A hockey history blog by Ben Massey
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It would be absurd to call Doug Harvey "overrated" even if it was true. He was the best defenseman in the NHL between Eddie Shore and Bobby Orr; to say that maybe he should have won five Norris Trophies rather than seven is hair-splitting to the nth degree. But he seems to have picked up a strange reputation, or perhaps a reputation for having a reputation.
Punch Imlach must be the worst great coach in hockey history—or the greatest terrible coach. Good luck picking. We associate him with surliness and victory, and Dave Keon could tell you how well Punch played the "ruthless win-at-all-costs loyalty-free bastard" game, but Imlach also drove Frank Mahovlich out of town when he was one of the best forwards in hockey, convinced prime Carl Brewer to return to amateur hockey, and gave up on enough talent that the Leafs could have been the Habs. He built the second-best of the 1960s expansion teams, the Buffalo Sabres, but the difference between second and first was a long way. As surely as Imlach whiped the last championship Toronto Maple Leafs across the line, he also set the tone for the great underachieving Leafs of three generations: teams which knew better than to give their best because whatever they did, the cobra could turn and strike. Teams with plenty of money and talent and an underlying suspicion, so long as you punched problems like Tie Domi or did not presume to be too talented, this was a pretty soft gig.
Some men make hard, unpopular decisions because they would rather win than play favourites. Punch Imlach was not that man. Few were more passionate than Punch Imlach, and few held to their favourites with more tenacity. The number of miles he tried to ride out of Dick Duff, Eddie Shack, or Floyd Smith long after it was time to put them down blows the mind. He took those guys to the Sabres and it didn't work, except for the troublesome fact that it kind of did: it was a team that could never win a title but was, for a hot minute, better than it had any right to be. And the Leafs? So what if Johnny Bower was 75 years old and had pleurisy; he led the league in save percentage three times in his forties. Tim Horton got his license in a Model T, and Allan Stanley was somehow older, and unbelievably it worked exactly well enough.
And he won. He won in the Original Six, but they don't repossess the pennants just because 26 more teams came later. He won more than any other coach of his era who wasn't Toe Blake, and the Habs were almost a special case. You couldn't exactly say he won in Buffalo, but he definitely did not bad. He is the best Leafs' coach since the Second World War and maybe the best Sabres coach ever. Everyone blames Harold Ballard for what happened in Toronto, but old Harold's been dead for almost 40 years and his idea of hockey looks a lot like Punch Imlach's. Some people, even when they seem to know everything about the game, can't get teams to win, and some, even when they seem insane, overachieve for longer than seems possible.
Earlier this summer I saw Bard on the Beach's production of Antigone. It was very good, with one quirk. The language was mostly respectable modern pseudo-epic: while not authentic it tried to sound ancient and tragic, except for when it didn't. Antigone would have some poignant speech, and Creon would look at her and say "are you fucking kidding me?", and the crowd would laugh and my brain would shift from fifth to second without a clutch and leave a stream of engine parts and motor oil on the highway of dramatic appreciation.
The NHL's defensemen in the 1960s were a lot like that.
It was the last decade of the Classical Tragic Defenseman. Tim Horton. Doug Harvey. Allan Stanley. Red Kelly. Marcel Pronovost. They were excellent players, too excellent to make one type—Pronovost was almost, but not quite, modern—but part of an extended family. Most of them only kinda skate, most of them could drink, those who couldn't drink thought they could, they all had some just obscene weakness. Horton, maybe the best defenseman of the decade, couldn't see. Harvey, whose best decade was the '50s but was still good in the '60s, was an actual alcoholic, not merely a hard-drinking hockey player. Pronovost's body was made up of so much scar tissue that he couldn't move. Yet the league's standard of defense was such that not only did they all play until they were a billion years old but they played well. The 1967 Maple Leafs were called the "Over the Hill Gang" because Lester Pearson may have passed the Canada Pension Plan as a subsidy for their blue line. And you probably remember how the 1967 Maple Leafs did. It wasn't just that these guys were incredibly old, it's that it was good to be incredibly old.
Then, right at the end of the decade, you see Bobby Orr and Brad Park, who changed everything, standing out in history like an F-bomb in the middle of Sophocles. Well, actually, to be more strictly accurate, you have Pierre Pilote, who perhaps was to Orr what Sophocles was to Shakespeare, the man who seemed like a one-off until he wasn't.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania got its first NHL team in the 1930–31 season. The Pittsburgh Pirates, in this context a previously-successful hockey team, moved across the Allegheny Mountains at the instigation of owner Benny Leonard, the legendary lightweight boxing champion who was a Jewish kid from New York but had fought many of his most famous bouts in the City of Brotherly Love. Granted, the Pittsburgh Pirates in their last season had been a terrible hockey team, with a record of 5-36-3, nine wins below the next-worst team in the NHL, but they had picked up 19-year-old future Hockey Hall of Famer Syd Howe, useful young forward Wally Kilrea, and heavyweight defenseman Allan "Big Pete" Shields from Ottawa in the offseason, so in Philadelphia the newly-christened Quakers were hardly going to be worse.
With their tiger-stripe sleeves and attractive cursive chest logo, the Quakers actually seem to have looked rather sharp. Everything was black and white in the 1930s so maybe they were ghastly in person but the surviving photos show a timeless quality that could walk into a Heritage Classic and sell 20,000 sweaters today. They had a few neat players: besides Howe, a young, tough little forward named Gerry Lowrey could chip in points, Kilrea wasn't in Howe's class but went on to 316 NHL games in an era where that meant something, Shields and Johnny McKinnon gave established defense, skipper Hib Milks wasn't bad, and rookie starting goalie Wilf Cude was only 20 when the season started but became solid with the pre-war Canadiens. And Philadelphia was a hockey city: their Can-Am team, the Philadelphia Arrows, drew 4,000 or so fans a night to the Philadelphia Arena.
This is all a rather feeble look at the bright side, for the Philadelphia Quakers were in fact completely doomed. Benny Leonard was only the official owner; the real man was bootlegger "Big Bill" Dwyer, who besides his unsavory reputation was also the owner of the New York Americans and therefore could not be officially involved with the Quakers. They had no stars and their few NHL-level talents were either too old or too young. Off the ice, the Philadelphia Arena was a 5,000-seat barn unsuitable for major league hockey in a declining neighbourhood. Pittsburgh was being ravaged by the Great Depression, but Philadelphia was even worse. The harder the Quakers organization tried, the more pathetic things became, and they did not try for long. In the end they suffered the perhaps-unique distinction of being an NHL team outdrawn by a minor hockey team in the same building.
And somehow they did get worse. The 5-36-3 1929–30 Pittsburgh Pirates became the 4-36-4 Philadelphia Quakers. By points percentage it is the worst two-year run in NHL history, yes, worse than the expansion Washington Capitals. In the end the Quakers couldn't even fold properly. Frankly it's a miracle hockey survived in Pennsylvania at all.
The philosopher Conan once said: "What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women." True at the time, but the best in modern life to cheer with the smallest group of fellow-fans required for it to technically count as a public event. It is called being a hipster and it is the only way to be. Tragically, as hockey fans, hipsterdom is not easy, for these days most organized North American hockey is either affiliated with or aspires to affiliation with the NHL, and going to a midget game to cheer one someone else's kid is a bit creepy even for those of us with giant mustaches reeking of IPA. So we must look back into history, at some of the great hipster hockey teams that can never become too mainstream, because the river of time has passed them by.
For many years your author was a Canadian soccer fan, so perhaps you imagine I was thrilled to see Vancouver, British Columbia awash during the 2026 World Cup not only with soccer, but with Canadian soccer: with Liam Millar wraps on the SkyTrain and Canada kits seen on random walks through town, and crowds in the tens of thousands enthusiastically cheering Les Rouges on to a tournament performance that, while hardly remarkable, was better than expected.
Certainly not! It's all gotten so mainstream. Canadian soccer is for the normies now, urgh! Retch! Blech! To see a beautiful family of respectable people wearing matching Stephen Eustaquio sweaters, saying "morning! hope they win tonight!" as they skip through the sun singing "ooh ahh Canada" makes me sick! I enjoyed Canadian soccer long before it was cool; this must be how Nirvana fans felt when Nevermind came out (I don't know, I never got into Nirvana, they were too popular). Yet the old memories still provide fuel, standing in a decaying Communist stadium with nine other people cheering for Iain Hume to somehow find the ball in the middle of a cow pasture and put a goal past Cuba. So it is with hockey. If we look into history, there is great hipsterdom to be found; hipsterdom that survives not in spite of how terrible things were, but because of it.
Thus, the New York Golden Blades
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