Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores Read online

  Art Ross Trophy: The trophy to the player who leads the NHL in scoring points during the regular schedule was donated in 1947 by Ross, the GM of the Boston Bruins from 1924 to 1954.

  Calder Memorial Trophy: The award to the player “selected as most proficient in his first year of competition” honors Frank Calder, NHL president from 1917 to 1943. From 1936 until his death in 1943, Calder purchased a trophy for the top rookie, then the NHL presented a permanent Calder Trophy.

  James Norris Memorial Trophy: To the defenceman “who demonstrates the greatest all-round ability in the position,” the Norris Trophy was donated by the Norris family in 1953 in memory of the late James Norris, former owner-president of the Detroit Red Wings.

  Vezina Trophy: The general managers of the 30 NHL teams select the winner of the award as “the goalkeeper adjudged to be the best at his position.” The owners of the Montreal Canadiens in 1926, Leo Dandurand, Louis Letourneau, and Joe Cattarinich, donated the trophy in honor of Georges Vezina, who had appeared in 325 consecutive games for the Canadiens from 1917 to 1925.

  He collapsed during a game in November, 1925 and died of tuberculosis a few months later. Until 1981–82, the Vezina went to the goalkeeper(s) on the team allowing the fewest number of goals during the season.

  William M. Jennings Trophy: In the 1981–82 season, the NHL Board of Governors donated the trophy in honor of the late William Jennings, longtime president of the New York Rangers and an important booster of hockey in the U.S. It is awarded “to the goalkeeper(s) having played a minimum of 25 games for the team with the fewest goals scored against it.”

  Lady Byng Memorial Trophy: Originally donated by Lady Byng, the wife of Canada’s Governor General in 1924, the award is “to the player adjudged to have exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability.” When Frank Boucher of the Rangers won the Byng in seven of eight seasons, he was given the original trophy and Lady Byng donated another in 1936.

  Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy: Given to the league by the Montreal Canadiens in 1999, the award goes to the NHL’s goal-scoring leader during the schedule, honoring the great star of the Canadiens, the late Rocket Richard.

  Frank J. Selke Trophy: Awarded “to the forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game,” the Selke Trophy was presented by the NHL Board of Governors in 1977 in honor of Frank J. Selke, the great GM who built powerhouse franchises and winning teams in Toronto and Montreal.

  Jack Adams Award: The NHL Broadcasters Association presented this award—and annually votes on the winner—made to “the NHL coach adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success.” It honors the late Jack Adams, GM of the Detroit Red Wings from 1927 to 1962, and coach from 1927 to 1947.

  Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy: Under the trusteeship of the PHWA, the award is to “the NHL player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication to hockey.” It honors Masterton, a player with the Minnesota North Stars who died from head injuries suffered in an NHL game in January, 1968.

  Lester Patrick Trophy: Honoring the late Lester Patrick, the longtime boss of the Rangers after first being an all-star player and then building the Pacific Coast Hockey League, the award is made “for outstanding service to hockey in the United States,” and has gone to players, officials, coaches, executives and referees.

  King Clancy Memorial Trophy: Francis “King” Clancy spent close to 70 years in the NHL as a player and executive, mostly with the Maple Leafs, plus a long stretch as a referee. A tireless worker for various charities, the NHL board honored his memory in 1988 with a trophy in his name “to the player who best exemplifies leadership qualities on and off the ice and has made a noteworthy humanitarian contribution to his community.”

  Lester B. Pearson Award: The trophy honors the late Lester Pearson, former Prime Minister of Canada and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and is given to the outstanding player in the NHL as selected by the members of the NHL Players’ Association.

  Bud Light Plus-Minus Award: First awarded in 1998 by Anheuser-Busch Inc., the trophy goes to the player who has the highest plus-minus in a minimum of 60 games. Plus-minus is the difference between goals for and against the team when the player is on the ice in equal manpower situations.

  Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award: A strong NHL goalie in a 14-season career, Crozier worked for the MBNA American Bank when he retired. After his death in 1996, the bank donated the award, which goes to the NHL goalie with the best save percentage in a minimum of 25 games.

  NHL/Sheraton Road Performer Award: A donation is made to the charity of choice of the player with the most points in road games of his team.

  SLAP SHOT SCIENCE

  Can a slap shot really send a hockey puck traveling at more than 100 mph? Uncle John heads to the lab to find out.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  No one knows for sure who actually invented the slap shot, but Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1950s and ’60s, gets credit for popularizing it. Bobby Hull, Al Iafrate, Al MacInnis, Sheldon Souray, Zdeno Chara, and others improved on hockey’s hardest, fastest hit, becoming famous for slap shots that traveled more than 100 mph. But how exactly does the slap shot work, what contributes to its power, and how fast do the fastest ones travel?

  SCIENCE SHOWCASE

  For the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, NBC produced a short TV segment that asked Dr. Thomas Humphrey from the Exploratorium in San Francisco to explain the science behind the slap shot. To determine why a puck moves so fast off this particular shot, physicists used a high-speed camera to capture every motion. Playing the film back in slow motion, scientists can study all the details of an action that actually takes less than a few seconds. Here’s what they figured out:

  • First comes the windup. Standing with one leg slightly behind the other, a player rotates his upper body to bring the stick high overhead. During this windup, potential energy (energy that’s just waiting to be released) is stored in the hockey player’s body and in the stick.

  • The more momentum in the swing, the more force is transferred to the puck and the faster it will travel. So as the player brings the stick down into the swing, he rotates his torso, transferring his weight from his back to his front leg to drive the stored energy forward.

  • The key to the extra power of the slap shot, though, comes just before the stick hits the puck. The player first strikes the ice about 10 inches behind the puck, causing the shaft of the hockey stick to bend. That causes the stick to act like a loaded spring. Just as it hits the puck, it snaps back to its original shape, colliding into the puck with an average of 100 pounds of pressure, which translates to a shot that can rocket toward the goal cage at about 100 mph. The weight of the stick makes little difference, but the more flexible the stick, the faster the shot.

  • The finale of the slap shot is a flick of the wrist and a follow-through that stabilizes the puck it so it will go where it’s aimed.

  WHO SHOOTS THE HARDEST?

  • Bobby Hull claims that he once clocked a slap shot at 118.3 mph during a practice session. There’s no proof of that, and the NHL doesn’t recognize it as a record. But if it’s true, it would be the fastest slap shot ever.

  • Technically, Russia’s Denis Kulyash holds the slap shot record of 110.3 mph…but he’s not in the NHL. As of 2011, the official NHL record goes to the Boston Bruins Zdeno Chara, who hit a slap shot that was recorded at 105.9 mph during a slap shot competition at the 2011 All-Stars Game.

  • And Sheldon Souray holds an unofficial record of 106.7 mph from a 2009 Edmonton Oilers Skills Competition.

  * * * * *

  WHO’S HIS AGENT NOW?

  Mike Danton played for the New Jersey Devils and the St. Louis Blues from 2000 until 2004, and then started playing again on a pro team in Sweden in 2011. What did he do in the intervening seven years? Served time in federal prison after being convicted of trying to
hire a hitman to kill his agent. (Danton maintains that he did not try to hire a hitman to kill his agent…he says he tried to hire a hitman to kill his father.) Representatives from the Swedish club said they knew all about Danton’s background, but didn’t have a problem with it, as “that was years ago.”

  THE VERSATILE DIT

  Bruin great Dit Clapper was the only player to be an NHL all-star at both forward and defence…just not in the same year.

  ONE MORE DECADE AND HE’D BE A GOALIE

  The statistics covering the achievements of Aubrey “Dit” Clapper in his splendid career with the Boston Bruins do not list some of his best attributes. At 6-foot-2 and 195 pounds, Clapper was among the strongest and toughest players in pre-expansion history. His endurance and athleticism allowed him to have what some have called two distinct hockey careers, as both a forward and a defenceman.

  Clapper had the first 20-season NHL career from 1927 to 1947, serving the opening 10 years as a winger (twice an all-star), then playing the latter half as a defenceman (four times an all-star, three as a first-team selection). “Dit was as good a player in all areas of the game as I saw in my time in the NHL,” said Milt Schmidt, who spent more than 60 years with the Bruins as player, coach and executive. “He had such size and skill that he could play tough hockey without fouls, and he was such a good fighter that through most of his career, very few challenged him to fisticuffs.”

  NO ALL-STAR SELECTIONS FOR COACHES

  Clapper played junior hockey in Oshawa when he was 13 and earned a spot with the Bruins when he was 20. In his second season, Clapper helped the Bruins win their first Stanley Cup crown and the next season he scored 41 goals in 44 games.

  When the Bruins had a splendid group of young forwards for the 1937–38 seasons, they shifted Clapper to defence as partner to the great Eddie Shore. That year Clapper and Shore swept First Team All-Star honors. The Bruins won the Stanley Cup the next season and, with Clapper and Flash Hollett as a strong backline pair, once again in 1941. After retiring, Clapper coached the Bruins for four seasons, then left hockey to operate his sporting goods store in Peterborough, Ontario. He coached the AHL Buffalo Bisons for the 1959–60 season, his last hurrah in hockey.

  EDDIE, YOU’RE OUT!

  The NHL was formed when the other owners had had enough of Toronto’s aggravating Eddie Livingstone.

  To say that spite against one team owner inspired the creation of the National Hockey League is not hyperbole. The other four team bosses in the National Hockey Association were fed up with the nonstop arguments of Eddie Livingstone, owner of the Toronto Blueshirts. Livingstone had waged long boardroom battles, never-ending debates over the rules, lawsuits, injunctions, and even a threat to form a rival league.

  HOW TO FORM A ONE-TEAM LEAGUE

  In November 1917, representatives of the other four NHA teams—the Ottawa Senators, Quebec Bulldogs, Montreal Canadiens, and Montreal Wanderers—plus a new Toronto team, the Arenas, met at Montreal’s Windsor Hotel and solved the “Livingstone problem” by forming the NHL with newspaperman Frank Calder as first president. “We didn’t throw Eddie Livingstone out because he still has his team in the NHA,” an NHL team owner said. “His only problem is that he’s playing in a one-team league. We should thank Eddie. He solidified our new league because we were all sick and tired of his constant wrangling.”

  BE SUCCESSFUL AND I’LL SUE

  The NHL’s start was not smooth. The bankrupt Quebec team didn’t open the season and after six games the Wanderers left hockey forever when their home rink was destroyed by fire. The remaining three teams, still determined not to ask Eddie back, carried on with the Arenas beating the Canadiens in the first NHL final and then winning the Stanley Cup against the Vancouver Millionaires. Predictably, Livingstone launched a lawsuit against the new league. But he lost the case and vanished from hockey.

  HOW (NOT) TO FORM A ONE-MAN ARMY

  Earlier, Livingstone had even waged war against the Canadian Army. During World War I, several star hockey players had joined the 228th Battalion, based in Toronto, including Duke Keats and Archie Briden from Eddie’s Blueshirts. When the 228th formed a strong club to play against the pro teams, Livingstone staged a noisy battle, claiming that Keats and Briden had signed contracts with his team. The players eventually returned to the Blueshirts and played in three games against the army club, two of them won by the 228th, which rank among the most violent matches ever played. The battle was ended when the battalion was shipped overseas to fight with guns, not hockey sticks.

  * * * * *

  PUT UP YOUR DUKES

  “Two people fighting is not violence in hockey. It might be in tennis or bowling, but it’s not in hockey.”

  —Gerry Cheevers, former

  NHL goalie/coach

  “It’s not who wins the fight that’s important, it’s being willing to fight. If you get challenged and renege, everyone wants to take a shot at you.”

  —Barclay “Barc the Spark” Plager,

  former St. Louis Blues defenceman

  “Either you give it right back or the next thing you know everyone and his brother will be trying you on for size.”

  —Doug Harvey,

  former Montreal Canadiens defenceman

  “What are you, the fight doctor now or something? You’ve never been in a fight in your life, so what are you talking about?”

  —Rob Ray, former Buffalo Sabres forward,

  to a reporter after Ray was pounded

  by Edmonton’s Georges Laraque

  THE FABULOUS NINES

  Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe were two great stars in a glory era of NHL history.

  They were as different as two men could be in approach, temperament and style but Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe remain to this day etched in the memories of most hockey fans—even those who never watched them play. The legends of the two fabled number nines are familiar to everyone with even a faint interest in the game, the way Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle are to baseball devotees. Comparison of the two is one of hockey’s most intense arguments, ranking with baseball’s Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio. Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux inspired similar discussions for a later generation but while Gretzky broke Howe’s goals and point records, Lemieux’s career was hindered by a lengthy list of injuries.

  ROCKET IS BETTER

  Richard was the electric performer, high-strung and seemingly ready to explode with a dazzling goal or violence at any second—perhaps the NHL’s most mercurial performer ever. His ability to produce goals, both on slick, deft skating and stickhandling moves or using his strength to get to the net, especially in crunch situations, was remarkable.

  GORDIE IS BETTER

  Howe took a relaxed approach, executing the most difficult moves with ease and grace. His natural instinct allowed him simply to show up where the puck was most likely to appear. His toughness was legendary, his retribution for fouls against him swift and hard, especially those delivered with his famous elbows. The game appeared easy for Howe, who really was a hard worker but always appeared nonchalant on the ice because of his great physical talent and ability to read the play and react to it much more quickly than others.

  WHAT RED SAID

  Referee Red Storey, who officiated many meetings between the two great players in the 1950s, offered perhaps the most-quoted analysis of the two exceptional right-wingers. “I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Rocket vs. Gordie argument was the busiest in hockey history,” Storey said. “I was asked for my opinion often and I told everyone who asked that Rocket Richard was the greatest goal-scorer and most exciting player the world has seen. Then I would say that Gordie Howe was the greatest player in history. They were two very different people and no one had the talent of Howe and no one had the scoring ability of Richard. I don’t think I pleased everyone, but that was how I felt.”

  A KING’S RULING

  The great general manager of the Montreal Canadiens, Frank Selke, was careful in assessing the two gr
eat wingers, treading carefully because Richard had led the team to extraordinary success. But after Richard retired, Selke discussed them in an interview. “Gordie Howe is the finest all-round player in hockey history,” Selke said. “That takes absolutely nothing away from the Rocket or any other player. King Clancy (in the NHL as a player, referee and executive for 70 years) said it well: “If there were two rinks in Montreal offering games at the same time with the Rocket and Howe as box office rivals, Richard would do more business. Richard was the game’s greatest crowd pleaser, the most spectacular goal-getter but Howe could do more things than any player ever. And I know the Rocket thinks the same way.”

  NUMBERS DON’T LIE

  Their career statistics can be used to make a strong case for each man. Howe’s durability was unmatched: He played 32 seasons of big-league hockey, 26 in the NHL with the Detroit Red Wings and Hartford Whalers, and six in the World Hockey Association with the New England Whalers and Houston Aeros, which included his sons Mark and Marty as teammates. In his 32 seasons of pro hockey—Howe insisted that his WHA numbers should be included in his career total—Howe played 2,186 games, scored 975 goals, 1,338 assists for 2,358 points plus 96 goals, 135 assists for 231 points in the playoffs. In the 26 NHL seasons, Howe played 1,767 games with an 801-1,049-1,850 during the schedule, a 68-92-160 points mark in 157 games.

  Richard was a Canadien for 18 seasons, producing 544 goals, 421 assists for 965 points in 978 games, and a strong 82 goals and 126 points in 133 playoff games. Richard took great pride in his ability to produce in the pressure of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Of his 82 postseason tallies, 18 of them were game-winners, a record six of those in overtime.

  IF ONLY HE WERE AS GOOD AS ME

  Richard and Howe were involved in the extremely intense rivalry between the Canadiens and Red Wings in the 1950s when the Canadiens won six Cups, and the Red Wings four in an 11-season stretch. While Howe said little of his opponent, Richard could praise and criticize Howe in the same sentence. “Howe is a great player, the best I ever played against, but he should hustle more,” said Richard, late in his career. “He doesn’t seem to be trying as hard as he could. He was a better all-round player than I was, maybe the best ever. But I think he should have scored more big goals, like in the playoffs.” Howe offered only praise for Richard: “The NHL never had a more dramatic player than the Rocket, nor one more dangerous in the clutch.”