The day Keon almost became a King
Funny things cross your path as a writer when you’re looking for other things.
Full disclosure here. I’ve got a book coming out next week called The Last Good Year. It focuses on that unforgettable Stanley Cup playoff series in 1993 between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Los Angeles Kings, and lots of other related items. What the game was like then. What the business was like then. The connections between the Leafs and Kings, between Toronto and Los Angeles. And of course those seven fabulous games.
When a book gets written, some stories and tidbits get left on the cutting-room floor as much as you’d like to include them all. Which brings us to how the greatest player in Leafs history — Dave Keon — almost became a member of the Kings.
A number of the players from the great Leaf teams of the Sixties ended up moving on to spend parts of their careers in Los Angeles. Red Kelly was L.A.’s first coach. Terry Sawchuk, Bob Pulford, Bob Nevin, Dick Duff, Pete Stemkowski and Eddie Shack played in Hollywood. Bobby Baun and Kent Douglas, meanwhile, landed in a much worse situation in northern California at the Oakland Coliseum playing for the Seals, a team owned by Charlie Finley and coached by another exLeaf, Bert Olmstead.
In November 1971, the Kings acquired goalie Rogatien Vachon from Montreal after Vachon has lost his starting job to youngster Ken Dryden. Vachon was a building block for the Kings and Pulford, who became the new Kings coach after retiring following the 1971-72 season. The team missed the playoffs in Pulford’s first year, but for the first time drew more than 10,000 fans per game.
Slowly, a good core was assembled. Butch Goring. Mike Murphy. Juha Widing, Gene Carr and Dan Maloney, plus Vachon in net. In the 1974-75 season, the Kings had 105 points, second in the Norris Division to the powerhouse Canadiens.
That summer, in a story not previously revealed, Pulford devised a bold plan to improve his team. He went to Leaf owner Harold Ballard to try and make a deal for the 35-year-old Keon. Naturally, Pulford had enormous respect for his friend and former teammate, the playoff MVP eight years earlier when the Leafs had won the Cup. He believed that adding Keon to his young squad could make the Kings a real playoff threat and more relevant to the L.A. sports scene.
Keon was clearly slowing down, going from 35 goals to 27 to just 16 in the 1974-75 season. But he was a respected leader, still a great skater and penalty killer, and he was also a big hockey name to offer the L.A. audience as an inducement to come to Cooke’s Fabulous Forum.
“I told Ballard (Keon) has done a lot for the Leafs and deserves this chance,” Pulford recalled in a recent interview from his Florida home. Ballard, who wasn’t planning to offer Keon a new contract, agreed. “It was just a handshake, but it was a deal,” said Pulford. “Keon was coming, and the deal was basically for nothing. He would have been unbelievable in L.A.” Then things got complicated. “So I went in to tell (Kings owner) Jack Kent Cooke about the trade. I said, ‘Keon’s going to come.’ He gave me one of those stares and said, ‘No, he’s not, Bob. I’m making a deal for Marcel Dionne.’ ” While Pulford had been courting Keon, his owner had been holding secret talks with Detroit for the 23-year-old Dionne. The Keon deal wasn’t going to happen.
A frustrated Pulford gave Cooke a list of four or five Kings players who could not be included in a trade for Dionne, including Murphy, Goring and Maloney. “(Cooke) said, ‘I promise I won’t trade those players for Dionne,’ ” Pulford recalls. “So I left to drive home, and I remember slamming on the brakes in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. I did a Uturn and almost killed myself. I raced back to the office, went into Cooke’s office and said, ‘You have to promise you won’t trade any one of those players.’ And he said, ‘I never said that. I said I wouldn’t trade those players for Dionne.” The deal was made on June 23, with Dionne and Bart Crashley going to the Kings for Maloney, defenceman Terry Harper and a second-round draft pick. Pulford was incensed and threatened to quit. “(Cooke) said, ‘No, you’ve got two years left on your contract and you’ll sit in your office if you have to.’ ” said Pulford.
Pulford stayed, then bolted to Chicago two years later. It’s not like Cooke’s deal was a disaster. It was a steal. Dionne went on to centre the high-scoring Triple Crown Line with Dave Taylor and Charlie Simmer, the first line in hockey history that had three players all get 100 points in one season.
But other than the 1982 Miracle on Manchester, the Kings never did anything of note in the post-season with Dionne on the roster. Pulford’s idea to acquire Keon was about turning the Kings into a winner. Instead, Keon left the Leafs for the World Hockey Association later that summer. He came back to the NHL after the merger with the WHA for three final years with the Hartford Whalers. One wonders how hockey history might have been altered if Keon had gone west. It’s like imagining what the Leafs would have been like with Wayne Gretzky in the lineup had Steve Stavro not vetoed Cliff Fletcher’s 1996 plan to sign The Great One, then 35 years old, just like Keon had been when Pulford tried to trade for him.
This much seems certain. Keon as a King would have been a decidedly more interesting chapter in hockey history than Keon in the doomed WHA. Damien Cox’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday.