ roster, that’s less than 14 of his (erstwhile) players.

Coaches do have another option, of course, a middle way between getting fired and taking a chance on the safety of management: as Fred Shero did in the summer of 1978, they can walk away.

In his day, the man they called the Fog had been seven years doing the job that Alain Vigneault just stopped doing on the Flyers’ job. Shero’s record included bringing home a pair of Stanley Cup championships, but at 52 he just didn’t think he had what it took any longer. “The reason for this resignation,” he said, “is simply that I feel my effectiveness to motivate the players, as well as to inspire them to the degree that would result in a Stanley Cup victory, has been exhausted.”

He went on to coach the Rangers in New York, but in November of 1980 he reached the end of the road there, too, resigning a second time, with Craig Patrick stepping in to succeed him.

That was a grim month all around for NHL coaches: the Edmonton Oilers also canned Bryan Watson that November, making way for Glen Sather’s return, while Detroit replaced Ted Lindsay with Wayne Maxner.

 

golden grad: in 1928, dave trottier was the most sought-after hockey player in the world

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Everybody wanted Dave Trottier in the winter of 1927-28, and why not, he was, at 21, the hottest hockey talent outside the NHL. He would have been an asset to any of the league’s ten teams that season, and several of the league leaders did their best to sign him.

But Trottier, a left winger, had a European trip he wanted to take before he decided on his hockey future, and so the Leafs and Senators, and the Rangers and the Bruins all had to wait.

Trottier died at the age of 50 on a Wednesday of this date in 1956.

Back in 1927, he was the Pembroke-born star of the University of Toronto Varsity Grads who were, under coach Conn Smythe, the presiding Allan Cup champions. As amateur champions of Canada, the Grads won the right to represent their country at the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and so they did that, in February, with Trottier leading the way, but without Smythe — he stayed home in Canada over a roster dispute.

A Trottier tale from the St. Moritz Olympics in February of 1928.

On their way to winning gold, the Canadian Grads dispatched Swedes (11-0) and Brits (14-0) and Swiss (13-0). Trottier scored five goals in each of the first and the final of those games, managing a meagre pair against the British, and with those 12 goals he shared the tournament’s scoring lead with teammate Hugh Plaxton.

Post-Olympics, Toronto thought they had the inside track on getting Trottier’s signature on a contract: Conn Smythe was the man in charge of the Maple Leafs, and Trottier was said to have vouched himself to the club.

But a Montreal paper was also hearing that he’d sign for the Maroons in Montreal. In Chicago, the news was that Ottawa had a chance.

Or maybe would he stay an amateur? There was word that he had a job lined up in pulp and paper in Northern Ontario, where he could also play hockey for Iroquois Falls.

In the fall, the Trottier speculation began to warm up again. The Leafs were reported to have offered him $5,000 annually for three years, plus a $5,000 signing bonus. Canadiens were said to be in the hunt, and the New York Rangers, too.

In October, with the opening of the new NHL season weeks away, the Boston Bruins were reported to have paid Conn Smythe’s Maple Leafs $10,000 for the option on Trottier’s rights.

According to another report, the former Olympic star was asking the Bruins for a three-year deal that would pay him $35,000. That would have put him among the highest-paid players in the NHL, if not above them: in 1927-28, Maroons defenceman Dunc Munro was the top earner, with a contract that paid him $9,000 a season.

“All the things that have been published have been very distasteful to me,” the man himself said at the end of October. He was in Montreal, working for a pulp-and-paper company there, and planning to play senior hockey for the Victorias. “I have not definitely decided to turn professional. I like hockey, but I have a business career ahead of me that for the future is more important than the game.”

Trottier finally agreed to terms with the Montreal Maroons at the end of November. The Boston deal was, I guess, annulled — or was it just a rumour in the first place? Either way, Montreal paid Toronto $15,000 and promised to send them a player at the end of the season. (I can’t tell who that ended up being.) The value of Trottier’s contract wasn’t reported.

Trottier didn’t have a stellar rookie season, contributing just a couple of goals. But he did turn into a reliable scorer over the course of a decade with the Maroons. In his best season, 1931-32, only three other players in the NHL scored more than his 26 goals, while his 44 points put him sixth in league scoring.

In 1935, he helped in the effort that secured the Maroons a Stanley Cup. Dave Trottier spent his last year in the NHL, 1938-39, with the Detroit Red Wings, before persistent knee and shoulder injuries put an end to his career.

Atop The Hockey World: A cartoon from October of 1928, a month before Trottier ended up signing for the Montreal Maroons.

 

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.