I grew up a Leafs fan and still consider them to be my favourite team — although that means a lot less to me at age 57 than it did when I was 17 … or 7! It’s been a long time since I would say I’ve bled blue and white. It was probably in 1989 (I’d have been 25 at the time) when I made my peace with the fact that the Montreal Canadiens were actually the greatest franchise in hockey history. (Though I’ve yet to make similar peace with baseball and the New York Yankees, whom I still despise!)

So, it’s only with a sense of history — not jealousy — that I consider the Canadiens’ amazing run through the playoffs so far this summer. What’s going to happen next, starting tonight against Tampa Bay? I don’t really like the idea of watching hockey in June, never mind July, but I’m too curious to turn away now!

Who are the most unlikely Stanley Cup champions in NHL history? Probably the 1937–38 Chicago Black Hawks. With a regular-season record of only 14-25-9 in a 48-game season, Chicago barely squeaked into the playoff but then upset the Canadiens, the New York Americans, and the Maple Leafs to win the Cup that spring. While 14 other sub-.500 teams have reached the Final (none since 1991), the only one to win the Stanley Cup was Toronto in 1948-49. The Leafs’ record was 22-25-13 that year, but they had won the Cup in each of the two previous springs, and almost seemed bored by the regular-season before coming to life in the playoffs.

“Anybody who knew us, knew the Leafs were much better than we showed.…” said Howie Meeker in his 1994 autobiography Golly Gee It’s Me. “We weren’t a below .500 club really. Anybody who considered us that was way out of their minds.”

Although the NHL likes to present Montreal’s record of 24-21-11 as if it’s actually over .500, overtime and shootout losses can distort what’s really a loss these days. Still, the Canadiens finished 18th in the league’s overall standings! Given that only 16 of the NHL’s 31 teams (soon to be 32) make the playoffs, there were two teams this year that didn’t qualify in their own divisions despite having better records than Montreal did. It’s kind of crazy that they’ve reach the Stanley Cup Final! There are not a lot of underdog stories in the history of this great franchise, but if Montreal pulls it off against the Lightning now, it’ll rank pretty highly among the NHL’s all-time unlikely winners. And pretty much be the most unlikely winner in Canadiens history.

I’m not analytical enough in my watching of hockey to offer any insight into how the Canadiens have done what they’ve done. So, instead, I’m just going to look back at the Montreal teams that have reached the Stanley Cup Finals 36 times now (twice before the NHL was even founded) and won it 24 times (once prior to 1917–18) to see how this year’s team stacks up.

Many people, it seems, are comparing this year’s Montreal team to 1993, which is the last time the Canadiens (or any Canadian team) won the Stanley Cup. But the comparison is only valid in the styles of those two teams. Montreal had 102 points in 1992-93. They were the fifth-best team in the NHL, although only the third best in their own division. Like this year, they fell behind in their first-round matchup (2-0 behind Quebec), but rallied to win. The fact that the fourth-place Buffalo Sabres (86 points) stunningly swept first-place Boston (109 points) certainly helped clear the path to a division title, and the New York Islanders’ shocking upset of the powerful two-time defending champion Pittsburgh Penguins cleared the way to a Conference championship. But once they reached the Stanley Cup Final, Montreal was hardly an underdog against Los Angeles and beat Wayne Gretzky’s Kings pretty easily.

The Canadiens won a record 10 games in overtime during the playoffs that year. It was a pretty remarkable run. As the team’s star goalie Patrick Roy told NHl.com in 2018 on the 25th anniversary of the 1993 Cup win: “The Canadiens didn’t always have the best team but they always had a team that was willing to work hard and put in the effort to win.”

Seven years earlier, in 1986, the Canadiens had also won an unlikely Stanley Cup title. That year’s team still had future Hall of Famers Bob Gainey and Larry Robinson from the 1970s dynasty, but the key playoff performer (as he would be in 1993) was goalie Patrick Roy, then in his rookie season.

The Canadiens were eighth overall in the NHL standings with 87 points (40-33-7) but a long way back of top teams Edmonton (119 points), Philadelphia (110), and Washington (107). A slew of upsets cleared the way for Montreal and Calgary to reach the Finals that year, and though Calgary had 88 points to and finished seventh overall that season, the only thing really surprising about the fact that the Canadiens beat the Flames to win the Cup was that it only took them five games. An unlikely win for sure, but not really an upset by the end. Still, the 1985-86 Canadiens are probably the weakest team in franchise history to win the Stanley Cup, so certainly an underdog story.

When Calgary and Montreal met again three years later in 1989, the Flames were the NHL’s top team with 117 points and the Canadiens were second with 115. Calgary won the Cup that year, winning the finale at the Forum. It marks the only time the Canadiens lost the Stanley Cup on home ice, which was no doubt upsetting … but the series wasn’t an upset.

In terms of Montreal Stanley Cup surprises, 1971 was certainly unexpected. But, really, the biggest shock came in the first round. The Boston Bruins set all sorts of single-season records that year, leading the NHL with 121 points on a record of 57-14-7. Phil Esposito had 76 goals and 152 points. Bobby Orr had 102 assists. The Bruins had won the Stanley Cup the previous year, and they were ever better now. The Canadiens were actually the NHL’s fourth-best team that season with 97 points, but were decidedly the underdog in their quarterfinal series with Boston. Rookie goalie Ken Dryden, and veteran captain Jean Beliveau in his final season, spearheaded a stunning upset. Beating the 28-34-16 Minnesota North Stars in the semifinals was as it should have been. Defeating a star-studded Chicago team that had 107 points in the regular season to win the Stanley Cup was certainly an upset, although not on the scale of beating Boston. But that year’s Montreal roster was loaded with future Hall of Famers who’d mostly won several Stanley Cup titles already. They were, in actual fact, a very good team.

Interestingly, an earlier Montreal Stanley Cup surprise had also come at the expense of a powerhouse Boston team under remarkably similar circumstances. The Bruins won their first Stanley Cup in 1928–29, and followed up with a record-setting season. Boston went 38-5-1 during the 44-game schedule in 1929-30 for an .875 winning percentage that is still the best in NHL history. (In a modern 82-game season, the mark would translate into 70 wins and 144 points!) Eddie Shore was that team’s Bobby Orr, and Cooney Weiland smashed scoring records just as Phil Esposito would later. Boston had not lost two games in a row all season, yet when the Bruins met the underdog Canadiens in the best-of-three Stanley Cup Final, Montreal swept the series. Having Howie Morenz — probably the greatest player of his era — certainly helped. Montreal also had a few other future Hall of Famers and previous Cup winners that time too.

Mostly, though, throughout their history, the Canadiens have been hockey’s most dominant team and their many championships don’t hold a lot of surprises. Nor do their few losses. Read on, if you care to…

The Canadiens won their first Stanley Cup in 1916. Back then, the champions of the National Hockey Association (forerunner to the NHL) played the champions of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. Because it could take six days to travel across the continent by train, the entire series was played in the East one year and the West the next. Vancouver had so dominated Ottawa in winning the Cup in 1915 that many thought the calibre of play in the PCHA was above that in the NHA. So, perhaps Montreal was considered an underdog against the Portland Rosebuds in 1916. But they did get to play the entire series at home, and the Canadiens won the best-of-five series in five games. If this was an upset, it was only a minor one.

A year later, Montreal visited Seattle for the 1917 Stanley Cup Final. The Metropolitans beat the Canadiens in four games. Seattle’s win may have been a little easier than experts expected, but Montreal’s loss was hardly a shock. Then again, the Canadiens beat the Mets two games to one in an exhibition series in San Francisco a week later, and team owner George Kennedy felt it proved that his Canadiens were better. When the two teams met again in Seattle in 1919, the series was even with two wins and a tie for each team when the final game was cancelled because of The Spanish Flu.

By 1924, it was pretty clear the calibre of play in the NHL was better than that in the western pro leagues. It was also clear that the home team had a pretty strong advantage in these East-West matchups. So the fact that the Canadiens took two straight games from both the Vancouver Maroons and the Calgary Tigers meant the Stanley Cup probably went to the team that deserved it. By the same token, Montreal’s loss to the Victoria Cougars in British Columbia in 1925 can hardly be considered an upset.

After beating Boston in 1930, the Canadiens eliminated the Bruins again in perhaps a minor upset in their semifinal series in 1931. Chicago battled Montreal harder than expected in the Stanley Cup Final, but the Canadiens won the series as expected.

The 13-year gap between Canadiens Cups in 1931 and 1944 was the longest drought in team history prior to the 28 years Montreal has now gone since winning in 1993. The 1943–44 Canadiens had lost fewer players to military service in World War II than other NHL teams. (The number of military deferments due to essential service jobs away from the rink angered other NHL owners, particularly Conn Smythe in Toronto.) Montreal was a dominating 38-7-5 during the 50-game season. They beat Toronto in five games in the semifinals before sweeping Chicago in the Final. No surprises there. The Canadiens were nearly as dominant again in 1944-45, but were stunned by the Maple Leafs in the first round of the playoffs. An upset, for sure … but not in the Stanley Cup Final.

The War was over by the 1945–46 season. Montreal slipped some, but still finished first overall. No playoff upsets this year, as the Canadiens once again needed only nine games to win the Stanley Cup. A year later, Montreal finished on top of the standings again, but a rebuilt, post-War Maple Leafs team beat the Canadiens in a six-game Final for one of the few times in franchise history that an underdog team beat Montreal for a Stanley Cup upset.

Amazingly, the Canadiens reached the Stanley Cup Final for 10 straight years from 1951 through 1960. Montreal’s loss to Toronto in 1951 was as it should be; the Leafs were much stronger that year. Detroit was clearly the better team too when the Red Wings beat the Canadiens in 1952, 1954 and 1955. The biggest shock in Montreal defeating Boston in 1953 was that the Bruins had eliminated Detroit, while the Canadiens were definitely favourites during their record streak of five straight Cup victories when they beat Detroit (1956), Boston (1957, 1958) and Toronto (1959, 1960).

Montreal might have won five in a row again in the late 1960s, winning as they should have against Chicago (1965) and Detroit (1966) and then defeating St. Louis twice after expansion in 1968 and 1969. Only that pesky loss to Toronto in 1967 — which joins 1947 as the only two years the Canadiens reached the Final and then lost when they were definitely the favourite — upset that dynasty. And if 1971 marks one of the rare occasions when Montreal won the Stanley Cup in an underdog role, wins by the Canadiens in 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979 stand as one of the most dominating stretches in hockey history.

All in all in Montreal, it’s a pretty remarkable history.

Just because this is a Stanley Cup story about teams from New York and Montreal, don’t go reading into it that I’m predicting the Islanders and Canadiens to reach the Final. (Then again, if it happens to be the two of them facing off against each other two weeks or so from now, remember where you read it!)

No, this is really just an excuse by me to spin a story out of a recent query about Lester Patrick’s sons, Lynn Patrick and Murray (Muzz) Patrick, scratching their names onto the Stanley Cup as kids when they found the trophy in the basement of their family home in Victoria, British Columbia. The questions was, had it happened in 1925 — when Lester’s Victoria Cougars had won it — or in 1928 — after Lester’s New York Rangers won it.

I’d always heard the story as 1925, and though some stories say 1928, the evidence turned out to be highly in favour of the earlier year, when Lester Patrick was the owner, coach, and general manager of the Cougars. Still, that didn’t stop me from doing plenty of poking around into 1928, when it seems extremely unlikely that as the coach and GM of the Rangers, he’d had the chance to bring the Stanley Cup home to Victoria.

Many of you know that Lester Patrick was a main character in the first book I ever wrote, an historical novel called Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada. So, for me, any chance to read up on old stories about Lester is like reading letters from an old friend. Lester was quite a bit in the news when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1928, so there was no shortage of stories.

The 1928 Stanley Cup Final between the New York Rangers and the Montreal Maroons was played entirely at the Forum in Montreal. (The Rangers, as would often be the case when the NHL playoffs rolled around, had to evacuate Madison Square Garden for the annual appearance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus). After the Rangers won the best-of-five series with a 2–1 victory in the final game on Saturday, April 14, 1928, they brought the Cup back to New York with them. On April 16, the team was paraded “in motor cars, preceded and followed by a special corps of motorcycle cops,” from Madison Square Garden to City Hall, where they met with New York Mayor Jimmy Walker.

“There we sat,” Lester recalled with a laugh in a story in the Vancouver Sun on May 5, 1928, while visiting from Victoria, “with banners strung along the sides, roaring through the traffic jams, lords of the universe for the time, at least. They paraded us to the city hall and back again in one quarter the time ordinary traffic could have done. The boys got a great kick out of that.”

Lester hadn’t had nearly as much fun getting out of the Forum after the Rangers’ victory over the Maroons.

“I had to fight my way through a yelling mob to the bus, 40 minutes after the game had concluded,” Lester said. “It was a very partisan crowd, naturally. They had figured the Maroons were a cinch, and they couldn’t take the defeat gracefully for the moment.”

Indeed, the crowd in Montreal had not been happy.

Heavy favourites over the Rangers, especially with all the games at home, Montrealers had not expected the series to go the limit, and when it did, the Maroons dominated play in game five, outshooting the Rangers 38-14. Still, they were beaten 2-1. The referees certainly didn’t put their whistles away in this one, with plenty of penalties called. But that wasn’t what upset the fans.

Early in the third period, with the Rangers up 1–0 thanks to a Frank Boucher goal late in the first period, the Maroons appeared to tie the score. Their goal was called back, however, because referee Mike Rodden ruled the play was offside. Montreal fans, according to the Gazette in its Monday recap of the game, “vented their ill-feelings against the arbiter by heaving everything that they could pry loose. The ice was littered as it has never been before.”

The Gazette detailed an “odd assortment of articles that was heaved on the ice.” There were pennies according to some sources, and bottles, one of which hit a player, but didn’t hurt him. “Winter hats were mingled with new spring felts,” said the Gazette, and “one young lady hobbled out after the game with only one silver slipper on, the other having been hurled out to the ice.”

It took a cleaning crew seven minutes to clear the mess, and they had “no sooner made the surface playable when a spectator hurled a chair from a box seat, narrowly missing those in front of the promenade.” The game was further delayed while the chair-tosser was removed from the rink.

The delay apparently took some wind out of the sails of the Maroons, and gave the Rangers a chance to catch their breath. With just under five minutes to go, Boucher scored again to up the lead to 2-0, and, despite a late Montreal goal, New York held on for the victory. But the fans weren’t finished being angry. When referee Rodden failed to pass through the lobby of the Forum on his way out (he apparently left quickly, through a side exit), a small mob turned its attention to NHL president Frank Calder instead. Calder was hustled safely into the Forum business office while a group of ushers “quickly terminated the display of rowdyism.” Lester Patrick had either fought his way through that same rowdy crowd in the lobby on his way to the team bus; or else they had taken their anger outside.

Later that evening, the Rangers and the Maroons shared a peaceful meal together at the Windsor Hotel, where the Stanley Cup was presented to the visitors.

Back in New York two days later, after being received by Mayor Walker at City Hall in the afternoon, the Rangers were dined at the apartment of William F. Carey, vice president of Madison Square Garden in the evening. Between engagements, wherever the players went, they were said to have been greeted by admirers all anxious to see the Stanley Cup.

A few days later, Lester Patrick left New York to return home to Victoria. The Stanley Cup stayed behind, being displayed for a few days in the window of the Fifth Avenue jewellers Cartier & Co., who would create a new silver band to add to the trophy to commemorate the Rangers’ first hockey championship.

Well, the Maple Leafs lost. Again. There was still a long way to go, but there will be no Stanley Cup win in Toronto this year. Again. Just like there hasn’t been since 1967. Haven’t even reached the Finals since then. The Leafs haven’t even won a playoff series since 2004. So, Toronto goes on to Year #55 without a Stanley Cup title, which is the longest drought in NHL history, surpassing the 54 years from 1940 to 1994 that the New York Rangers went without.

Still, when it comes to Stanley Cup droughts, the Leafs are a long way from the longest in hockey history. There’s another city that dwarfs even the drought of 71 years (1945 to 2016) the Chicago Cubs had between World Series appearances, and even the 106 years (dating back to 1908) between Cubs victories. That record drought belongs to … Winnipeg.

Sure, the city didn’t even have an NHL team for long stretches of time, but no team from the Manitoba capital has even played for the Stanley Cup since March of 1908, when (coincidentally) the Winnipeg Maple Leafs were crushed 11-5 and 9-3 by the Montreal Wanderers in a best-of-three-series. The Winnipeg Victorias were Stanley Cup champions in 1896 and 1901, and in that early challenge era when the prized trophy was open to leagues all across the country, they last won it in a successful title defense in late January of 1902. The Victorias defeated the Toronto Wellingtons. That 1902 series marks the first time a Toronto team ever played for the Stanley Cup and the last time a Winnipeg team ever won it. And with the Leafs loss to the Canadiens, it continues to mark the only time that teams representing Toronto and Winnipeg have met in a playoff at hockey’s highest level.

Back at the turn-of-the-20th-century, Winnipeg was a major hockey hotbed. Second only to Montreal. Toronto had plenty of teams then, but the caliber of play in the Ontario Hockey Association was considered weaker than that of Manitoba and Quebec. (Ottawa played in the otherwise Quebec-based Canadian Amateur Hockey League.) Still, the Toronto Wellingtons were senior champions of the OHA in 1900 and 1901, and local backers of the team liked their chances against the Victorias.

Fans elsewhere felt otherwise.

“The Toronto press is still heaping honors on the Wellingtons at the rate of several columns per day and the Stanley Cup is all but on exhibition in the Queen City,” mocked the Ottawa Citizen on January 18, 1902. “There is going to be an unhappy period for those (Toronto) boosters when the Tin Dukes get up against real hockey players in Winnipeg.” (The “Tin Dukes” crack was a shot at the team’s nickname — the Iron Dukes — from the Duke of Wellington for whom they were named.)

Many hockey players — indeed, many athletes in all sports — in this era of amateurism came from well-off families. The Victorias were mainly the sons of Winnipeg’s business elite, with many prominent citizens among their backers. In Toronto, most of the Wellingtons worked in banks or for insurance companies. The OHA was the largest hockey league in the country and rigidly enforced the amateur code, so having money certainly helped! The OHA also seemed more determined than other provincial leagues to maintain a gentlemanly style of play, which, sadly, didn’t help from a competitive standpoint.

In these early days, the need for natural ice meant hockey seasons only stretched from late December to mid March. Train travel meant leagues had to be fairly local, so in order to make the Stanley Cup available to teams all across Canada, the senior champions of any recognized provincial association were able to challenge the current Cup champion. Games could take place before the season, after the season, and even right in the middle of a season. Hence the scheduling of the games in Winnipeg between the Victorias and the Wellingtons for January 21 and 23, with a third game, if necessary, on the 25th. When the Victorias requested that the Stanley Cup series be played later in January, the Wellingtons objected because the bankers on their team had to get back to Toronto in time to balance their books for the first of February.

Obviously, this was a different time … but hockey and the Stanley Cup were hugely popular!

There was, of course, no television or radio in those days, but it was already common for people to meet in public places to listen to someone read out play-by-play reports sent from rinkside by telegraph to newspapers, or for fans to make telephone calls to those newspapers’ offices for score updates. When the Wellingtons traveled to Winnipeg, the OHA’s Toronto-based president John Ross Robertson arranged a novel new way for the fans at home to know what happened.

With the time difference from the West, it was thought that final scores from the Stanley Cup games would be received by telegraph around 11 o’clock or 11:30 at night. When they were, the Toronto Railway Company would blow its big whistle to signal the results: two blasts for a win by the Wellingtons; three would mean victory for the Victorias.

Though few people outside of Toronto gave the Wellingtons a chance in Winnipeg, they surprised their critics by keeping the games close and playing pretty good hockey. Still, the Victorias took the January 21 game 5-3 and won the second game by the same score two nights later, giving Winnipeg a sweep of the series. “We played as hard as we ever played in our lives,” said Wellingtons captain George McKay, “but the checking … was much harder than we were accustomed to. It was fierce.” The players on the Victorias were also said to be faster skaters.

Despite losing their Stanley Cup series, the Wellingtons returned to Toronto and would end the 1901–02 season with their third straight OHA championship. They would win the title again the next year, but passed on another Stanley Cup challenge and withdrew from hockey suddenly and surprisingly just prior to the 1903-04 season.

As for the Victorias, playing a short four-game season in Manitoba against their only senior rival, the Winnipeg Hockey Club, the team went 4-and-0 to win its its tenth consecutive provincial championship in 1902. But after defeating Toronto in January, the Victorias lost the Stanley Cup to the Montreal Hockey Club from the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association that March.

So, while the Maple Leafs are going on to 55 years without the Stanley Cup, the Jets are looking to win Winnipeg’s first in 119 years.

I was 3 1/2 years old when Toronto beat Montreal to win the Stanley Cup in 1967. I don’t remember it. (My hockey memories don’t kick in until after I saw my first game, at Maple Leaf Gardens in December of 1970.) But I remember well when the two teams met in 1978 and 1979. The Leafs of Sittler, McDonald, and Williams, Salming, Turnbull, and Palmateer are the true teams of my youth — and they were good teams too. Still, there was no way they were going to beat the Canadiens back then. Hard to believe its been 42 years!

Plenty of people have been waxing nostalgic recently with this renewal of the Leafs-Canadiens rivalry. So, I figured, why not me? But I’m going back a lot further than I can remember. Further, probably, than anyone can remember even if they were alive at the time. The two oldest franchises in the NHL have met in the playoffs 15 times (the Canadiens lead 8-7) going all the way back to the first Toronto-Montreal NHL series at the end of the first season in league history.

The NHL had four teams when the 1917–18 season started, but just three when it ended. (The Montreal Wanderers withdrew from the league in January of 1918 after fire destroyed the Montreal Arena.) The season was played into two halves, with the Canadiens coming out best in the first half with a 10–4 record. Toronto topped the second-half standings with a record of 5–3. The playoff meeting between the two half-champions was a two-game, total-goals series played on March 11 and March 13, 1918.

Back in those days, the Canadiens were already known as the Canadiens, as they had been since the team was formed for the inaugural season of the National Hockey Association (forerunner of the NHL) in 1909-10. You can pick a pretty good fight with a hockey historian as to what the Toronto team was called. They’ve gone down in history as the Toronto Arenas, and they were operated that season by the Toronto Arena Company, but probably didn’t take that name officially until the 1918–19 season. The team had been known as the Blue Shirts (two words) or Blueshirts (one word) during its time in the NHA, and most journalists were still using one of those spellings — or referring to them as the Blues, or Torontos — during the 1917–18 NHL season.

“The hockey week here opens to-night with the first of the NHL play-off series between Torontos and Canadiens,” reported the Toronto Star on March 11, 1918. “The Blue Shirts, with the exception of Reg Noble, are in excellent shape for the final struggle, and are confident that they will take a three or four-goal lead to Montreal with them for the final game on Wednesday night.”

Another unnamed Star sports writer wasn’t so sure.

“When it comes to a real showdown,” read the column known as Random Notes on Current Sports, “Canadiens are the logical favorites for the NHL championship. They have shown themselves to be a real team – fast, brainy, and game – and many Toronto fans will be back them to win right here to-night.”

But the Toronto players were right. The Blue Shirts/Blueshirts/Arenas won game one by a score of 7–3.

“It is a fortunate thing, indeed, for Les Bons Canadiens that both matches of the NHL play-off series do not take place in Toronto,” said Elmer Ferguson of the Montreal Herald on March 12, 1918. “You’d never know the old club from its play on Toronto ice last night, compared with its dash and brilliance in games played before the friendly faces at Jubilee Rink. And, by the same token, you’d never recognize the meek and inoffensive team wearing the blue shirts which we’ve been accustomed to seeing in the rampaging, aggressive and chip-on-the-shoulder gang which rode roughshod over our habitants last night.”

But even with a four-goal lead, hanging on to win the series in Montreal was no sure thing. As it turned out, the Canadiens won game two, but with only a 4–3 victory, so Toronto took the series 10–7 in total.

“The Canadiens chances faded away when they undertook to make the visitors quit by roughing it on every possible occasion” reported the Montreal Gazette on March 14. “Canadiens suffered through penalties… Toronto played the puck more than the man, and took the bumps handed out to them without retaliating to any great extent. This counted greatly in their favor.”

NHL summaries show that far more penalties were called in game one at Toronto. Even so, game two in Montreal must have been rougher.

“Bullfighting is prohibited in Canada for the reason that it is considered brutal,” wrote Harvey Sproule (a future Toronto NHL head coach, briefly, in 1919–20) in the Toronto Star, “but it is a regular ‘pink tea’ in comparison with the Donnybrook served up to the fans at the Jubilee Ice Palace last night…”

With the win Toronto took the NHL championship, but not yet the Stanley Cup. Winning the NHL title that season only entitled the Blue Shirts/Blueshirts/Arenas to host the Pacific Coast Hockey Association champion Vancouver Maroons (who wore maroon-coloured shirts) in a best-of-five Stanley Cup Final. Toronto won that series 3-games-to-2 with a 2-1 victory in the finalé on March 30, 1918 to claim what was already a prized trophy.

And this year?

I think Toronto is good enough to win in four games, but probably five. Then again, if Leafs goalie Jack Campbell can’t carry the playoff weight, and the Canadiens’ Carey Price can turn back the clock … well, let’s just say I wouldn’t want to trust Freddie Andersen in another seventh game!

One year to the day of the declaration of a global pandemic, I’m using the somewhat flimsy pretext of an overlooked anniversary (of sorts) from last week as an excuse for running this story today. Really, it’s just another old incident I may have figured out something new about…

This past Sunday, March 7, marked the 115th anniversary of Fred Brophy of the Montreal AAA hockey team scoring a goal on Nathan Frye of the Montreal Victorias. What makes this goal noteworthy is that Brophy himself was a goalie! What makes the pretext somewhat flimsy is that this was actually the second time Brophy the goalie had scored a goal … and it’s his first goal — a little more than a year earlier, on February 18, 1905 — that I’m actually writing about.

That Fred Brophy scored a goal more than 80 years before Philadelphia Flyers goalie Ron Hextall shot a puck the length of the ice into an open net on December 8, 1987, is not unknown to hockey historians. It’s more than likely it first game to light in Volume 1 of Charles L. Coleman’s seminal work The Trail of the Stanley Cup, published around 1966.

In writing about the 1905 hockey season, Coleman (who had poured over old newspapers for years to compile his three-volume set) stated: “Another unusual record was established by Brophy, the Westmount goaler, who on February 18th rushed the length of the ice and scored a goal against Paddy Moran of Quebec.”

Of his goal the next year, Coleman writes: “Brophy, the Montreal goaler, duplicated his performance of the previous year by scoring a goal against Victorias in the game on March 7th. In doing so, he stickhandled his way past the stars Bowie, Eveleigh and Bellingham.”

Brophy’s scoring ability got more play on December 24, 1969, in a Canadian Press story that appeared in numerous Canadian newspapers.

The CP story gives basically the same scant details that Coleman had provided. But somewhere along the line, more information about Brophy’s first goal surfaced. Wikipedia has this to say:

“The first recorded goal in competitive play, scored by a goaltender, was in 1905. According to a Montreal Star report, poor officiating resulted in only the goaltenders left on the ice in a February 18 game between the Montreal Westmounts and Quebec Bulldogs of the Canadian Amateur Hockey League (CAHL). Fred Brophy (Montreal) and Hall of Famer Paddy Moran (Quebec) exchanged scoring attempts, before Brophy beat Moran, while the latter and most of the spectators “convulsed in laughter.”

Now, I know that in the early days of the NHL, there was no rule limiting the number of players serving a penalty at one time. Still, I’ve had difficulty envisioning a situation in which the referees would call so many penalties that only the goalies were left on the ice.

Wikipedia credits the book Without Fear: Hockey’s 50 Greatest Goaltenders by Kevin Allen, Bob Duff, and Johnny Bower as the source of its information. So, I asked Bob Duff if he had that Montreal Star report. Bob said he’d only read about it, and thought it might have been in a book by Brian McFarlane.

So, I got in touch with Brian McFarlane … who could only recall the story from what he’d read in Charles Coleman. Who (if anyone) found that Montreal Star story? At this point, who knows!

Unfortunately, the Montreal Star has never been digitized and is not easily accessible (especially these days) via microfilm. But plenty of other newspapers are online. So, I got busy. And if there was a story in the Star, it was either inaccurate at the time … or was transcribed inaccurately later.

English accounts of the game from Montreal are scarce. The Gazette has very little to say about it. Westmount had its own paper (as I discovered when doing my research on Art Ross — both Ross and Lester Patrick played with Brophy on the Westmount team this year, and in this game) but the Westmount News either doesn’t exist before 1907, or no copies have survived.

The 1905 game was played in Quebec City, and perhaps that’s the reason the best accounts I could find were in French. So, I sent a copy of the story in Montreal’s La Presse to Society for International Hockey Research colleagues Jean-Patrice Martel and Marc Durand. Marc has a special interest in the history of the Quebec Bulldogs, and was readily available to read the story … and provide me with translations.

The English-language accounts I’d seen had made it pretty clear that Paddy Moran had tried to score before Brophy did, and that there were a lot of penalties called in a very one-sided game that Quebec won 17–5. As Marc explained, the score was already 12–4 Quebec at the time, and it was getting to be late in the game. According to his translation:

“Paddy Moran played his typical game. He went the extra mile by taking advantage of the moment when Quebec had just one forward on the ice to try and score himself. The situation amused the public. Brophy, to not be left behind, returned the compliment by scoring, after a superb race, helped by a lot of goodwill on the part of the Quebec defense.”

No explanation as to what that “goodwill” entailed, but it was clear that Brophy and Moran were not the only players on the ice. Quebec only had one forward who wasn’t in the penalty box at the time, but Moran had him and his two defensemen with him. Westmount had only one player in the box.

Marc and I both agree that, from what we know of Paddy Moran, he doesn’t seem like the type who would just let Brophy score on him, no matter what the score. (Especially after Brophy had just stopped him!) Goalies in this era didn’t have all the equipment they wear today. Their gloves weren’t all that different from other players; the pads on their legs were flimsy; and their sticks were only marginally wider than other players. Still, there’s no record of any other goalies doing what Brophy did at the game’s highest level in this era.

The fact that he did it again the next season shows it couldn’t have been a complete fluke.

And for people who haven’t see it already, I was one of those who Ken Dryden reached out to yesterday to share his message that we still need to be careful. Even with the vaccine rollout picking up the pace, Ken’s is a reminder that we still need to wear a mask…

On a late Friday morning, right around noon, on April 17, 1931, Henry Smith was going down the stairs to the cellar in his home at 47 Empress Avenue in Ottawa. A widower living alone for the past six months after 60 years of marriage to Anne McLaughlin, Mr. Smith was suddenly overcome by a dizzy spell and fell. He suffered seven cracked ribs and was taken to the Walter Street hospital.

Once a contractor of great renown, Henry Smith and partner John Henney had built many bridges in Ottawa, and public structures across much of Canada. He was a man who had always enjoyed robust health, and was said to have been in full possession of all his faculties at the time of his accident. Hopes were held out for a complete recovery, but the shock to his system was too much. Complications set in, and Henry Smith died shortly after 9 am on the morning of Tuesday, April 21. He was a month shy of his 88th birthday.

So, why do we care about this?

(I guess the better question is, why do I care about it?)

Because of the seven sons of Henry and Anne Smith, all seven became prominent hockey players in their hometown of Ottawa. Alf Smith, the oldest son, and his brother, Tommy, 12 years his junior, are both members of the Hockey Hall of Fame. Another brother, Harry, probably had the talent to join them there, although perhaps he had even more of Alf’s belligerent nature than he had of Tommy’s scoring skill.

As I mentioned in my recent story about the Gilmour brothers, Alf, Tommy, and Harry were all members of the Silver Seven in their final dynasty season of 1905–06. Smith brothers Dan (known as Moxie) and Jack both played briefly with Alf on the Ottawa hockey club before it earned the Silver Seven moniker, while Billy, or Will Smith, played with several other top Ottawa clubs after the Silver Seven era. Youngest brother George Smith played alongside Billy briefly with the Ottawa Emmetts in 1909–10, but appears to have had less talent for the game than his six elder siblings.

Alf Smith was 17 1/2 years older than his youngest brother George, but it is mentioned in the obituaries for both Henry and Anne that Henry had once issued a challenge to any other “seven sons” hockey team to face-off against his talented Smith tribe. The challenge, it’s said, was never accepted.

That appears to be true.

But it certainly doesn’t appear to have been due to any lack of trying on the part of proud papa Henry!

I recall coming across stories of the Smith family challenge years ago, but had mostly forgotten about it until a recent post about the Smiths on the Society for International Hockey Research web site by a Swedish member named Oskar Tallqvist. After reading it, I went hunting through old newspapers for stories about the challenge … and found quite a lot.

The first time that a family challenge from the Smiths appeared in the newspaper is in the Ottawa Citizen on March 10, 1899:

Alf Smith was two months shy of his 26th birthday. He had played with Ottawa in the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada (the NHL of its day) from 1894 through 1898 (and would star for the team later, from 1903 through 1908) but appears not to have been playing anywhere in 1898–99. Dan was two years past his stint with Alf on Ottawa’s top team, and Jack was still two years away from his. Harry and Tommy were only teenagers, and their official hockey records don’t date back that far. And, despite what the paper says, Will (Bill) was actually the nine-year-old (though his next birthday was coming soon, on April 20), while George had only turned eight in January.

Still, the big question for me now was, “who were the Sime, or Sims brothers?”

Well, though Ancestry has some records showing the name spelled as Symms and Simms, this was the family of Henry Francis Sims, another pioneering Ottawa citizen who was even older than Henry Smith. Henry Sims and his wife Rachel had seven sons, who in 1899 would have ranged in age from about 34 to 16. (They also had three daughters.) The sons were all hockey players, and a year later, in 1900, at least five of them would play together for the same team in Ottawa’s Merchant’s Hockey League: the Henry J. Sims & Co. hockey team. Henry Francis Joseph Sims, the third son and fourth child in the family, was a furrier and a hatter operating on Sparks Street.

The Society for International Hockey Research has records for only two of the hockey playing Sims brothers. Youngest son Herbert (1883-1947) was better known as Bert. He played at McGill University in the early 1900s along with future Hall of Famers Tommy Phillips in 1902–03 and with Billy Gilmour in 1904–05. Bert Sims went on to become a noted North American medical specialist as an ear, nose and throat doctor and was president of the Ottawa Rough Riders football club (known as the Senators at the time) when they won the Grey Cup in 1926. The second youngest Sims boy, Percy, played with the Ottawa Silver Seven in 1902–03 and helped them win the Stanley Cup that year.

But in 1899, the Sims brothers were mostly playing hockey for fun when a challenge to any hockey-playing family was issued by another Ottawa merchant family, the McCrackens, in local newspapers on February 21. A day later, it was reported that the McCracken crew (they were tailors on Bank Street) had agreed to face-off with the Sims boys:

The game was played at Dey’s rink in Ottawa on March 3, 1899. Hockey in these days was played with seven players a side, the extra player being the rover who lined up between the forwards and the defencemen, who were known in those days as point and cover point. But because the oldest Sims brother, William, was out of town, the families agreed to drop the rover and play with six men aside. They only played 40 minutes, but the Sims ran up a one-sided 12–0 victory.

Percy and Bert were the stars of the game, according to the Ottawa Citizen. There was a longer report in the Ottawa Journal, showing the following lineups:

R. G. Sims   -  Goal   -  Sam McCracken
Edgar Sims   -  Point  -  Alex McCracken
Percy Sims   -  Cover  -  Joe McCracken
Henry Sims   - Forward -  George McCracken
Herbert Sims -         -  David McCracken
Fred Sims    -         -  Robert McCracken

Little wonder, then, that Henry Smith issued the challenge on behalf of his hockey-playing offspring just a week later. And it’s no surprise why the Smiths wanted to face the Sims.

There is no report as to why the game was never played.

Perhaps the fact that two of the Smith children were under the age of 10 had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason, it seems that nearly five years passed before more talk of the Smith family playing together versus another family of seven appeared in newspapers. A story out of Perth, Ontario (not too far from Ottawa) on January 13, 1904, was picked up in capital city newspapers the following day:

I knew the name Frank McLaren from writing in the past about the Stanley Cup challenges of the Toronto Wellingtons and the Toronto Marlboros, but not the fact that he was also one of seven hockey-playing brothers. On January 16, 1904, the Montreal Gazette noted that the Smiths “are out to accept the challenge of the McLaren Freres of Perth” — although the paper got several of the Smith brothers’ names wrong. The Ottawa Journal that day only noted that the Smiths “should accept the defi,” and introduced me to another set of seven hockey playing brothers, when it noted that, if not the Smiths then the Christmas brothers of Montreal should accept the challenge. (This clarified the “Christmas” reference in that paper’s January 14 headline above.)

The Christmases seem to be a family of seven sons and no daughters born to Thomas Henry Christmas and his wife Jennie. Brothers Ernest, William, Archie, Howard, Alex, Percy and Walter ranged in ages from 27 to 16 in 1905.

The Ottawa Citizen had more about the McLaren challenge in its paper on January 18. Among other things, it introduced yet another hockey-playing family of seven with a story out of Newmarket, Ontario, indicated that Doyle family — Larry (goal), Fred (point), Frank (cover point), and forwards Ern, Harry, Ed and Tom — would be happy to hear from the McLarens. The Citizen noted that Henry Smith was also up for the challenge, and reminded readers what the seven Smiths were currently up to.

“Alf is now putting up superb hockey on the Stanley Cup holders and both Dan and Jack have figured on the Ottawas previously.” (Neither appear to have been playing anymore by 1904). “Harry was captain of the Aberdeens last season and now plays center for the Arnprior aggregation of puck-chasers. Tommy Smith was one of the Emmetts’ best forward last year… Willie tips the scales at about 105 pounds but is rapidly learning the fine points of the game…. The youngest of the family is George, age 12.” (He actually turned 13 the day this story appeared in the paper.) “George has been taught hockey from the cradle and is plucky to the core.”

On February 14, 1904, the Citizen reports that the Beavers of the Ottawa City league (who featured future Ottawa star Hamby Shore) had agreed to play a couple of games against the Smiths to get them prepared for their clash with the McLarens. However, there doesn’t appear to be any record of the Smiths ever facing the Beavers … nor of a challenge match against the Perth family ever being played.

But Henry Smith wasn’t giving up on the dream of seeing his seven sons face-off together against other teams, be they family squads like his or not. First, in January of 1907, there were stories about Henry having been in Winnipeg arranging for his boys to face teams from that city. Then, in the late fall of 1908, there was talk of a lengthy trip through the United States and western Canada. Finally, in November of 1910, there were stories about the Smiths going west to Edmonton to take on the Banford boys, another hockey-playing family said to have seven sons who were originally from the Ottawa Valley, but had relocated to Alberta around 1903. In all cases, no games were ever played.

Talk of the Smith family playing together as a team of seven ended, sadly, on June 9, 1911, with the unexpected death of Jack Smith. He’d been ill for about two weeks with inflammation of the stomach when, suddenly, his heart gave out.

“Hockeyists and sportsmen in all parts of the country will, with deep regret, learn of his untimely demise,” said an obituary in the Ottawa Citizen on June 10. “He was the third member of a hockey family which could hold its own with anything in the country….

“The Smith Brothers Seven was known from coast to coast and one of Mr. Smith’s fondest dreams had been to get the boys together again.”

As for the rest of the Smith boys, Dan passed away in 1926 at the age of 50. Alf, who had finished playing by 1909, but would coach in the NHL with the Ottawa Senators (1918–19) and New York Americans (1925–26), died in August of 1953 at the age of 80. Harry had died that May at 69, while youngest brother George died in 1954 at age 62. Tommy, whose last season as a player was in the NHL with the Quebec Bulldogs (sometimes called the Athletics) in 1919–20, died in 1966 at the age of 80.

Bill Smith was the last and the longest-lived of the seven brothers. He passed away on October 30, 1977 at the age of 88.

The new NHL season gets started tonight. COVID concerns have already begun to play havoc with a few rosters, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m sure, as in other sports, there will continue to be cases. Hopefully there won’t be anything worse.

But this story has nothing to do with the current season, COVID, the Spanish Flu, or any of that. There’s no real reason, or timing tie-in, for this one except that (as is often the case) I came across a few articles in old newspapers that got me interested, and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about it. This story is a little bit all-over-the-board, but here goes…

According to Wikipedia (if I counted them up correctly!), there have been 299 sets of brothers who’ve played in the NHL from the league’s beginning in 1917 through 2019–20. Of that group, 47 sets of brothers have played together on the same team, but only 10 have won the Stanley Cup together. The numbers are slightly larger if we expand the time frame beyond the birth of the NHL and back to the start of the Stanley Cup in 1893.

Still, in all that time, there are only two instances when a group of three brothers have played together on a Stanley Cup team. (I’m one of three brothers myself, so this interests me.) Both sets are from Ottawa, and played with the famed “Silver Seven.” Alf, Harry, and Tommy Smith played together in 1906, although it seems that no more than two of those three ever suited up together in a Stanley Cup game that year. (I’ll likely write more about the Smith family in a future post). However, in the spring of 1903, brothers Dave, Suddie — short for Sutherland — and Billy Gilmour all starred together for Ottawa when the Silver Seven launched one of hockey’s most legendary dynasties.

The Gilmour family was a prominent one in Ottawa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m not certain if the hockey family is related to the same lumber family of Gilmours for whom Gilmour Street in Ottawa was named, but the father and grandfather of our hockey Gilmours were both prominent in the lumber industry in the Gatineau region. So, the Gilmour boys, along with three other brothers (including one more who later played hockey) and a sister, likely grew up among plenty of privilege. This wasn’t always the case, but was not uncommon either for Canadian athletes in this era of amateurism. [NOTE: The Gilmour Street lumber family IS the same family as the lumber and hockey Gilmour family.]

All three Gilmour brothers played junior and intermediate hockey with the Ottawa Aberdeens, who were what might now be considered a top farm team for the Ottawa Hockey Club that would become known as the Silver Seven. The Gilmours, along with the great Frank McGee and a couple of other teammates, rose through the ranks more or less together.

By the 1902–03 season, McGee and the Gilmours were all together on the top Ottawa club. Billy was still only 17 years old. Suddie was 20 (so was Frank McGee) and Dave was 21. They were all key in leading Ottawa to the Stanley Cup for the first time that season, first by defeating the Montreal Victorias in a two-game playoff to decide their league title, and then by successfully defending the Cup against the Rat Portage Thistles in a two-game challenge. Ottawa outscored its opponents by a combined score of 19–5 in those four Stanley Cup games. Though sources do differ, Frank McGee is generally credited with scoring seven of Ottawa’s 19 goals. Dave and Billy Gilmour scored four apiece, while Suddie added three more.

The 1902–03 season marks the only year that all three of the Gilmour brothers starred together with the Silver Seven (who were named — so the story goes — when team executive and mine owner Bob Shillington presented each member of the seven-man starting lineup with a silver nugget to commemorate their Stanley Cup victory). Suddie and Billy were both there in 1903–04 when Ottawa retained its title, but only Billy was still playing in 1904–05 when Ottawa continued its winning ways.

Billy Gilmour played just a single game in 1905–06, and did not take part in either challenge series when Ottawa successfully defended the Cup that year against teams from Queen’s University and Smith’s Falls, Ontario. That makes it debatable as to whether he should be considered a Stanley Cup champion for that season or not. However, he did play a full season with Ottawa (by then, officially, known as the Senators) when they won the Stanley Cup again in 1908–09. He was the only member of the “Silver Seven” dynasty that was with the team by that season.

Hamilton Livingston “Billy” Gilmour was voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962, along with a host of other notables who had played before 1927, and inducted the following summer. Even so, he appears today as one of the more questionable of the Hall’s honoured members. Gilmour only ever played a handful of games at hockey’s highest level (he also played four seasons at McGill University while he was playing for the Silver Seven) and though he returned to play two more games for Ottawa during the 1915–16 season, he was basically done by the time he turned 24 right after the Cup-winning season of 1908–09.

Still, in his prime, Billy Gilmour was a talented and popular player on the top team in hockey, and was well-regarded by fans, sportswriters, his teammates, and his opponents. He was still a recognizable enough name in Ottawa and Montreal to warrant impressive obituaries in those cities when he passed away in March of 1959. He’d lived in Montreal for many years, but was buried in a family plot at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa. Just shy of his 74th birthday when he died, Billy was the longest-lived by far of the six Gilmour brothers, with the others all passing away by the age of 50.

Oldest brother Allan Gilmour, born in 1878, was the first to die when he was killed in action in World War I on June 3, 1916. (Billy Gilmour had enlisted himself just a few days prior to his brother’s death.) Allan Gilmour was 38 years old. The second-oldest brother, John Gilmour, died in 1925 when he was 44 years old. Youngest brother Ward, the fourth hockey brother, was 47 when he died in 1940. Suddie and David Gilmour passed away within a few months of each other in 1932. David was 50 when he died on September 27. Suddie was 48 when he passed away on February 14.

The death of Suddie Gilmour came nearly 30 years after his hockey heyday, but it seemed to revive a nostalgia for the days of the Silver Seven. Frank McGee had also died in the War back in 1916, and his brother John, who’d been a bit player during the 1903–04 season, died in a horse-riding accident back in 1904. This meant that Suddie’s funeral was the first in the city to truly mark the passing of one of Ottawa’s old Stanley Cup heroes. Among the many mourners who attended Suddie’s funeral two days later were former Silver Seven stars Harvey Pulford, Alf Smith, Harry Smith, Bouse Hutton, Art Moore, and Harry Westwick. Brother David was there as well, and many of the same mourners would turn out at his funeral soon enough.

Ironically, the one notable teammate who wasn’t there for Suddie Gilmour’s funeral was brother Billy, who was living in France. Apparently, Billy spent a lot of time in France after the end of World War I. He’d lost his wife back in 1925, when she had died at just 38 years old, and he and his daughter were living either in Paris, or the south of France in Bayonne or Saint-Jean-de Luz.

Billy Gilmour was in Ottawa for Dave’s funeral in September of 1932, but he continued to live in Paris until the Nazi’s marched into the city in June of 1940. I’ve come across a couple of articles mentioning a “narrow escape” to London before the occupation. If I’m ever able to learn anything more about it, you’ll be reading that story here one of these days!