Sam LoPresti

shot clocking: linus ullmark < tiny thompson (but who’s counting)

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Tiny Dancer: Thompson in the workplace, circa the 1930s. (Image: Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Tiny Thompson did some counting before he retired in 1940. Thompson, of course, was a fixture in goal for the Boston Bruins for a decade in the ’20s and ’30s, helping them win their first Stanley Cup championship in his rookie year. After Frank Brimsek displaced him in Boston, Thompson played a couple of seasons with the Detroit Red Wings before calling quits on his NHL career. That’s when he came up with the estimate that he had stopped 100,000 shots in his time tending goals.

Whether or not Thompson notched his stick to keep track of shots incoming, I don’t know. Hard, really, to say whether that’s a realistic number or pure fiction. Thompson, we know, played 553 regular-season games in a 12-year NHL career and another 44 in the playoffs. He played another nine or so in minor leagues, before that, in the 1920s. No-one was keeping official track of shots on goal in those years, so it’s impossible to pronounce on Thompson’s tally one way or the other. We do know that the all-time NHL leader in saves, Martin Brodeur, made 33,758 of them through 1,471 games, regular-season and playoffs. Does that help?

The incumbent Boston goaltender, Linus Ullmark, has played in 199 NHL games, and his save count is up to 5,353. As you maybe noticed, the 31-year-old Swede and his numbers were much this week as he had himself, well, a week, right in the middle of having himself, well, a year.

Both have been extraordinary, but let’s focus here on the week’s doings.

Heading into Boston’s game in Vancouver on Saturday, February 25, Ullmark had nothing but wins to his credit for the month, winning all of his four starts to that point. Against the Canucks, Ullmark and his Bruins won again, 3-1, with the goaltender hoisting a late-game shot at Vancouver’s empty net to finish the night in style, scoring the first goalie goal in Boston’s 99-year franchise history. (He still has some work to do before he catches the all-time NHL goalscoring leader: Brodeur collected three in his day, including a game-winning goal.)

Still, that was exciting.

Three nights later, on Tuesday, February 28, Ullmark was the hero in Calgary as the mighty Bruins rolled on, beating the Flames 3-2 in overtime. Again the goaltender made history, this time for prodigious puck-stopping, as Ullmark turned away 54 Calgary shots, setting a new franchise high for a single game.

The Bruins, thrilled, were quick to herald this on Twitter, broadcasting the image below. If they didn’t quite get it right on the night, well, it was a big thrill, and facts can be hard to corral when you’re so very … thrilled.

Not to take anything away from Ullmark, but the finer points of the case do deserve an airing. As the NHL’s PR department was careful to clarify, Ullmark’s achievement involved, in fact, a somewhat narrower time-frame than all of eternity.

As reported next morning in the NHL’s Morning Skate daily news digest, “Ullmark made a career-high 54 saves and registered the most on record by a Bruins goaltender (since 1955-56 when shots on goal began being tracked), besting Tim Thomas(51 saves on March 1, 2007).”

Good to know. As is what came next in the NHL release: “Of note, Boston has featured one instance of a netminder making more saves in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: Tuukka Rask (59 saves in Game 1 of 2013 SCF).”

Right you are. Just why there should be, in this case, a distinction made between a regular-season feat of this nature and one performed in the playoffs isn’t clear (to me, at least), but then again the dubious distincting between regular season and playoffs is not anything unseen before in NHL record-keeping. It does, nevertheless, seem like a bit of a statistical slight to Tuukka Rask.

Which brings us back to Tiny Thompson. As the PR people at the NHL pointed out, the league didn’t start officially accounting for shots (and thereby, saves) until 1955, well after Thompson’s time, which means there’s no reliable official record of what he and his early netminding brethren were doing in the early decades of the league. That’s too bad.

It doesn’t mean that shots and saves were never counted in the pre-1955 NHL: sometimes they were. Not in every arena, not all the time, nor in any systematic way. There’s no verifying the accuracy of the tallies that contemporary newspapers reported in those years. But report they did, sometimes, and even if those records are anecdotal, these numbers hold their places in hockey history if not in official ledgers.

For instance?

Well, the 90 shots that Normie Smith of the Detroit Red Wings was reported to have diverted in March of 1936. That’s some goaltending. That game still stands as the longest game in NHL history, wherein Detroit beat the Montreal Maroons 1-0 in the sixth overtime of a Stanley Cup semi-final. (Lorne Chabot of the Maroons stopped 68 shots.)

Or what about Chicago Black Hawks goaltender Sam LoPresti, who stopped 83 Bruin shots in a game in 1941. (Three others that got by him secured a 3-2 win for Boston, who had Brimsek in their goal). Also something.

You’ll find, too, in the annals of Bruins history a Stanley Cup game played in April of 1933 that the Bruins themselves may well have forgotten, something the team tends to do when it comes to its own history, bizarrely, given how rich that history is — but that’s another story, one you can read about here (and here), if you feel the need.

But. 1933. Boston met the defending Cup champions, Toronto’s Maple Leafs, that year in a best-of-five semi-final series that was decided at Maple Leaf Gardens in another epic six-overtimes battle. Tiny Thompson was in the Boston net, facing Lorne Chabot at the other end. Both men were nursing shutouts when Leaf right winger Ken Doraty finally ended the thing (and the series) at five to two in the morning when he beat Thompson for the winning goal.

Leafs Win: Artist’s impression of the game-winning goal Ken Doraty put past Tiny Thompson in April of 1933.

Distressed by the loss, exhausted, Thompson probably didn’t care how many shots he saved that night, but the number does seem to have been a remarkable one nonetheless. As reported in the Toronto Daily Star the following day, the Leafs fired 115 shots at Thompson, who saved 114 of them. 114! Chabot, for his troubles, stymied 93.

Tiny Tally: The Windsor Star clocks the shots, April 4, 1933.

It’s worth noting that most of the summaries that went out from Toronto that night included shot counts, period-by-period. Some, including in the Boston Globe and in both Montreal’s Gazette and Daily Star, offered different numbers when it came to saves, 111 for Thompson and 89 for Chabot. Again, there was no official count. These lesser totals seem to have been the result of someone, somewhere along the line leaving out shots fired (by both teams) the final (sixth) overtime period.

This, again, doesn’t change anything that Linus Ullmark achieved last week. Well done, him. But Tiny Thompson does seem to have stopped more than twice as many shots one long in Toronto in 1933. That seems pertinent, and of interest to Bruins’ fans, according to me.

As is (finally) another entirely unofficial incident from two seasons earlier.

Tiny Thompson is, again, our man. He was 27 in February of 1931 and (apparently) feeling frisky. It wouldn’t happen nowadays, but midway through that NHL season, Boston took the time between two of its scheduled regular-season games to travel to Providence, Rhode Island, to play a benefit against the minor-league Reds of the Canadian-American League. The cause was a good one in those Depression years: all proceeds from the game — $3,800 — went to support the unemployed.

“For the Bruins,” the Boston Globe reported, “it was little more than a workout.” They won easily, by a score of 7-1, powered by a pair of goals by Harry Oliver.

“Everything was in all seriousness until the final minute,” the paper assured its readers. Then? Tiny Thompson decided that he wanted in on the scoring action. So he headed up the ice. Stickhandling the whole way? Maybe. It sounds like the Providence defence parted for him. Did he have any kind of wrist shot? I can’t say. The Globe: “He went in alone from the blueline and beat [Reds goaltender] Mickey Murray on the far side of the nets.”

All in all, it was “a spectacular finish,” the Globe decided — a goalie goal that Linus Ullmark himself might have been proud to score, 92 years later.

On The Go: Boston newspaper clipping from 1932 showing Tiny Thompson heading up ice during a Bruins practice.

 

flyby

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Lift-Off: Posing here in 1940-41, Sam LoPresti puts Emile Francis to shame, I’d say, when it comes to sailing across his net in search of a puck that may or may not ever show up.

Like Frank Brimsek and Mike Karakas (Bob Dylan, too), Sam LoPresti hailed from Minnesota’s Iron Range. Born on a Tuesday of this date in 1917 in the now-ghostly mining town of Elcor, LoPresti grew up in nearby Eveleth. He played two seasons for the Chicago Black Hawks, and was a stand-out in his team’s (ultimately unsuccessful) playoff series in the 1942 playoffs against the Boston Bruins.

In March of 1941, as a rookie, LoPresti played another famous game against the Bruins. In this one, he faced 83 shots, stopping all but three in a 3-2 Boston win. LoPresti’s teammate Doug Bentley was, for one, disgusted … with Boston. “They must have been lucky because they certainly weren’t good,” the winger told a reporter next day. “Any team which has to take 83 shots at a goalie isn’t good in my book. What a bunch of Deadeye Dicks. Phooey.” (Doug Bentley did not himself score in this game, it might be pointed out, though his brother, Max, did.)

“I couldn’t sleep all night,” offered LoPresti. “I was so exhausted from the game that I kept tossing and turning in bed.” When he did manage, finally, to sleep, his roommate, Chicago’s Eveleth-born defenceman John Mariucci, woke him up to remind LoPresti how wonderfully he’d played. “I’m so tired now I’m going to sleep all the way back to Chicago,” LoPresti said.

Following the 1942 season, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, then transferred to the Navy. In February of 1943, he was serving as a gunner’s mate on a merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on an Atlantic crossing. Along with 20 or so shipmates, he spent 42 days in a lifeboat before being rescued off the coast of Brazil. He did eventually return to hockey, though never to the NHL: he played senior hockey in Duluth and Eveleth before retiring from the ice in 1951. LoPresti was a charter member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, inducted in 1973. His son, Pete, followed him into the crease, tending NHL goals in the 1970s for the Minnesota North Stars and (briefly) the Edmonton Oilers.

Sam LoPresti died in 1984 at the age of 67.

americans pastoral

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Bentleys Backcheck: It was on this date in 1972, a Friday, that Hall-of-Fame left winger Doug Bentley died at the age of 56. Here he is in early 1942, during his third season with the Chicago Black Hawks; the following year he’d lead the NHL in goals and points. Chicago was in at Madison Square Garden this January night to meet and beat the Brooklyn Americans: the score was 7-4 Chicago, with Doug Bentley contributing a pair of goals. He’s at the far right above, with brother Max checking back beside him. Brooklyn’s Ken Mosdell is the lone Brooklyn attacker, with Earl Seibert and Art Wiebe of the Hawks alongside. In goal, having made the save, is Sam LoPresti.

just add pads

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Born in Selkirk, Manitoba, in 1905 on a Saturday of this date, Paul Goodman was minding the nets for the AHA Wichita Skyhawks when the Chicago Black Hawks summoned him to Toronto in the spring of 1938 where they were battling the local Leafs for the Stanley Cup. With Chicago starter Mike Karakas out with an injury, the Black Hawks had made do in game one with emergency replacement Alfie Moore. Better yet, they’d won the game. That didn’t sit well with the Leafs, who refused to consent to Moore playing the second game, so in went 33-year-old Goodman. The Leafs won that one, but Karakas returned for the final two games to secure Chicago’s second championship in four years. Goodman got his chance at a more regular role with the Black Hawks two seasons after that playoff debut, taking over the starter’s job from Karakas, which is when this photograph dates to, January of 1940.  Goodman’s final NHL season was 1940-41. That year, he shared  the Chicago net with Sam LoPresti.

game on, again, 2020: fist bumps no, fist fights fine

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Wrasslemania: Art Coulter of the New York Rangers fights Joe Cooper of Chicago’s Black Hawks at Madison Square Garden in January of 1941. Looking on at left is Chicago goaltender Sam LoPresti, along with an unidentified press photographer and (at right) his New York counterpart, Dave Kerr. Working on separating New York’s Muzz Patrick and John Mariucci of Chicago is referee Bill Stewart.

Like everybody, Gary Bettman was housebound at the end of May. Unlike the rest of us, the NHL commissioner was broadcasting live from his New Jersey home, announcing the plan his league would be following in the hope of rebooting a 2019-20 season that the global pandemic had so brusquely interrupted in mid-March.

It was another strange scene in this strange and scary year we’re in, and at the same time as familiar as yesterday’s Zoom call. The image was medium-res at best, and Bettman was looking slightly startled, though smartly turned out in his quarantine-formal blue jacket and open-necked white shirt. He was in his dining room, with a formal-looking high-backed chair sitting empty behind him, maybe to signify the absences we’ve all been enduring. Over his left shoulder the camera caught the corner of a painting rendered in greens that don’t naturally occur in hockey. The room itself was a hue that, if I’m reading my Sherwin-Williams colour chart correctly, sells as Decisive Yellow. Cacophonous and yet somehow consoling was the background percussion accompanying Bettman as he said his scripted piece: nearby, in the commissioner’s kitchen, his three-year-old grandson was happily hammering pots and pans.

“I want to make clear that the health and safety of our players, coaches, essential support staff and our communities are paramount,” Bettman said at one point in a 15-minute explanation of the NHL’s Return to Play Plan that laid out formats, match-ups, and a tentative calendar. While there were blanks yet to be filled in — just where games would be played still hadn’t been determined, for instance — on the well-being front, the commissioner was adamant. “While nothing is without risk, ensuring health and safety has been central to all of our planning so far and will remain so.”

In a 2020 context, it was the right thing to say. In a COVID-19 context, there was no not saying it.

There’s another context that applies here, too, a broader hockey framework in which proclamations of how seriously the NHL takes the health and safety of its players are rendered ridiculous even as they’re spoken by the fact that the league still — still! — insists that fighting is a fundamental part of the game.

Tweakings of rules have, in recent years, contributed to a reduction in fights. Coaching attitudes and strategies have shifted as the game has sped up, and intimidation no longer plays the part it did even five years ago.

The reasons why the NHL prefers this fading-away over an outright embargo on fighting remain opaque. Fans still love it, it’s always said, some of them, and cheer when the gloves drop. Bettman takes cover, when he’s cornered, by insisting that the players think it’s fine.

Otherwise, the league hasn’t bothered to renovate its rationale since Clarence Campbell was president almost 50 years ago. Fighting is a safety valve by which players release the pressure that builds up in such a bumptious game as hockey, he used to argue: without it players would be maiming one another with their sticks. That’s one of Gary Bettman’s go-to defences, too, though it’s a thermostat he likes to talk about.

Advances in medical science continue to reveal links between head trauma and the grim tolls of CTE, but that news hasn’t impressed the NHL, which wants more proofs before it decides that the safety of its players might be improved by not having them punch one another in the head.

The contradiction the league embraces when it comes to fighting remains baked into the rulebook. Which part of Rule 21 doesn’t apply to fist fights on the ice? “A match penalty,” it reads, “shall be imposed on any player who deliberately attempts to injure an opponent in any manner.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times imagined how major sports might have seized the opportunity of our global lull to re-imagine the way they go about their business. What about dispensing with baseball’s DH, the Times blue-skyed. Or, for the NBA, introducing a 4-pointer for really long-range shooters? And for hockey:

Though that was never going to happen.

Returning to the ice after a four-and-a-half months hiatus is no easy enterprise. You can understand why a league like the NHL, trying to get back to its business in extraordinary times, would seek to keep things as normal as possible, as familiar, as unchanged.

The times, though — they’re different. COVID-19 has sickened millions worldwide. Tens of thousands have died. Mid-pandemic, the movement against racial injustice and police brutality that grew after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis under the knee of a policeman was such that it’s even shaken the NHL out of the complacency it’s preferred to shelter in for so long. (Granted, the response has been a little stilted, a little clumsy, but the fact that the league is getting around taking a stand on issues of systemic racism, equality, and social justice is, I suppose, a something in itself.)

As the NHL lurches back into action — the verb there is Michael Farber’s, from a TSN essay this week, and I think it’s the right one — as hockey goes lurching into its unprecedented and unpredictable future, we’ve learned all about the safety measures the league has put into place for the 24 teams hubbed away in a pair of Canadian bubbles, Toronto and Edmonton, from testing players every day for COVID-19 right down to counselling them to wash their hands frequently while singing “Happy Birthday.”

The league’s playbook on all this is available to any and all who might like to browse it, in two documents, neither one of which is exactly a riveting read. The 65-point Return To Play FAQ is the more accessible of the two; the Phased Return To Sport Protocol: Phase 4 Secure Zone is 28 pages of deeper detail, covering everything from the in-bubble roles of Hygiene Officers and what happens if a player or official tests positive for COVID-19 to Hotel Amenities and Dining Options.

It’s all very thorough, as it should be. But what about on the ice? How is that going to be affected, if at all? Looking in on European soccer over the past few weeks and even some Test cricket, I’ve been interested to see how pandemical conditions and precautions have changed the way games are actually being played.

Not a whole lot, as it turns out. Most of the adjustments have been of a peripheral sort.

Cricketers were told not to apply sweat or saliva to the ball.

The handsome guide issued by England’s Premier League, which resumed play in June, included these provisos:

Closer to home, North American Major League Soccer offered a short plan for “In-Match Prevention,” outlining “general hygiene measures [extending] to the field for official matches.”

Players, coaches and officials were asked, for instance, “to exercise care when spitting or clearing their nose;” they were also “asked not to exchange jerseys or kiss the ball.”

Health and safety guidance governing the NBA’s bubbly restart in Florida was contained in a 113-page guide disseminated among teams, though not, as far as I can tell, released in any public way. It does, USA Today reported, mandate that players to “Avoid Gross Habits on the Court,” namely:

No spitting or clearing nose on the court; wiping the ball with jersey; licking hands (and touching other items such as shoes or the basketball); playing with or unnecessarily touching mouthguard (and touching other items.)

Baseball, benighted as its efforts to get back to bats and balls have proved, issued a detailed guide in its 101-page 2020 Operations Manual, which includes a section on the rules MLB has modified for its pandemic return-to-play as well as guidelines for best behaviours on-field. Those include wherein “players all other on-field personnel” are exhorted to “make every effort to avoid touching their face with their hands (including to give signs), wiping away sweat with their hands, licking their fingers, whistling with their fingers, etc.”

Not allowed: any spitting, “including but not limited to, saliva, sunflower seeds or peanut shells, or tobacco.” (Chewing gum is okay.)

Also, says MLB:

Fighting and instigating fights are strictly prohibited. Players must not make physical contact with others for any reason unless it occurs in normal and permissible game action. Violations of these rules will result in severe discipline consistent with past precedent, which discipline shall not be reduced or prorated based on the length of the season.

Compare that to what the NHL is offering. As far as I can tell, the NHL’s guidance for what players should and shouldn’t be doing on the ice in the time of COVID-19 is limited to a single bullet-point on page 10 of the aforementioned Protocol, down at the bottom of the section headed “Safety Precautions.” It reads, in its entirety:

Avoid handshakes, high fives, and fist bumps.

So no more handshake lines, I guess, to finish off hard-fought playoff series? What about kissing the Stanley Cup, when it’s finally presented? On that and other matters the NHL seems to be keeping its own counsel. Maybe more advisories are to come. For now, not another word does the league have to say on how players might be advised to conduct themselves on the ice in a time of a highly contagious novel coronavirus.

Teams, I’ll assume, have their own careful systems to make sure water bottles aren’t shared; maybe they’re in charge, too, of reminding players not to be blowing noses or spitting. It may be that, like the NBA, the NHL — or maybe the NHLPA? — has issued comprehensive handbooks to teams to cover this whole tricky territory, they just haven’t been made public.

I guess it’s possible, too, that the league has been talking to players on an individual basis — putting in a call, maybe, to remind Boston’s Brad Marchand, for instance, not to be licking anyone for the next few months at least.

What seems just as likely is that it was decided at some point that short of rewriting the way game is played, there’s no way to govern or even guideline hockey into a safer, socially distanced way of doing things, so why even bother drawing attention to the awkward truth?

There’s nothing social about the game once it gets going on the ice, and no distancing. Players stand shoulder-to-shoulder at face-offs, they jostle, they bump. Once the puck drops, the game is a festival of mingling and milling, of sweaty human pushing and crowding and collision. That’s the game.

And the punching that sometimes ensues? Maybe you could direct players to disperse after whistles blow, to stand back a bit at face-offs. But if you did that, how could you not say something about the closer contact of bodychecking and fighting? While baseball might have no problem with explicitly forbidding melees, the NHL feels safer in silence, maybe, which is why it defaults to pretending that none of this is worth discussing.

The fighting that hockey has failed to inhibit didn’t make sense a year ago, long before COVID had capitalized its threat, and it doesn’t make sense now. But it’s not going anywhere: it’s firmly ensconced inside the NHL’s bubble for as long as this outlandish season lasts.

Even if you missed the exhibition games earlier this week and the several scuffles that happened there, if you tuned in this afternoon to the real thing, you didn’t have to wait long to see the new NHL meld with the old in Toronto.

When Carolina’s Jacob Slavin scored an early goal on Henrik Lundqvist of the New York Rangers, once he’d gathered with his linemates for a hug, he headed, as you do, to the Hurricanes’ bench to bump fists.

There was more of that a few minutes later, under angrier circumstances, as Carolina’s Justin Williams felt the need to drop his PPE to punch New York’s Ryan Strome in the head, and vice-versa.

Strome was bleeding from the nose by the time they’d finished. He headed for the Rangers’ dressing room, while Williams sat himself down in the penalty box. A couple of bemasked members of Scotiabank Arena’s rink crew skated out with shovels to scrape away the blood from the ice.

Game on, I guess.

Contact Tracing: Boston’s Brad Marchand showing how it’s not supposed to done in the Eastern Conference finals of 2018. Tampa Bay’s Ryan Callahan was the unfortunate recipient of the Boston winger’s attentions. The NHL’s handling of Marchand’s lick? The league told him if he did it again he’d be “subject to supplementary discipline.”

 

 

maroosh

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Now Hear This: John Mariucci makes his point with an unidentified member of the post-war Montreal Canadiens. That’s Chicago coach Johnny Gottselig looking in from behind (the second hatted man from the right); Montreal defenceman Kenny Reardon is the Canadian interceding on Mariucci’s right. The other Montrealer looks to me to be numbered 15, which means he could be George Allen or Bob Fillion or … Floyd Curry? The Chicago player nearest the camera could be a 3 but might be an 8, so who knows: Joe Cooper, possibly?

“To be sure there was hockey before Mariucci. But it was Mariucci who made hockey a game for more than Canadians. It was Mariucci who, by force of his play and his personality, made the game a Minnesota game, and then a U.S. game, as well. Pee Wee leagues and summer camps and a state high school hockey tournament and Brotens and Herbies and gold medals … all those things, which have become so much a part of Minnesota’s culture, can be traced to the toughest member of the Hay Street gang, John Mariucci.”

That was Doug Grow writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, paying tribute to the man they called Maroosh — also the godfather of Minnesota hockey —in the days following his death, at the age of 70, in 1987. A long-serving coach of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, Mariucci also steered the U.S. team to a silver medal at the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy. He spent his latter years managing and assisting with the coaching of the Minnesota North Stars.

To mention that he was born on a Monday of this date in 1916 in Eveleth, Minnesota, is to circle back to Hay Street, where he grew up, and where the Mariuccis’ neighbours included the LoPrestis (Sam tended goal for the Chicago Black Hawks) and the Brimseks (Frank, a Hall-of-Famer, made his name with the Boston Bruins).

After a late start — by some accounts, Mariucci didn’t play organized hockey until he was 17 — he starred at hockey and football at the University of Minnesota before joining the Black Hawks in 1940. The adjectives his play as an NHLer generated include rugged and feisty and bruising, as well as the associated phrase never one to miss a bodycheck. “Mariucci Thinks It’s Silly To Fight; He Has Been In About 100 Battles,” ran the headline of a 1948 profile when he was playing for the AHL St. Louis Flyers.

“I’m really sorry every time I get into a fight,” he volunteered, “and I swear I’ll never fight again. … But I hope no opposing player takes advantage of me. I won’t stand for it.”

Top Hawk: Mariucci with the C (and a big old pair of gauntlets)  during the 1947-48 season, his last in the NHL.

His NHL career only lasted five seasons, interrupted as it was by the two wartime years he served with the U.S. Coast Guard. He did play some EAHL hockey in the service —Frank Brimsek was a teammate — with the formidable Cutters.

Back with the Black Hawks after the war, the quality of his leadership saw him named captain of the team. That was a distinction in its own right, of course, and press reports at the time suggested that Mariucci’s appointment was even more notable since he was the first American-born player to serve as captain of an NHL team. That wasn’t the case, in fact: Billy Burch, the man named as the New York Americans’ first captain in 1925, was born in Yonkers, New York — though it’s true, too, that he moved with his family at a young age to Toronto, where his hockey skills were mostly refined.

Not Quite So: The Blackhawks’ 2019-20 media guide errs on Mariucci’s dates.

There is a more noteworthy glitch in what passes as the official record regarding Mariucci’s captaincy that could do with some correcting. Could we fix that, somebody? Many of the standard sources you might find yourself consulting — including both the Blackhawks’ own website and the team’s 2019-20 Media Guide — assert that Mariucci was captain for two seasons, 1945-46 and 1947-48.

That’s not so. The first of those, 1945-46, did see Mariucci return to Chicago ranks from the Coast Guard, but it was left winger Red Hamill, a Toronto-born Chicago veteran making a return from a year on duty (and playing hockey) with the Canadian Army, who was elected captain that season, succeeding Clint Smith.

Hamill continued as captain the following year. And he was still with the team in October of 1947 when Mariucci supplanted him. That was Mariucci’s last year with Chicago and in the NHL: in the fall of ’48, when he was 32, the Black Hawks released him, and Gaye Stewart took over as captain. That’s when Mariucci joined the St. Louis Flyers of the AHL. He was named captain there; press reports from the time also note that he’d be doing some work, too, in his new Midwest home as a scout for the Black Hawks.

Right Said Red: The Chicago Tribune noted Red Hamill’s appointment as Chicago’s first post-war captain in October of 1945.

training camp, 1940: all aboard for hibbing

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Slow Train Going: Ready to board the train for Hibbing, Minnesota, members of the 1940-41 Black Hawks doff their hats at Chicago’s North Western Station. From left, they are: Bill Thoms, Pep Kelly, Earl Seibert, Johnny Gottselig, Jack Portland, Mush March, coach Paul Thompson, and trainer Eddie Froelich.

The Chicago Black Hawks went to Hibbing, Minnesota, for training camp in October of 1940, which is what they did in those years, having prepped for years, pre-seasonally, in Champaign, Illinois. Later, 1943, the Hawks would shift briefly to Minneapolis before giving up on Minnesota altogether in the fall ’45, when they took their training to Regina, in Saskatchewan. In ’40, second-year coach Paul Thompson was young, 33; two seasons earlier, he’d been manning the left wing for the Black Hawks, as he’d been doing since 1931. In ’38, coached by Bill Stewart, Chicago had won a surprising Stanley Cup. Aiming to repeat that feat, Thompson’s team convened in Minnesota three weeks ahead of their opening game of their 48-game regular-season schedule, a November 7 meeting with the New York Americans slated for Chicago Stadium.

Twenty-five players travelled to Hibbing. Those who didn’t accompany the coach on the train from Chicago came south from Winnipeg. Paul Goodman was the incumbent in goal, though the Hawks were excited by a young local prospect, too, Sam LoPresti. Defensive veterans Earl Seibert, Jack Portland, and Art Wiebe would be challenged by another Minnesotan, Eveleth’s own John Mariucci, and a recently graduated mining engineer from the University of Alberta, Dave MacKay. Returning forwards included Mush March, Johnny Gottselig, Phil Hergesheimer, and Doug Bentley. The latter’s brother, Max, was given a good chance of making the team, as was a young Winnipegger  by the name of Bill Mosienko.

Thompson was enthusiastic: to his mind, this team was shaping up to be “the most evenly balanced in Chicago history.” The team’s tempestuous owner was on the page when he blew in for a visit midway through camp. Never before, Major Frederic McLaughlin declared, had a team of his looked so good so early.

This despite the fact that the Hawks hardly skated the first week of the pre-season. The ice was iffy in Hibbing that October — what there was of it. This despite the fact that the Hawks hardly skated the first week of the pre-season. The ice was iffy in Hibbing that October — what there was of it. The crew at Memorial Arena was no doubt doing its best to get a freeze on for the hockey players, but they had their troubles that first week. Five days into camp the Hawks still hadn’t seen a serviceable surface. Thompson curtailed Wednesday’s drills before they really got going: “five minutes of skating,” the Canadian Press reported, had worn the ice down to the floor.” The players took to the outdoors, where they kept themselves busy with a little road work, a little golf. Wednesday saw Mush March score a hole-in-one on the Hibbing course’s 190-yard seventh hole. He’d been prepping all summer long, you could say: March had spent the summer as a club pro in Valparaiso, Indiana.

By Thursday, the coach’s patience was almost at its end: if the Hibbing rink couldn’t get it together by Friday, he’d take his team and head west for 500 miles, to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where former Chicago defenceman Taffy Abel managed the rink.

Friday, with the team packed and ready to go, Hibbing’s ice-makers came through, and the Hawks skated for the first time with sticks and pucks. “The frozen surface stood up under two 90-minute tests,” the CP noted; “jubilation was rampant.” Art Wiebe was the season’s first casualty, suffering a gash over the right eye along with what the CP termed “a slight brain concussion.” No worries, said coach Thompson: he’d be back in action next day.

The second week of camp, the ice was fine. Monday 1,000 spectators showed up to watch Chicago’s first open scrimmage. Coach Thompson played referee, “allowing some fouls to pass unnoticed, but … quick to stop play on offsides.” It was 19 minutes before anyone could score, with Johnny Gottselig beating Paul Goodman.

As planned, the Hawks decamped the following Monday for St. Paul. They had another week of drills ahead of them there, along with a series of exhibition games against the local American Hockey Association Saints. Those were played, eventually: when the Black Hawks first arrived in St. Paul that vexed pre-season, they learned that the refrigeration plant had broken down, and that the ice wouldn’t be ready to receive them for another day or two.

 

crowding the crease

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Dual Purpose: Mike Karakas (left) and Paul Goodman share a Chicago net in October of 1938. Note the script on their sticks: “Professional Goalie.” And if you zoom in on Goodman’s left mitt, you’ll see it’s inscribed with the name “Alex Connell.” Did Goodman borrow the leather, perhaps, from the august Ottawa goaler, whose career had come to an end in 1937, or maybe did he inherit it? Could be an autograph, I guess, or an invocation, Goodman’s reminder to himself of who he wanted to be emulating when the pucks started to fly.

Chicago Black Hawks goaltender Mike Karakas fractured a toe on the eve of the 1938 Stanley Cup finals, and for a while there that April it looked liked the Hawks would open the championship series against the hometown Toronto Maple Leafs with New York Rangers’ borrowed backstop Dave Kerr fighting their corner. There was a whole kerfuffle over that, featuring fistfights among coaches. As it ended up, the man featuring in the Black Hawks net was Alfie Moore, who’d played a little previously for the New York Americans, and happened to be on hand. In search of a more permanent solution, Chicago also rushed out and bought Paul Goodman from the AHA Wichita Skyhawks, though when the 33-year-old Moore helped Chicago beat the Leafs by a score of 3-1, they thought maybe he’d do fine.

But the NHL wouldn’t let them keep Moore, so it was Goodman — also 33, born in Selkirk, Manitoba — who got the start in game two.

The Leafs roared back with a 5-1 win, which can’t have done much for Goodman’s confidence, let alone Chicago’s. Karakas, 26, was back in for games three and four, sporting a customized shoe and toe-splint, and Chicago won both those games, which won them the Cup.

Initially, Chicago’s patchwork goaling trio all had their names engraved on the Cup with the rest of their teammates. They stayed there for 20 years, until the Cup was redesigned 1957, at which point five Hawk players whose names should, by rights, be etched into hockey history (including Moore’s and Goodman’s), were, by wrongs, left off.

Paul Goodman was back with the Hawks in the fall of ’38; the photograph here dates to that pre-seasonal October. Toe-healthy, Karakas wasn’t quite ready yet to cede the goal on anything like a full-time basis, and so Goodman returned to Wichita for the duration of the 1938-39 season.

The year after that, Chicago had three goaltenders at camp, adding a young Frank McCool to the mix. He eventually returned to university in Spokane, while Goodman was assigned to the IAHL Providence Reds; Karakas kept his net. But only for a month or so: with the Black Hawks faltering in December, coach Paul Thompson decided a switch was in order. So Goodman finished the season as Chicago’s first-choice puck-parryist.

Karakas played a bit for Providence before he decided he didn’t want to be in the minors. Suspended, he, too, ended up as an emergency replacement before the season was out, appearing for the Montreal Canadiens in stead of the injured Wilf Cude and Claude Bourque. Karakas did eventually make it back to the Black Hawks’ crease, but it took a while: he had two more seasons in the minors ahead of him before he made his return.

Paul Goodman would keep Chicago’s 1940-41 net, but only temporarily. He got hurt not long after Christmas, and the Hawks called up 23-year-old Sam LoPresti — a son, like Karakas, of Eveleth, Minnesota. About to turn 36, Goodman decided he’d had enough, announcing his retirement before January was over.

 

we band of brothers

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Blood Brood: For the first time in NHL history, four sets of brothers took the ice together in December of 1940. From left, Rangers Mac and Neil Colville line up with Lynn and Muzz Patrick, alongside Max and Doug Bentley of the Black Hawks, and Bill and Bob Carse.

There would be no gathering of the clans on this night in 1941 — not all of them, anyway, just some of them. In fact, by this point in the 1940-41 season, the brief era of the NHL’s greatest sibling assembly had already come and gone. There would be other nights of brotherly note in years to come, as when four Sutters took part in a 1983 game, but that wartime season was unlike any other insofar as four sets of brothers were on the ice together on several of the occasions when the Chicago Black Hawks battled the New York Rangers.

The Rangers, who were the defending Stanley Cup champions going in ’40-41, featured GM Lester Patrick’s boys that year, Lynn, 28, and 24-year-old Muzz, both born in Victoria, B.C. Also on the roster were Edmonton’s own Colvilles, 26-year-old Neil and Mac, 24. Chicago, meanwhile, had Edmontonians of its own in Bill and Bob Carse, aged 26 and 21 respectively. And they had dual Bentleys, too, from Delisle, Saskatchewan, 24-year-old Doug and, in his rookie season, 20-year-old Max.

While the two teams would meet eight times over the course of the regular season, all the brothers would be involved for just three of those games. The first of those was on December 1, 1940 in Chicago, with the home team prevailing by a score of 4-1. The novelty wasn’t much noted. There was the photograph, above and, here and there, a few newspaper inches on previous NHL brothers, Cleghorns, Cooks, and Conachers. Thompsons, too, one of whom, Paul, was the Chicago coach. Max Bentley scored the first goal of his career that night, early in the first period: Phil Hergesheimer passed him the puck and Bentley went racing through centre. “One lightning swish and Max blinded Goalie Dave Kerr with the first tally,” was how The Chicago Tribune wrote it. Bill Carse scored, too, in plainer prose.

The teams met again just before Christmas, though the brother act was incomplete this time, with Muzz Patrick and Bob Carse absent on the night. On Christmas Day, the teams tied 3-3 at Madison Square Garden with all eight brothers back in action. Lynn Patrick scored a goal that looked like this in the next day’s New York Times: he “steam-rolled” through the Chicago zone before he “stepped inside the defence and got off a drive that flew squarely into the cords.” (Bill Carse got another goal, also.)

The last time all the brothers were in a game together was on the night of January 7, 1941, in New York again, where the Black Hawks prevailed, 3-2. This time, Lynn Patrick’s goal involved “a terrific shot that eluded Goalie Sam LoPresti” (Chicago Tribune) and “converting a pass from Neil Colville” (Times). Carsewise, Bob scored.

And that was all. When the teams met again on this day in ’41, it was Max Bentley who was missing. Sent down that week for seasoning with the minor-league Kansas City Americans, he’d at first refused to report, though Kansas coach Johnny Gottselig soon talked him into it. Chicago won the January 26 game, while New York took the last three match-ups. Max was back in Chicago for those games, though they lacked, variously, Doug Bentley (troublesome back) and/or Bill Carse (skate-cut to the leg).

The brothers might all have re-united the following season, 1941-42, but for Muzz Patrick having departed the league for a higher calling. Does that sound morbid? The fact of it is that, having applied for and gained American citizenship, he’d joined up. As the rest of the brothers prepared for another season on ice, the U.S. Army’s Private Patrick was in basic training at Camp Wheeler in Georgia.

By December he’d been transferred north, to Fort Jay, New York. “That gives Muzz a chance to see the Rangers in action a few times,” fancied a sports columnist; “he’d probably like to switch uniforms long enough to give his dad and brother Lynn a hand some night.” Promoted lieutenant, he found his calling as a military policeman and served out the duration of the war. He got his discharge in October 1945, just in time to head for the Rangers’ training camp in Winnipeg.

Sight-Seer: Private Muzz Patrick mans a .50-calibre machine gun during basic training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, in the fall of 1941.

first to flee

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thompsons

Thompson and Thompson: Boston’s Tiny and his brother, Chicago’s Paul, at Boston Garden, circa 1934-35. (Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

Art Ross was the first coach to pull his goaltender in desperation, we think. With good authority, James Duplacey’s The Rules of Hockey (1996) points to the second game of the 1931 Stanley Cup semi-final between Montreal and Boston at the latter’s Garden.

March 26 was the date. Battleship Leduc was wearing a boxer’s training helmet and didn’t play well. Dit Clapper lay on the ice in “anguish” after he dislocated his shoulder, which was before he relocated it and kept on playing. Montreal’s Georges Mantha scored in the first period. In the third, after Howie Morenz hit a post, Eddie Shore knocked him cold. Boston’s George Owen got a major penalty for that, or something, which made up to 16,550 people in the stands very unhappy. Many of them threw stuff. Four minutes remained in the game. Attendants who cleared the ice saw more stuff fall as soon as they’d finished their work, and so they returned to clear that. Bruins’ president Charles Adams then walked out to announce that anyone throwing more stuff would be prosecuted. Everyone threw more stuff. The hockey players went to their dressing rooms while the attendants went to work for a third time. Policemen ejected “one or two alleged paper tossers.” When play resumed after  a 15-minute delay, Montreal had its own penalty to serve — Johnny Gagnon, two minutes for “stalling” — and the teams briefly played four-on-four before Gagnon returned. Georges Mantha had scored for Montreal in the first period and so, with a minute remaining in the game, Ross yanked his goaltender, Tiny Thompson, to send out Red Beattie to join the shorthanded Bruins. Shore, Clapper, Art Chapman and Cooney Weiland were the rest of them trying to score, but they never got a clear shot at Montreal’s George Hainsworth before the bell ended what Victor Jones of The Boston Globe called “as lively a shindig as this pair of eyes ever gazed upon.” Final score: Montreal 1, Boston 0.

All of which is to set straight Dave Strader’s mistaken salute last night to the spurious 73rd anniversary of the first yank of an NHL goaltender. Play-by-playing Detroit’s game with Chicago on NBCSN, Strader anticipated Mike Babcock’s final-minute decision on whether Jimmy Howard would stay or go by telling his colour man, Brian Engblom, that March 16 was the day the first NHL goaltender left his net in favour of an extra attacker. Strader had all the details: Chicago’s Sam LoPresti was the goalie, Paul Thompson his coach, Toronto the opposition.

All of which check out. The newspaper accounts I’ve seen don’t explicitly mention LoPresti leaving the net, but the Leafs did score two goals in the final minute of the game, to win it 3-0. Good, then: except that game was in 1941, a full ten years after Thompson’s original, well-documented departure. Paul was Tiny’s younger brother — could that be where the confusion somehow got started?

Then again, the NHL itself hasn’t quite got the story straight, at least on its website. At NHL.com, on the Miscellaneous Trivia page, this is the story they’re sticking to:

Pulling the goalie It was the New York Rangers who first pulled their goaltender for an extra skater, either 1939-40 or 1940-41. Frank Boucher, the club’s coach at the time is generally credited with the innovation.

In 1931, Ross’s innovation was an “amazing manoeuvre” (The Globe and Mail) and — well, Victor Jones at The Boston Globe was frankly more concerned about the “miscarriage of justice” that marred the game (the late penalty on George Owen). I don’t know who the next goaltender was to be pulled. Ross kept on yanking Thompson every now and again over the years that followed, but I’ve yet to find a case where it actually paid off with a goal. Who’s the first sixth attacker to have scored? That would be worth knowing.