Around the League with Rich Kincaide (Wings v. Black Hawks Edition)

 

Let’s stipulate the following right off the top: I love the Elias Sports Bureau. I know this might make you think I’m a geek, or a nerd, or even a geeky nerd, but I don’t even care. Where else are you going to get things like this:

When Toronto’s Roy Halladay beat the Yankees Tuesday, he improved to 16-5 (.762) lifetime against New York, the second-best winning percentage against the Yankees among all (opposing) pitchers with at least 20 decisions.

Do you know which pitcher has the best all-time winning percentage against the New York Yankees? This is the beauty part. According to Elias, it’s the most famous Yankee of them all: Babe Ruth! Ruth was 17-5 (.773) all-time against the Yankees. And if I have to tell you that before he became the greatest slugger of All Time in New York—it doesn’t matter that his records have been surpassed, he still pretty much invented the Home Run—that Babe Ruth was a member of the Boston Red Sox and one of the best pitchers in the American League, well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can see each other anymore.

Now, Elias also noted this week that Pittsburgh's 6-2 win in Washington matched the second-largest margin of victory by a road team in the seventh game of any NHL playoff series. The North Stars beat the Kings by five goals in a Game 7 in Los Angeles in 1968 (9-4), and the Oilers had a four-goal win at Colorado in 1998 (4-0).

Also, the Penguins opened the scoring in their Game 7 win over the Capitals with a pair of first-period goals eight seconds apart by Sidney Crosby (at 12:36) and Craig Adams (at 12:44). It was the fastest two goals by one team in any Game 7 in NHL playoff history. The previous record was 14 seconds by the Minnesota North Stars in their 9-4 win over the Kings in the seventh game of a first-round series in 1968 (second period: Andre Boudrias at 15:58, Dave Balon at 16:12). Those goals were hardly crucial in that game, as they increased Minnesota's lead from 6-2 to 8-2.

I thought that was pretty good stuff, too, but as I was thinking about it, I remembered something the Elias Sports Bureau had not included. The name of the goalie who gave up those 9 goals to the North Stars—including those goals 14 seconds apart—in the most lopsided 7^th game home-ice loss ever. It may surprise you. It was one of the greatest goalies (if not the greatest) in NHL history: Terry Sawchuk.

That night he was shelled by the North Stars, Sawchuk—the goalie of record for Detroit in their Stanley Cup-winning seasons of 1952, ’54 and ’55—was less than a year removed from being the toast, once again, of the hockey world. (He was also, as it turned out, just over two years away from being dead.) A year earlier, in 1967, Sawchuk had come off the Maple Leafs bench to beat Montreal in 4-1 in Game 5 of the Stanley Final and 3-1 in Game 6 to win the Cup for Punch Imlach’s Toronto Maple Leafs. Sawchuk, stopping 40 of 41 Montreal shots, was the First Star in the clincher. It’s 42 years now and for the record, that’s still the last time Toronto won the Cup. A few weeks later, with the NHL expanding from six teams to twelve, Imlach left Sawchuk unprotected in the expansion draft and he became the first player selected by LA Kings owner Jack Kent Cooke. Sawchuk would last just one year in Los Angeles. That 9-4 loss at the Forum in Los Angles to the North Stars is a big part of the reason why.

Sawchuk’s coach in Los Angeles was his former teammate Red Kelly. “I was never so disappointed in Terry as I was that night,” he said. “I felt that he let me down and the team down. The loss wasn’t all his fault, but it was the big game and he missed it, really.”

Now here’s a question. Do you happen to know who Leonard “Red” Kelly is? If you don’t, you ought to. Kelly’s Detroit sweater, #4, should be hanging from the rafters at Joe Louis Arena right next to Gordie Howe’s #9, Ted Lindsay’s #7, Sawchuk’s #1 and the rest.

Kelly was to the Detroit Red Wings of the 1950’s what Nicklas Lidstrom is to the Red Wings of today. (A reporter from Stockholm once told me that we are all pronouncing “Lidstrom” name improperly. In Sweden, he said, it’s “LEED-strum”.) Anyway…

Kelly won four Stanley Cups with the Wings in the 50’s (1950, 1952, 1954, 1955), was on each of the Wings’ teams that won the NHL regular season title a still-record seven straight years, was the original winner of the Norris Trophy for Best Defenseman in 1954 and the runner-up two other times and was an eight-time All-Star—a record for a Detroit defenseman until that guy LEED-strum came along. The main thing you have to remember about Kelly as a Red Wing, though, are those four Stanley Cups.

Early in 1960, when a newspaper story out of Toronto suggested that the Wings had forced Kelly to play with a broken foot late in the 1959 season (they had) Jack Adams, the iron-fisted General Manager of the Red Wings, blew a gasket and in a fit of pique which can only be described as exquisite, traded Kelly to the Rangers. Kelly told Adams, and later NHL Commissioner Clarence Campbell, to take a hike, son. He’d quit before he’d report to New York. A few days later Adams shipped Kelly to Toronto for Marc Reaume. Kelly for Manon Rheaume might have been a better deal for Detroit.

The only reason Kelly-for-Reaume isn’t the worst trade in hockey history is that a couple of weeks after Sawchuk won that ’67 Cup for the Leafs, the Black Hawks decided Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Freddie Stanfield to Boston for Pit Martin, Gilles Marotte and Jack Norris sounded good like a good deal. The numbers say it wasn’t. Esposito scored 459 goals as a Bruin, Hodge 289 and Stanfield 135. Martin scored 243 times for Chicago and Marotte scored10. Norris was a goalie who appeared in 10 games for the Black Hawks. So, Chicago traded 883 goals to Boston and got back 253. This is not good value.

Neither was Kelly-for-Reaume. The guy for whom Adams traded his LEED-strum played 47 undistinguished games for Detroit and was down in the minors in less than a year.

Kelly, still wearing his # 4, only wearing it for the Leafs now, played 8 more years in the NHL and won 4 more Stanley Cups, giving him 8 for his career. You could look this up yourself or Elias could tell you, but of the 1,134 players who have put their name on the Stanley Cup, only 5 have had theirs etched upon it more often than Red Kelly.

Two of Kelly’s post-trade Cup wins came over the team that traded him away, the Red Wings. Kelly grew up in southern Ontario in a small town not too far from Detroit and his dad would come and see him play at the Olympia when Toronto was in town. One night he saw Jack Adams there and before Adams could scurry away he went up to him and said, “The Stanley Cup just seems to follow that boy around, doesn’t it?”

Here’s the thing. There’s another boy out there who the Cup seems to “follow around.” His name is Scotty Bowman. He’s got nine Cups as a coach (more than any other coach, ever) and two more as an executive for a total of eleven. Five of those Cup wins came with the Detroit organization. He left the Wings in the past off-season. He’s with Chicago now.

Nobody gives the Black Hawks much of a shot against the Red Wings in the Western Conference Final, but I worry when I think about things like this. I could stop reading items from the Elias Sports Bureau, but some of these things I think up on my own and there is not much that can be done about that.