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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. 50 Right Winger Jari Kurri
To the luckless, the knack of being at the right place is about coincidence and good fortune. The lucky know better: winners manipulate circumstance, they don’t wait for it. He may not have controlled his professional destination, but no NHL player worked more shrewdly to prepare for and maximize his situation than the greatest European player to star in the NHL, Finland’s Jari Kurri. Kurri became an Edmonton Oiler on a misunderstanding. A common belief among NHL teams in 1980-that Finland had all its young prospects tied to the national team-dampened interest in Finnish players among NHL scouts. But Edmonton scout Barry Fraser knew Kurri hadn’t signed a contract in his homeland and landed the 17-year-old Finnish star with the Oilers’ fourth-round choice. Nature had blessed Kurri with spectacular hand-eye coordination and a…
No. 35 Goalie Patrick Roy
Patrick Roy became one of the NHL’s greatest goalies by recognizing success as his birthright. Roy, after all, is a name fit for a King. “You know,” he told his friend, Pierre Turgeon, the day of his trade from the Montreal Canadiens to the Colorado Avalanche, “I’m going to win the Stanley Cup.” Six months later, Roy made himself a prophet. Born to a francophone father and an anglophone mother in the Quebec City suburb of Ste.-Foy, Roy was blessed with athletic bloodlines. His mother was a nationally ranked synchronized swimmer, his father a superb tennis player and amateur ballplayer. But more than genetics separated Roy from the pack. From the outset, he displayed an unflagging belief in himself. Despite giving up an average of 5.32 goals per game with a bad Granby…
No. 44 Right Winger Bill Cook
It was a pre-game sight that provided infinite comfort to New York Rangers’ coach Lester Patrick. In the hubbub of the dressing room, he would spy his captain, Bill Cook, rubbing his palms against his hockey pants, rocking gently on his stool. “He’d be a bundle of nerves, just aching to get at it and break the tension,” Patrick said. “The placid player can be depended on for a safe, steady game, but for the kind of inspired hockey needed to win championships, I need the Bill Cooks. When it comes right down to the crunch, the other players will follow the Bill Cooks.” Today, he would be called a premier power forward, but before there was such a term there were two words to describe a gifted goalscorer who delivered as much…
Next Ones, Next Time
Center Eric Lindros At an August, 1997, news conference to boost awareness of the dangers of head injuries, Eric Lindros began describing the effects of a career-ending concussion sustained by his brother Brett. And then, unaccountably, the Philadelphie Flyers’ superstar began to weep. The biggest man in the room, the biggest name in hockey, cried over his brother’s injury, just the way he used to cry at the sad parts when his mother read him Lassie. Eric Lindros is Batman: at once striking and confused, terrifying and vulnerable, he is hockey’s dark knight. No NHLer can inflict his level of punishment, no NHLer seems to enjoy it more. And yet, no NHLer seems more haunted. Six Guns When The Hockey News marks its 75th anniversary in 2022, there will be additions and subtractions to our…
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