Hockey History

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...

I figured I couldn’t call myself a hockey historian if I didn’t have something to say about Toronto and Montreal in the NHL playoffs. But — surprise, surprise! — we’re going back a little bit further here… I was 3 1/2 years old when Toronto beat Montreal to win the Stanley Cup in 1967. I don’t...

I’d been pretty busy until recently, working on a new book for Firefly called Hockey Hall of Fame True Stories. They wanted something less stats-driven than most of their recent books … and they wanted it fast! So, in early March, I started writing and I delivered a lengthy manuscript at the end...

Trafford Hicks with Arlington High School team Organized ice hockey had relatively deep roots in New England, with Concord in New Hampshire appearing as somewhat of an early cradle, where St. Paul’s School under direction of coach Malcolm Kenneth Gordon ran an intramural program from the late...

Hello everyone! This week I'll be presenting my late friend Wilfred Cude's book he wrote about his father, former Montreal Canadiens netminder of the 1930s, Wilf Cude. The book's description is as follows: Wilf Cude (1906-1968): gifted NHL goaltender, dedicated hockey coach, conscientious...

Author note: Morey Holzman is a former journalist who has been published in the New York Times and Pravda (Slovakia). He is the co-author of Deceptions and Doublecross (with Joseph Nieforth), which told the story of the NHL's founding from Eddie Livingstone's perspective. Still in print...

Organized senior amateur league hockey in the Ottawa Valley, around the Ottawa River, had taken form already around the immediate turn of the twentieth century, in the form of the Ottawa Valley Hockey League (OVHL) – starting in 1898–99 – and the Lower Ottawa Hockey Association (LOHA), starting...

Book Title: Hockey Tactics Retrospective, Part 1 (1975-86) Author: Jack Han (edited by Michael Farber) Publisher: Self-published PDF ebook via Gumroad.com Author Note: Jack Han (Twitter @jhanhky) wrote for the Montreal Canadiens, the ATP World Tour and The Athletic. Between 2017 and 2020 he...

The first installations of the Ottawa City Hockey League appeared during the 1890s, where it was first an amateur league with both senior and junior teams, and later a junior league only. Among the inaugural clubs during the 1890–91 season were the Ottawa Hockey Club, Ottawa Gladstones, Ottawa...

Book Title: From Rinks to Regiments: Hockey Hall-of-Famers and the Great War Author: Alan Livingstone MacLeod Publisher: Heritage House, 2018 From Rinks to Regiments - Heritage House Publishing Author Note: A. L. MacLeod is a Victoria-based author whose books have dealt with war, or hockey...

In March 1953, Stan Obodiac handed Anatoli Tarasov a book by Lloyd Percival. It's not clear whether the book was How to Play Better Hockey or The Hockey Handbook and how much of it Tarasov was able to translate. What we do know is that six months later, Tarasov implemented a new training routine...

In his biography Lloyd Percival: Coach and Visionary, Gary Mossman reports the following: The late Canadian sportswriter, Jim Coleman, frequently related a story told to him by Lethbridge Maple Leaf hockey player Stan Obodiac, who was of Ukrainian decent, spoke fluent Russian and sent regular...

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...

Book Title: Hockey’s Wildest Season: The Changing of the Guard in the NHL, 1969-1970 Author: John G. Robertson Publisher: McFarland: Hockey’s Wildest Season – McFarland Author’s Information John G. Robertson is a 57-year-old sports history author who lives in Cambridge, Ontario. He has...

On February 24, 1952, the Edmonton Mercurys completed an undefeated run through the Winter Olympics in Oslo, Norway, to win the gold medal in hockey. Canada had previously won Olympic hockey gold in 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932, and after settling for a surprising silver behind a Great Britain...

John William McGrath was born on March 10, 1891 in St. John’s, Newfoundland to parents James Francis McGrath and Catherine McCarthy. His father was a fisherman as well as a civil servant and political figure in Placentia and St. Mary’s, Newfoundland. James Francis McGrath was a member of the...

The Life and Teams of Johnny F. Bassett: Maverick Entrepreneur of North American Sports is the biography of one of the most influential sportsmen of the twentieth century. Dozens of interviews with Bassett’s contemporaries and archival research provide the basis for this work which began as a...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, during the 1900–01 season, 24-year old James Joseph “Jimmy” Enright assembled a group of local teenage Ottawa boys to form a junior hockey team which would initially go under the name “Enright’s Boarders”. The youngsters trained and played at the...

A New Hockey Book on Houghton, Michigan 136 pages, 8” x 10”, softcover, $20 US …a story for all hockeyists, puckeys, rooters, hockey enthusiasts, and historians The story of how a Canadian-born dentist and Houghton entrepreneur changed hockey by openly paying players to come to Michigan’s...

In 1945, Nikolai Romanov became chairman of the All-Union Committee for Physical Culture and Sports, the governmental body overseeing sports in the Soviet Union. Anatoli Tarasov would later characterize him in the following manner: Granted, he scolded me more often than he praised me, but all...