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Top 50 Players of All-Time
The Hockey News has been providing the most comprehensive coverage of the world of hockey since 1947. In each issue, you'll find news, features and opinions about the NHL and leagues across North America and the world.
No. 9 Goalie Terry Sawchuk
From the moment he strapped on his dead brother’s pads, it seemed like Terry Sawchuk had entered into a pact with the devil. The Winnipeg native would become one of the greatest NHL goalies of all time. Fame, money and stardom, all would be his, but it would come at the usual price. Mike Sawchuk, Terry’s older brother, was the real goalie of the family, but he died at 17, the victim of a heart ailment. It was a devastating loss for 10-year-old Terry. “I couldn’t believe when it happened,” he once told an interviewer. “I missed him for a long time afterwards.” When the regular goalie on Sawchuk’s bantam team moved, Sawchuk strapped on his brother’s pads. “The pads were there where I could always look at them,” Sawchuk said. “The day…
No. 15 Center Howie Morenz
His story is so laden with myth, the man himself has long since been lost. How to appraise Howie Morenz, the man many believe died rather than stop playing for the Montreal Canadiens? Start with the fact that when he crumbled into the south boards of the Forum in late January, 1937, Morenz, 34, was the NHL’s all-time leading point-getter. Next, consider a goals-per-game average (.49) better than that of Gordie Howe, Frank Mahovlich and Jean Beliveau. Consider how journalists strained for new monikers-he was called the ‘Stratford Streak,’ the ‘Mitchell Meteor,’ the ‘Hurtling Habitant’-and weigh the words of those who saw him play and said his greatness would transcend any era. King Clancy, who first broke a sweat in the NHL in 1921, said Morenz was the best player he ever…
No. 20 Right Winger Mike Bossy
It was always, with Mike Bossy, about magic. First, the wondrous apparition: time and time again Bossy seemed to materialize, unchecked, in scoring position with the puck on his stick. Then came the sleight of hand. “When he shoots,” said Al Arbour, Bossy’s coach with the New York Islanders for all but one season, “it doesn’t even look like he touches the puck.” Poof. Red light. Like magic. Every magician’s trick, of course, is fuelled by the assumptions. The audience can’t see or even feel the slight taper on a deck of cards or the false panel that frees the damsel long before she is cut in half. Bossy was the first rookie to score 50 goals. Five times he hit the 60 mark and his nine consecutive 50-goal seasons is an NHL standard. Bossy…
No. 25 Goalie Ken Dryden
Immune to the sway of pressure or precedent and unaffected by the selfdestructiveness that often claims original thinkers, Ken Dryden was the most formidable rebel the NHL has ever known. Dryden was the product of the baby-boomer, post-secondary education system. The Toronto native spent four years in the Ivy League at Cornell University and graduated with a pre-law degree. His studies separated him from previous generations of poorly educated players who depended on hockey as their sole chance for a career. Nor was he a member of the generation of NHLers who would be offered the equivalent of a lifetime’s wage for a season of NHL labor. The combination of those two factors, and Dryden’s ability to understand them, created what, up to then, had been a rare scenario: the Montreal Canadiens needed…
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