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Top 50 Players of All-Time by Franchise
In The Hockey News 2017 Collector’s Edition, we count down the top 50 players for each NHL franchise. With stats and bios for all 1,500 players, plus a full-page profile on a star for every club, and top 10s for the six defunct teams, this mag is a trip through the game’s rich history that all fans are sure to enjoy.
A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT
THOSE CALIFORNIANS sure played weird tunes on the radio, Arturs Irbe thought. He was riding the bus as a newcomer on the expansion San Jose Sharks during the 1991-92 season, listening to what he assumed was cutting edge American music. In reality, though, it was just the team bus driver’s preferred genre: oldies. Irbe went an entire year before he found out oldies weren’t modern pop hits. And it’s fitting, isn’t it? The guy spent his career jiving to his own throwback beat. He was a short, stocky goaltender who never changed his equipment and regularly repaired his tattered pads himself. His puckhandling was unorthodox at best and ineffective at worst. And he made his living constantly surprising everyone as one of the sport’s most fascinating underdog stories. At every stop in…
SILENT STOPPER
FOR MORE THAN a century now, the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota has provided the United States with tons and tons of iron ore, which morphs from unrefined rocks to gleaming steel. There was a time when it also took the young boys of the men who came from all over the world to work in the mines there and turned them into wonderful hockey players. Frank Brimsek was one of them. He was also one of the first to play in the NHL. Without a doubt, he was the first American-born player to have a significant impact on the best league in the world. And in an organization that has produced some of the most skilled players in the history of the game, he has been the greatest of…
THE START OF SOMETHING
IN ORIGINAL SIX cities, hockey is part of the very fabric of the culture. Fans in Detroit know this well. They have prayed at the altar of ‘Mr. Hockey,’ given thanks for ‘Stevie Y,’ packed Joe Louis Arena and worshipped the Stanley Cup, offering up octopi in exchange for playoff prosperity. The Winged Wheel is seen as a symbol of success, the insignia worn by multiple-time NHL champions. All this is to say that for David Legwand, like any other hockey-mad kid born and raised in the Motor City, the Wings were tradition. So, what does one do when starting an NHL career in a city that knows honkytonk better than it knows hockey talk? For Legwand, the only choice was to put down roots and build new traditions. Prior to…
COLORADO AVALANCHE
1979-1995 QUEBEC NORDIQUES WHILE IT PAINED the fans in Quebec, the move that saw the Nordiques relocate to Denver and become the Colorado Avalanche turned out to be a watershed moment for the franchise. The timing worked out so that a team long under the thumb of the archrival Montreal Canadiens rose up and won its first of two Stanley Cups in 1996 – its debut season in Denver. Not coincidentally, many of the top players in franchise history competed for the Nords and Avs during that transition period. Legends were born during the new rivalry with the Detroit Red Wings, and Colorado was a powerhouse for more than a decade. 1 JOE SAKIC POS | C YEARS | 1988-2009 GP | 1,378 G | 625 A | 1,016 P | 1,641 QUIET BUT DEADLY. If…
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