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  Before the NHA came along, games were played in two thirty-minute halves. But the NHA owners noticed that a lot of their revenue came from food and drink at the arenas, so they changed the rules to three twenty-minute periods. That way fans could visit the concession stands one more time. Years later, when Harold Ballard was part owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he’d turn off the water fountains so the public would buy more drinks.

  The NHA made other changes. The puck was now dropped instead of being placed on the ice. Assists were recorded, rather than just goals. Players were fined for penalties. The biggest change to the game was probably the end of the position called “rover.” The rover was a seventh player, usually the best player on the team. He patrolled the whole ice and joined the defense or forwards, wherever he was needed. There was a lot of controversy about moving to a six-man team. Toronto Star editor W.A. Hewitt (Foster Hewitt’s father) said it was like watching baseball without the shortstop. The six-man game made hockey more of an individual effort. But fans loved it because as the ice opened up, guys had the space to hold on to the puck and rush it.

  In 1912, a new team called the Toronto Hockey Club joined the league. They’d soon be renamed the Toronto Blueshirts because of their blue sweaters with a large white letter T for Toronto on the front. Their first game was at the Arena Gardens in Toronto on Christmas Day 1912 against the Canadiens in front of 4,500 fans.

  The Arena was the third rink in the country to have indoor ice. The fans found it a lot more comfortable than sitting outside in the freezing cold. But by today’s standards it was like a big barn. The seats were made of long planks of unpolished wood.

  The Montreal Gazette reported on Toronto’s first game. Two defensemen brought the puck up. One moved back and four attackers camped out in front of the net. Georges Vezina was fined five dollars for lying on the ice in front of his net and Canadiens right-winger Didier Pitre was fined seven dollars for two majors.

  In a sense, the Blueshirts were an expansion team—seven of them had never played pro before—and the result was what you might expect from a game between the Habs and an expansion team: Montreal won 9–5. But the Blueshirts went on to win the Stanley Cup in their second season (1913–14) under player-coach Jack Marshall. So Toronto and Montreal were rivals even before the NHL came along.

  Eddie Livingstone bought the Toronto Blueshirts from Frank Robinson in 1915. But he and the other NHA owners didn’t get along. They were always fighting and threatening to sue each other. They especially didn’t like the fact that Eddie hired some muscle guys who hung around when they tried to negotiate with him.

  By the start of the final NHA season, 1916–17, there were six teams in the league: Montreal Wanderers, Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators, Quebec Bulldogs, Toronto Blueshirts—and because so many players were enlisting to fight overseas in World War I, the league invited the 228th Battalion team to join.

  They called themselves the Northern Fusiliers—and people loved them. There were six Stanley Cup winners on the team: center Sam “Goldie” Prodgers won with the 1912 Quebec Bulldogs and again in 1916 with the Canadiens; Howard McNamara, the captain, won a Cup in 1916 with the Canadiens along with Amos Arbour; Howard’s brother George McNamara won the Cup with the Blueshirts in 1914; Eddie Oatman won with Quebec in 1912; and Lieutenant “Roxy” Rocque Beaudro won the Cup in 1907 with the Kenora Thistles. Imagine six Stanley Cup winners enlisting in a single unit today. They would be the most popular team in the league.

  For many years when I was playing, especially in Canada, our relationship to war went back to our parents and grandparents who experienced the world wars. It wasn’t until the 90s that war was something we thought about much. We just took for granted the sacrifices that people made for us. After that, from Florida to Vancouver, whenever anyone from the military was introduced, they would get a louder ovation than the players, and they deserved it. Just imagine the reception they would get if they were actually playing.

  The Fusiliers dressed in khaki uniforms and the fans went crazy when they skated out. They were leading the league in goals when they were called overseas on February 1917, before the end of the season. Thankfully, none of them died in combat. But they did what they shipped out to do. Their big defenseman, Art Duncan, received the Military Cross for shooting down eleven enemy planes as a member of the Royal Flying Corps.

  With the Fusiliers gone, the NHA owners—minus Eddie Livingstone—secretly met at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal and planned to form a new league before the start of the next season. They wanted to get rid of Livingstone, so they decided to suspend the NHA at the start of the 1917–18 season and start up a new league called the National Hockey League. It was formed under president Frank Calder. The teams were the Wanderers, Canadiens, Senators, and a temporary Toronto franchise called the Toronto Arenas. It was operated by the Toronto Arena Company that also owned the Montreal Arena. Not surprisingly, the team was made up mostly of guys who had played for the Blueshirts the year before.

  The Arenas won the Stanley Cup in that first season, 1917–18. Livingston was furious to have lost his team and his league, and he sued. But to no effect. The new league was here to stay, as were Toronto and Montreal, two teams whose rivalry would become legendary. In 1919 the Arenas would become the Toronto St. Pats. Eight years later they would change their name to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

  Three

  TEX’S RANGERS AND THE LEAFS

  If you want to stand out in New York, you need to think big. New Yorkers aren’t sitting around, waiting for something interesting to happen. Things are happening there all the time. If you want people to pay attention, you need to be as exciting as the most exciting city in the world.

  That was just as true in the 1920s as it is today. Yankee Stadium had just been built. The New York Giants football team had just come into existence. And colorful promoters like Tex Rickard were creating sports heroes through big events.

  In July 1921, Rickard put together the first million-dollar sports contest, a boxing match between the world heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey, and Georges Carpentier, who was the world lightweight champion and a decorated French World War I pilot. Rickard billed it the fight of the century, though Dempsey outweighed the Frenchman by thirty pounds.

  Rickard borrowed a quarter of a million dollars to build a venue for the fight in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The arena took only nine weeks to build, though it was big enough to hold 91,612 people. Rickard sold it out, and there were a few times during the fight when the stands swayed quite a bit. Dempsey knocked Carpentier out in the fourth round and Rickard grossed $1,789,238.

  Rickard also ran Madison Square Garden. In 1926, when he saw Howie Morenz and the Canadiens skate against his tenants, the New York Americans, he got so excited by the game that he and his partner, Colonel John Hammond, petitioned the NHL for another New York team and won the franchise.

  Rickard wanted to come out guns blazing so he hired a guy named Conn Smythe as general manager for $10,000 and asked him to put the team together. Today, the annual trophy for playoff MVP—as well as the division both the Kings and Oilers played in when I was in the league—is named after Smythe, which gives some sense of his importance to the game. But even if he had never taken a job with the NHL, he would still be an impressive figure. He was a varsity athlete in both hockey and football who interrupted his engineering studies to enlist as an artillery officer in the First World War, where he was awarded the Military Cross for stopping a German counterattack with only his revolver. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down, and ended the war as a POW. (He enlisted again in the Second World War and was wounded in France.) He was a remarkable man.

  When the First World War ended, he returned to the University of Toronto and ended up coaching his old hockey team. The Blues, as they were called, used to travel to Boston to play, which is where Smythe met Charles Adams, who later re
commended him to Rickard and Hammond. As he began building the team, sportswriters started calling it “Tex’s Rangers” and the name stuck. They’re still the Rangers today. And I was lucky enough to wear their iconic sweater.

  Like a lot of GMs, Smythe built from the blue line out. He recruited 6’2”, 210-pound veteran defenseman Ivan “Ching” Johnson from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Then he went after Clarence “Taffy” Abel, who was a nimble 225. They were two of the biggest guys in hockey. No one likes going into the corner with a defenseman who outweighs you by forty pounds.

  Puck possession was not as critical as it is today. Back then, you could let someone have possession and still contain them. When I played with the Oilers, before Marty McSorley moved back to defense full-time, he was on a line with Kevin McClelland and Dave Semenko. They might not have touched the puck for a whole minute and a half, but the other team never got out of their own zone. That’s what it would have been like playing against Johnson and Abel.

  Smythe had a hard time pinning the two big defensemen to a contract. He said that every time he and Johnson reached a deal, Johnson would have to call to check with his wife and she’d change the deal so they’d have to start all over again. After a few hours of this, Smythe sweetened the pot and made a final offer on one condition: Johnson had to sign it before calling home.

  Abel, who was born at the turn of the century in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, was the first American player to establish himself in the NHL. He was an even tougher guy to sign. He kept backing off. So Smythe asked to meet in his stateroom on the train. When Abel got there, Smythe locked the door and told him he couldn’t leave until he signed. When the train started to move, Abel signed the contract, opened the door, and jumped off onto the platform.

  Smythe looked for players in the Western Hockey League (WHL). The WHL was good hockey. In 1925–26 it had six teams: Saskatoon Sheiks, Calgary Tigers, Edmonton Eskimos, Portland Rosebuds, Vancouver Maroons, and Victoria Cougars. It was the last league outside the NHL to compete for the Stanley Cup. In fact, a year earlier, the Victoria Cougars had beaten the Canadiens in the finals. But the WHL teams were losing the ability to be financially competitive with the NHL.

  Frank Patrick, along with his brother Lester, had been in charge of professional hockey in the west for fifteen seasons. When they came to the conclusion that the league could not survive, they arranged the sale of WHL players to NHL teams in May 1926, with the proceeds divided among the WHL owners. Obviously, that was a very different time when it came to labor relations. Up until the late 60s, players were just employees, not partners. Players today would shake their heads at the idea of their contracts being sold from one league to another, but that’s the way it was back then. Nobody knew any better.

  The Patrick brothers are thought of as two of the biggest influences in the formation of the game we play today. Raised in Montreal, Lester, who was the oldest of eight children, was best known as a high-scoring defenseman who won two Stanley Cups with the Montreal Wanderers in 1906 and 1907. Their dad Joe sold his lumber business and the Patricks formed the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) in 1911. They invested in the $350,000 Denman Arena, home to the Vancouver Millionaires. And it was the Patricks who came up with a way to make artificial ice that is still used today. One of their franchises, the Seattle Metropolitans of the PCHA, was the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, in 1917. With Lester as coach and manager, the Victoria Cougars won the Cup in 1925. These guys had hockey in their blood.

  The brothers came up with a lot of the rules and innovations that fans will find very familiar today, including the playoff system, penalty shots, the blue line, the forward pass, numbers on sweaters, programs, letting goalies leave their feet to make a save, on-the-fly line changes, and farm teams. And that’s not all. The Patrick family will definitely be part of the story later on.

  In any case, Smythe was far from done assembling the Rangers’ roster. He managed to get two of the best players in the western league, brothers Bill and Bun Cook from Saskatoon. On their recommendation, he then signed a guy who would go on to become one of the greatest New York Rangers of all time—though Smythe immediately regretted adding him to the team. Frank Boucher was a former RCMP officer and a truly special hockey player. (In Game Two of the 1924 Stanley Cup semifinal, his Vancouver Maroons had lost 2–1 to the Montreal Canadiens; Boucher scored the lone Vancouver goal, and both Montreal goals were scored by his brother Bill.) But he was small—5’9” and about 135 pounds. When Smythe met his new star at the train, he exclaimed, “I paid fifteen thousand dollars for you? Bill Cook must be crazy.”

  Bill Cook ended up looking pretty smart. Boucher played center on the famous Bread Line between the Cook brothers. They won the Stanley Cup in 1928 and 1933, and Boucher was with the Rangers until he retired in 1938. He then came back as a coach, leading the Rangers to another Cup in 1940. And when the New York roster was depleted by the Second World War, he came out of retirement to play one more season. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Boucher was that New York did not win a Cup without Frank Boucher until Mark Messier was the captain in 1994. Or perhaps the most surprising thing is that Conn Smythe didn’t want him around.

  One of them was going to have to go, and in the end it turned out to be Smythe. He built a strong team at an economical price of $32,000. But he found himself out of a job before the Rangers’ first season even began after he locked horns with Rickard and his partner. He refused to sign a guy named Babe Dye. Smythe wanted team players and he thought Dye was too much of an individual. His bosses disagreed. Dye had scored 175 goals in 172 games in his first seven NHL seasons, mostly in Toronto. Meanwhile, the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in their second year of operation. Frank Boucher scored the series-winning goal in Game Five.

  The Rangers wanted to make a big splash for their inaugural game on November 16, 1926. Lou Marsh was the referee and was told to use a dinner bell instead of a whistle. It was a short-lived idea. The Rangers’ publicist, Johnny Bruno, came up with the scheme that they should kidnap their top scorer and captain, Bill Cook, three days before opener and then “find” him just before the game. That was another short-lived idea.

  A good GM is never out of work for long. After being fired, Smythe moved back to Toronto. Jack Bickell, one of the owners of the St. Pats, planned to move his franchise to Philadelphia for $200,000. When he saw the Rangers go to the top of their division that first year, he figured Smythe must have known what he was doing and offered him control of his team.

  Smythe said he would do it, but only if the team stayed in Toronto—and if he could buy a piece. Bickell told him to find investors to match Philadelphia’s offer and agreed to invest $40,000 himself. Smythe put down $10,000. He then found the other $150,000 and renamed the team the Maple Leafs in honor of the emblem on the 1924 Olympic team sweaters and the insignia on the uniform he’d worn as a Canadian soldier during the war. And he changed the team color from green to white.

  Smythe’s history and the Leafs have been bound together ever since. Maple Leaf Gardens, the team’s home for decades, was known as “the house that Smythe built.” Quite literally, there would not be a team called the Maple Leafs today if it weren’t for Smythe, and hockey history, along with generations of kids’ dreams, would look very different. So it’s strange to think that if he had been a bit more of a showman, he would have stayed in New York, in the Rangers’ front office. And the Leafs would never have been.

  Four

  THE BRUINS

  As a player, I have to admit that I never loved playing at the Boston Garden. I doubt anyone loved playing there, apart from the Bruins. Most rinks are 200 feet by 85, but the Garden was 191 by 83—nine feet shorter and two feet narrower. That may not sound like a lot, but it makes a real difference.

  Anyone who has watched hockey on an Olympic-sized sheet, which is wider than an NHL rink, knows how different that game is. Those few feet of extra width make it ne
arly impossible for the defensive team to close the gap on the attackers. A smart passing team should be able to control the puck around the perimeter almost indefinitely, and an attacker coming in with speed has all kinds of room to step around a defenseman to the outside. North Americans find the adjustment to playing defense on the big ice a huge obstacle, and even some incredibly skilled Europeans never get the hang of the North American game. With less ice to defend, NHL defensemen learn to step up at the blue line, which can be a pretty unpleasant welcome to the North American game to a player who thinks he has room on the outside.

  In any case, even a slightly smaller ice surface means you have less time and space to maneuver before someone closes the gap on you and separates you from the puck. No team knows that better than the Bruins. Back then they played half their games on small ice, and they have always been built to separate the visiting teams from the puck. When you play the Bruins on their home ice, you have no choice but to play their game.

  And they are good at their game. Just think of some of the guys who became heroes in Boston over the years: Derek Sanderson, John Wensink, Terry O’Reilly, Stan Jonathan, and Peter McNab. And more recently, guys like Shawn Thornton, Milan Lucic, and Brad Marchand have been able to continue the tradition on the standard-sized ice surface of the TD Garden. I doubt anyone ever enjoyed playing against these guys.

  There weren’t a whole lot of rinks that we were intimidated going into, but the Garden was rough and tumble and the Bruins had the team to go with it. Mark Messier used to say playing at the Garden was like being in a game of pinball. There was just no time and space to play the free-flowing game we loved. When we went to Boston, we knew we would be mucking it up with one of the toughest teams in the league. It wasn’t until the 1988 playoffs against the Bruins that we figured out what to do. I’ll talk about that in a bit.