Vern Buffey

licence to thwart

/ puckstruck / Leave a comment

Pleased To Meet You: It was four years ago today that Harry Howell, long-time New York Ranger Hall-of-Fame defenceman, died at the age of 86. Hockey’s goalscorers, he mused in 1967, “get most of the ink,” but he said that growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, he never envied them. He said he “always wanted to be a defenceman,” laughing, “maybe because I realized I wasn’t going to make it as a forward.” Howell played in 1,000th game that year; all of them were in Ranger livery, making him only the second player in NHL history (after Gordie Howe) to play that many with a single team. Here, Howell hinders Montreal’s Henri Richard, probably during the ’67 All-Star game at Montreal’s Forum. Canadiens won that game 3-0, with Richard scoring the opening (winning) goal and ending up as the game’s MVP. Both Howell and Richard were penalized by referee Vern Buffey that night, for separate second-period transgressions by tripping. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

c’mon, ref

/ puckstruck

With NHL referees back on the job tonight in Las Vegas, here’s a handy guide to the calls they won’t be making throughout game five of the Golden Knights’ Stanley Cup semi-final against the Montreal Canadiens. Kelly Sutherland and Eric Furlatt will be wearing the stripes tonight, taking over from Chris Lee and Dan O’Rourke, the much-maligned pairing whose handling of games three and four in the series stirred up so much Twitter ire and pundit pother. The illustration is Zzzzzzzzzap Hockey, a whimsical 1976 hockey miscellany for young readers. 

Below, that’s Scotty Morrison, the NHL’s referee-in-chief, in September of 1969, which is when 13 referees and 7 linesmen under his command went out on strike 24 hours before the league’s pre-season schedule was set to get underway. At issue: the officials, including refs Bruce Hood, Vern Buffey, and Bill Friday, had organized themselves into the NHL Referees’ and Linesmen’s Association only to have the league to recognize it. 

“I’ll referee myself,” Morrison declared in the face of the job action, though it didn’t quite come to that. Not all of the league’s officials had walked out on him: five senior officiants stayed on the job, working weekend exhibition games as planned. One game that was handled by a replacement referee was a notorious meeting in Ottawa between the Boston and St. Louis that featured a grisly stick-fight that ended up with the Blues’ Wayne Maki fracturing Ted Green’s skull. 

By the following Monday, the NHL and the officials had come to a seven-point agreement, covering pay and expenses and insurances, that put the men in stripes back on the ice.