The Best Book of Hockey Facts and Stats - Softcover

Weber, Dan

9781552976609: The Best Book of Hockey Facts and Stats

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552976602 ISBN 13: 9781552976609

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2002

Over its info-packed 304 pages, The Best Book of Hockey Facts and Stats records all the players and all the important games and seriesincluding every Stanley Cup game and every All-Star game. Also included are details of all the trophies awarded to the best players, such as the Georges Vezina for best goalie, the Art Ross Trophy, and the trophy awarded in honor of Maurice "Rocket" Richard.

Player listings are loaded with information: personal stats, such as where a player was born, his height and weight, and career scoring totals and trophies won to date, plus the complete story of the player's career.

The Best Book of Hockey Facts and Stats features:

The Best Book of Hockey Facts and Stats not only chronicles the growth of this popular sport, the authors' entertaining and readable style reveals their passion for the great game of hockey.

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About the Author:

STATS Inc. is North America's most comprehensive agency for the dissemination of sports statistics. Based in Chicago, they supply the media with facts and figures on hockey as well as other sports.

Introduction

For a sport that started out on the natural ice of the frozen north, there were really only a couple of ways to go. South ... and west. And, now, everywhere in between. Almost all at once, it seems.

For four decades, more or less, and 25 straight years from the onset of World War 11, professional hockey was content to exist in a solid Canada-USA mix of six major markets-Toronto, Montreal, New York City, Boston, Detroit and Chicago.

There were plenty of great players and teams, and their amazing stories are here. But for many sports fans, hockey was an acquired taste. Football was another story, as the NFL was beating major league baseball to the West Coast by the better part of a decade in the Fifties. The NBA was right there, too. The three professional sports leagues were combining, consolidating competitors, conquering new markets, energizing TV empires and developing their demographics.

All the while hockey waited. And watched. Content and comfortable in their historic ice palaces, mostly from the Roaring Twenties -- the Forum, Maple Leaf Gardens, Chicago Stadium, the Olympia, Boston Garden and Madison Square Gardens.

As great as Gordie Howe and Maurice "Rocket" Richard might have been, they were not names all sports fans would know much about. Here you will learn of all the great names and personalities in hockey history -- the top 100 past and present stars -- from goalkeepers to centers, from defensemen to wingers.

And then there are the coaches, the top 15 of all time, profiled here as well, from Jack Adams and Lester Patrick to Scotty Bowman and Mike Keenan.

All the while the pace of the game is on view. Fast and furious on the ice, hockey wasn't exactly happening off it. Sure, there were some advances -- helmets, goalie masks, painting the ice white, striped shirts for the officials, the Zamboni machine. But if you cared about the National Hockey League west of Chicago or south of Manhattan, well my friend, that's why they had newsreels. Or the minor leagues.

By the time the NHL finally expanded in a serious way after the 1966-1967 season, the NBA had beaten hockey to Los Angeles by seven years, to Minneapolis by 19 and to St. Louis by 20.The irony here is that it was the NHL that had pretty much brought pro basketball into existence after WWII in order to have a second team in their arenas in the winter. Hockey was getting beaten to the punch almost everywhere by baseball, football and basketball. In California, Florida, the Pacific Northwest, the Old South, the Rockies and the Sunbelt.

Finally the NHL did get it. From six teams in 1966-1967, the league has expanded to 30 teams just 25 years later, a 500 percent increase. No major professional sports league has expanded that far that fast. The NHL these days is in Nashville, Columbus, Vancouver, Carolina, Florida, Atlanta, Colorado, Texas and Arizona. New buildings everywhere are filled with luxury boxes. And the players no longer come from just six or seven Canadian provinces and an occasional immigrant.

American college players supplement a steady diet of blue chippers from all around the world -- from Australia to the Czech Republic, from Sweden to Russia, from Finland to Slovakia, from Germany to England. Many of them are profiled here.

You know hockey has arrived when sports fans in Carolina let their Charlotte Hornets pro basketball team leave the state at the same time they go giddy for a Hurricane hockey club that improbably brings the Stanley Cup finals home to Raleigh.

Players are bigger, stronger, faster, more talented now, although the group that just left the game headed by Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux will be hard to beat for sheer blinding skill levels. And maybe we'll never see the likes of Gordie Howe, Howie Morenz or Maurice Richard either.

But professional hockey? You can't miss it. Coming to a neighborhood near you, whether you're a hometown fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes or the North Carolina Tar Heels, or even the Grand Ole Opry, hockey is here. And there. Darn near everywhere.

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