Subban is just playing old-time Sens hockey
1903-04 Senators beat Winnipeg for the Cup, and put 7 players in hospital
We’ll never know whether the slash by Montreal’s P.K. Subban on Mark Stone significantly altered the course of the Senators’ playoff run, but this much is certain: had it happened a century ago, it would hardly have been noticed.
The brand of hockey favoured by the Senators in the early 20th century was a vicious one, where cross-checks and broken bones were part of any successful Stanley Cup drive.
Most notorious was the 1903-04 Senators, whose run that year to their second of four consecutive Stanley Cups took them through three challengers, including Winnipeg’s Rowing Club squad in what still ranks as one of the bloodiest games in league history.
The three-game series, played at Ottawa’s 4,000-seat Aberdeen Pavilion, saw the teams split the opening matches, Ottawa handily taking the first, 9-1, and Winnipeg tying the series two days later with a 6-2 win.
The decisive contest — a 2-0 win by Ottawa — was, according to one reporter, the “hardest and most brilliant” game ever played in Ottawa. “From the time Referee Trihey first started the puck on its checkered career, it was nip and tuck and the rubber knew no rest.”
Neither did the medical attendants, as the Sens sent seven of Winnipeg’s nine players to the hospital:
Brown, lame; Richards, face swollen, leg hurt; Bennest, thumb broken, badly bruised; Breen, bruised and broken-up; Hall, cut on head’ Kirby, cut on head; and Bawlf, cut and bruised
Two of the seven left the game early, three were forced to remain in bed following the game and one was out of hockey for the remainder of the season (this Stanley Cup challenge took place between Dec. 30, 1903 and Jan. 4, 1904, with the regular season still ahead).
A few weeks later, the Senators again defended the Cup, this time against the Toronto Marlboroughs, a faster team who contended that the Aberdeen Pavilion ice was salted to slow them down.
After the first game, a 6-3 Ottawa win, Toronto’s Tom Phillips could scarcely walk. One teammate, Frank McLaren, was hospitalized with two broken ribs. A third Marlborough had one arm so bruised he could barely hold his stick.
One visiting player remarked “It was a case of shoot and duck. The Ottawa defence didn’t care whether or not a goal was scored; they just walloped to teach you better manners during the next attack.”
The team suffered its share of lumps, too. A year earlier, in the first of a two-game, totalgoals Stanley Cup series against Montreal, the Senators lost Harry “Rat” Westwick to a broken ankle. (Also that year, in a two-game series versus the Rat Portage Thistles, the puck had to be replaced when it fell through a hole in the ice and couldn’t be retrieved.)
In 1905, facing the same Thistles, Senators scoring ace Frank McGee (who that season set a record that still stands, when he scored 14 goals in a game against the Dawson City Yukoneers) was forced out of the series with an injury in a 9-3 loss in the first game. Wearing new tube skates, the Thistles were a much quicker team, and so some Ottawa partisans again allegedly salted the ice, and our hometown heroes recovered to win the Cup.
Ottawa’s 1921 Cup run culminated in a best-of-five series in Vancouver, against the Millionaires. In front of 11,000 fans — the largest crowd ever at a hockey game — the series took all five games to decide, with one Vancouver reporter noting after Game 2 that the Senators appeared to have a clean way of playing a dirty game. In the final match, Ottawa disposed of the artifice, fighting its way to a 2-1 victory.
The Senators last won the Cup in 1927, defeating the Boston Bruins. The deciding fourth game featured numerous fights as the game wound down, including a bench-clearing brawl instigated by Bruin Billy “Beaver” Coutu, who, after assaulting referee Jerry Laflamme and tackling linesman Billy Bell, became the first (and only) player to be banned from the NHL for life. Senator Hooley Smith was fined $100 (the equivalent today of about $1,300) and suspended for a month for his attack on Boston’s Harry Oliver, and never played for the Senators again.
P.K. Subban? Hate him all you like, but he’s simply playing oldtime Senators’ hockey.