Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (33 page)

More than a few NHL trades turned out big for one team, and an embarrassment for the other.

N
ot long after the famous “Espo Deal” between the Chicago Black Hawks and the Boston Bruins in May 1967, Hawks general manager Tommy Ivan encountered the GM of another NHL team. “Tommy, the whole league wants to say thanks to you,” the man said, “for creating a monster in Boston.” In that trade, Ivan had sent forwards Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge, and Fred Stanfield to the Bruins in exchange for center Pit Martin, defenceman Gilles Marotte, and goalie Jack Norris.

THE MONSTER MASH

Seldom has a trade involving front-line players turned out to be such a boost for one team. Over the next nine seasons, the three big forwards produced 860 goals and 2,089 points, key men with defenceman Bobby Orr in the glamor team of the early 1970s, winners of two Stanley Cup championships. The Bruins set most scoring records that the Edmonton Oilers fractured in the next decade. Martin was a good center for the Black Hawks with 243 goals and 627 points in 740 games but Marotte's development stalled and the Hawks traded him after three seasons. Norris never made it as an NHL goalie, playing only 58 big-league games with three teams.

PHIL SCREWS IT UP

“I had fun playing the game and the Black Hawks brass thought I should be more serious about it,” Esposito said. “We finished first for the first time in the team's history in the 1966–67 season and had a little party to celebrate. I drank too much champagne and got brave. I told Tommy Ivan, ‘We have a dynasty here. Don't screw it up!' After we lost the first round of the playoffs to Toronto and I didn't have a point in six games, I was gone.”

TAKES ON TRADES

The Hawks-Bruins trade is on a long list of NHL deals that turned out to be one-sided. One theory on trades is that the team that lands the best player, even in a multi-player deal, is the winner of the swap. Often the benefits of a deal are much more subtle than that. A team overloaded with star players can deal one of them to strengthen its “foot soldiers”—checkers, penalty killers and grinders—improving its depth enough to be an immediate challenger while the traded front-liner gives the other club strength over the long haul.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD SLEEP ON IT, JACK…

When Red Kelly, a Norris Trophy defenceman who was an anchor on four Stanley Cup winners with the Detroit Red Wings in the 1950s, was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs for defenceman Marc Reaume in 1960, the deal was made in anger by Wings boss Jack Adams. Kelly told a Canadian magazine writer that Adams once had ordered him to play despite a cracked bone in his ankle and when Kelly refused and discussed it publicly, Adams saw it as disloyalty to the organization. While Reaume played only 47 games as a Wing, Kelly switched to center in Toronto and played a large role in four Cup wins in the 1960s.

SMYTHE SWIPES LEAF FOR LIFE

Over the decades, the Leafs were a team that made several shrewd deals in which they appeared to have swindled their trading partners. In 1930, Leafs owner Conn Smythe felt his club needed a leader/sparkplug to give the franchise a lift both on the ice and off, where Smythe was trying to assemble a money package to build Maple Leaf Gardens. The Ottawa Senators were struggling to survive financially and when Smythe offered $35,000 in cash plus two fringe players for defenceman King Clancy, the offer was snapped up. Clancy filled the role perfectly, a Leaf for life—on the ice, behind the bench and in the executive suite.

CONN RARELY WRONG

When Smythe sent $5,000 to the Red Wings in 1935 for goalie Turk Broda, it appeared that the Leafs had picked up a minor leaguer. But Broda became one of the NHL's great goalies, the backbone
of five Stanley Cup champions. When star center Syl Apps told Smythe he would retire after the 1947–48 season, the Leaf owner swung one of the game's biggest deals, landing center Max Bentley from the Chicago Black Hawks in exchange for five competent NHL players. Bentley played a large role in three Leaf Cup titles. In 1943, the Leafs traded fringe defenceman Frank Eddols to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for the NHL rights to young forward Ted “Teeder” Kennedy, perhaps the greatest Leaf ever.

Other deals that fall in the one-sided category:

• In 1967, the expansion St. Louis Blues traded veteran forwards Ron Stewart and Ron Atwell to the New York Rangers for center Red Berenson and defenceman Barclay Plager, who became mainstays of the Blues' three trips to the Cup final.

• In 1970, the Canadiens traded forward Ernie Hicke and their first-round pick in that year's draft (center Chris Oddleifson) to the Seals for defenceman Francois Lacombe and that team's first-round pick in the 1971 draft. The Canadiens used that pick to select winger Guy Lafleur, the dominant player of the 1970s.

• The Bruins acquired big winger Cam Neely from the Vancouver Canucks in 1986 in exchange for center Barry Pederson. While Pederson's career declined, Neely became a Hall of Famer who scored 344 goals in 525 games for the Bruins.

• Halfway through the 1991–92 season, the Leafs landed center Doug Gilmour from the Calgary Flames in the largest ever NHL deal (ten players) and Gilmour led the Toronto team back to contender status after a decade of futility. Three seasons earlier, Gilmour helped lead the Flames to their only Stanley Cup win after being acquired from St. Louis with two other regulars for a package of players that went on to accumulate only 23 points total for the Blues.

• In 1996, the Vancouver Canucks traded failed first-rounder Alek Stojanov to the Pittsburgh Penguins for winger Markus Naslund. Naslund took a couple seasons to find his game, but became the Canucks captain and one of the team's best scorers.

Don Cherry's dog Blue became as much a part of the Boston Bruins' 1970s success as the players on the ice.

T
he material was complete for a television series that might have endured longer than
Lassie
. There was a dog, albeit not an especially pretty or loveable mutt, and a boy, well, at least a male human being who was young at heart. The human claimed that he talked often to the dog, obviously basing his selection of clothing on the pup's suggestions. While the boy gained considerable fame, he always said that the dog was better known than his master.

BLUE COME HOME

It's too late for the series pilot to be shot, at least not with the original cast. Blue passed away, undoubtedly her spirit elevated to a canine Valhalla, where a Bobby Orr look-a-like is the host and a Terry O'Reilly clone is the valet. Blue, a bull terrier, belonged to Don “Grapes” Cherry, hockey coach (Boston Bruins, Colorado Rockies), raconteur, broadcaster (
Hockey Night In Canada
), and premier provocateur at stirring the hockey pot…or any other pot that's handy.

BEAUTY, EH?

Because it's not kindly to make nasty remarks about any departed's lack of beauty, nothing will be said about the time Blue walked down a street backwards and no one detected that she wasn't going frontward. Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in Grapes' beholder eyes, Blue was Miss Canada, Miss Universe, Miss Congeniality and the golden age of good looks in one package.

BULLDOG STAN

Blue first became a personality when Cherry coached the Bruins in the 1970s. Grapes' preference would have been to place the leash on general manager Harry Sinden—or at least have Harry sit up and beg occasionally—and when that didn't happen, Cherry turned to Blue. During a losing streak, Cherry mentioned that
when he returned home after a defeat, his dog Blue tried to hide. A Boston writer asked about the dog and a star was born. Soon, pictures of Blue appeared in the papers—today she would have her own website—plus film clips on the early news.

At every press palaver with Cherry, someone would ask about Blue and Grapes would be off and winging on the embroidery of a folktale about his dog's latest feat. He always compared Bruins enforcers John Wensink and Stan Jonathan to Blue, qualifying it as the highest compliment he could imagine.

LUNCH-PAIL LOGIC

When the Cherry-coached Bruins excelled in the late 1970s, meeting the Montreal Canadiens in two Stanley Cup finals and a memorable seven-game 1979 semifinal in three springs, the reporters covering the series had a high time. The ingredients were ideal—Boston and Montreal in May; the powerhouse Canadiens against the underdog “lunch-pail” Bruins; coaches Grapes and Scotty Bowman waging brilliant psychological verbal warfare; Grapes, with his tongue-in-cheek, working his
poor-us, powerful-them
needle in an effort to rankle the serious Bowman.

LOST IN THE WOODS

During the 1979 series, Cherry wove a splendid yarn about he and Blue going back to nature to clear their minds before a key game. They took a walk in a large conservation area near the Boston suburb where the Cherry family lived, and stopped for a snooze in the warm mid-spring sunshine beside a stream. When Grapes awoke, he and Blue proceeded in the wrong direction and became lost. “Okay, I used a little—what do the thinkers call it, poetic licence?—in a few of my Blue stories but the one about us getting lost is 100 percent true,” Cherry said. “We wandered through that big park until we came to a highway and started walking along it. Both of us were getting pretty tired when a guy stopped his car and offered us a ride. Now, this is the absolute truth: He didn't recognize me until he stopped but he had recognized Blue.”

BLUE TOO HIGH, TEAM TOO LOW

After the 1979 seventh-game overtime loss to the Canadiens after a too-many-men penalty against the Bruins late in the third period
allowed Montreal to tie the score, Grapes' stormy relationship with Sinden saw him sacked from the Bruins job. His relationship with Blue was strained seriously when he moved to Denver in 1979 to coach the lowly Colorado Rockies. “That was when Blue stopped talking to me altogether,” Cherry said. “She was getting up in years and moving to Denver in mile-high country was tough on her. In that altitude, she lost her energy and couldn't walk ten feet without needing a rest.” Cherry tried hard to sell hockey in Denver but the struggling Rockies never really caught the fans' fancy. He was whipping a horse on its way to the glue factory and after one season, the Rockies released him.

TIRES, TRIUMPHS AND TEARS

Cherry's high-buck, long-term contract gave him a chance to sniff the roses and look at all alternatives. A few guest appearances on hockey telecasts, with frequent mentions of Blue, gave him something to do while he waited for a call to come with the offer of another coaching job. But the phone never rang and Cherry became a regular on the
Hockey Night in Canada
telecasts with his controversial “Coach's Corner.” Blue was offered a commercial for a tire company and included her master in the deal. His
Grapevine
TV show, a national radio show and a chain of restaurants meant he couldn't afford to return to coaching hockey.

Blue died in the mid-1980s at the “old” breed age of 15 and Cherry found a new pet, named—what else?—Baby Blue. “Baby Blue was a gamer but she was like a good rookie defenceman trying to replace Bobby Orr,” Cherry said. “We had a good time with Baby but there really only could be one Blue.”

* * * * *

LISTEN UP!

“I've got nothing to say and I'm only gonna say it once!”

—Maple Leafs coach Floyd Smith after a disturbing loss

Two great junior stars, Guy Lafleur and Marcel Dionne, created much speculation in the first big NHL entry draft.

T
HE FLOWER AND LITTLE BEAVER!

Guy Lafleur and Marcel Dionne were the first two high-level junior hockey stars to be publicized heavily as candidates for the first overall pick in the NHL draft. Through the 1970–71 junior season, the two spectacular French-Canadian forwards were analyzed and compared endlessly the way U.S. college football and basketball stars were touted for the top draft role in their sports. And when the two junior aces led their teams into a controversial playoff series that still is debated today, it supplied a rare chance to examine them under the same microscope. Of course, the view then that the two players were remarkable prospects for NHL stardom, the kinds of forward around which a big-league attack could be built, was verified by their distinguished NHL careers.

PERRAULT'S PARADE OF NEWFOUND SCRUTINY

The draft had generated considerable excitement the previous season, 1969–70, when Gilbert Perreault, the magnificent, freewheeling center of the Montreal Junior Canadiens, and Dale Tallon, a talented rushing defenceman of the Toronto Marlboros, were touted for the first-pick role. The Buffalo Sabres had first selection and took Perreault, who had a Hall of Fame career while Tallon went to the Vancouver Canucks and enjoyed ten solid but unspectacular seasons with the Canucks, Chicago Black Hawks and Pittsburgh Penguins. But the media attention earned by the two junior stars showed the NHL how valuable the draft could be as a publicity tool.

CANADIENS FIRST

Adding a unique twist to the season-long draft debate was the Montreal Canadiens' ownership of the first selection through a
trade with the California Golden Seals in 1970. Canadiens GM Sam Pollock traded winger Ernie Hicke and their top pick in the 1970 draft (center Chris Oddleifson) to the Seals in exchange for defenceman Francois Lacombe, cash and the Seals' first pick in the 1971 draft. The Seals obliged by finishing last in the 1970–71 schedule, handing the Canadiens a dream situation—the surety of obtaining one of two great young players, both Francophones.