Marty Brodeur breaks Terry Sawchuk's record for most shutouts by an NHL goalie

Revisionist history pisses me off. When I was a kid they used to note "modern-day" records like six goals in a game and 15 shutouts, and it's a load of crap to do so.

A record is a record is a record, no matter what Ford Frick wanted to force everyone to believe. I understand rules have been changed many times along the way to facilitate scoring in hockey (1929 and 1943 are the prominent early examples, and 1943 the year they often cite as the start of the so-called "modern era" because that's when the centre red line debuted) but the facts are that the NHL records are seven goals in a game and 22 shutouts in a season. That's it.

 

Double J, I think you can qualify certain records.

There are two unbreakable records: Gretzky's 61 records and Glenn Hall's 502 consecutive games played. The former is because, well, it's Wayne and the second is simple: every team has a back-up goalie whereas they didn't in the 50's and 60's.

 

But those are still records. You wouldn't say, "well, this goalie has played 83 consecutive games, which is a modern-day record." You wouldn't say, "so-and-so scored 203 points last year, which is a record for someone not named Wayne Gretzky."

Besides, Hall's record isn't quite so simplistic. Nobody employed back-up goalies in those days, so the opportunity was there for any good netminder of the era to play in 502 consecutive games. But no one did, other than Glenn Hall. He was good enough to not be displaced as the top dog, whether it was in Detroit or Chicago, and he was lucky enough to have not been injured to the point where he couldn't play.

 

Somewhere in the great beyond Joe Malone is smiling that somebody remembers his seven goals.

 

I agree. My point about Hall is that it is now virtually--if not totally--impossible to break his record because every team carries two goalies That doesn't diminish his record whatsoever which, when you consider he threw up before every game is even more remarkable.

I'm more impressed by the fact that he was the first butterfly goalie--when those guys didn't wear masks.

 

Wasn't the "clutch-and-grab" era relatively short? The game was a lot more wide open during most of Gretzky's career than it was in the years leading up to the lock out.

 

Keith Moon shattered the consecutive vomiting record in 1970...oh you were still talking about the games streak.

 

I'd love to write about Joe Malone. Apparently he once scored nine goals in a NHA game a few years prior to his seven-goal outburst against Toronto. And the 80th anniversary of that game is in a couple of months.

No one will ever approach his NHL records for goals-per-game average - 44 goals in 20 games in the 1917-18 season, 146 goals in 125 career games. The NHL, naturally, doesn't recognize the latter mark. The league instituted a cut-off of 200 goals for a career, which means the goals-per-game record is held instead by Mike Bossy.

The league also created a separate record for goals-per-game in a season and restricted that category to 50-goal scorers. Guess who owns that mark? You got it - Wayne Gretzky. How fucked is that? Total revisionist bullshit.

 

You could probably date the beginning of the worst part of the clutch and grab era from the NJ Devils Stanley Cup win in '94-95. Maybe the most unwatchable Final ever.

And then the combination of the trap and rodeo style defense turned hockey into an almost unrecognizable game.

You can thank Brendan Shanahan for changing that during the lockout. So, ten years, I guess.`

 

Terry Sawchuck Jr. was my high school health teacher. I was in his class when Patrick Roy broke his dad's wins record. He was not a fan of his father and called him an abusive drunk.

 

Some other fun stuff about Phantom Joe:

In the 1919-20 season, Malone was the leading scorer in the league with 49 points (39 G, 10A) for a Quebec Bulldogs team that went 4-20.

That team scored 91 goals total and had 140 total points. Meaning, Malone scored 43 percent of his team's goals and had 35 percent of his team's points. They gave up a total of 177 goals, or 7.38 per game.

Malone's 7-goal game came on Jan. 31, 1920 against the Toronto St. Patricks. Quebec won that game 10-6. That came three weeks after Newsy Lalonde (who was second in the league in scoring that year) scored 6 goals for Montreal.

Malone also scored 6 in the final game of the regular season that year, a 10-4 win over the Ottawa Senators on March 6.

http://www.hockey-reference.com/teams/QBC/1920_games.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_players_with_five_or_more_goals_in_an_NHL_game

In other words, Quebec needed Malone to score 13 goals in two out of the four wins. Remarkably, Quebec was only shut out once during the season, a 5-0 loss to Ottawa on Feb. 6.

As for me, I'd love to write about the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals between Montreal and Seattle that ended due to the Spanish flu epidemic. It just sounds like one of those intriguing bits of history.

 

More Malone:

He didn't play two games in the season when he scored 44, so there was an opportunity for 50 that season.