Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (7 page)

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.

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

B
OOM! 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.”

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.

O
NE 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.

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

T
o 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

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

T
hey 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.”