Déjà vu all over again
Drawing parallels between rebuilding Blueshirts of ’70s and today
LOS ANGELES — Dave Maloney and his band were coming and that meant Peter Stemkowski and his ilk were either going or already out the door. The Rangers’ Era of Excellence Without Winning the Cup I had ended, and the basic difference between the situation four decades ago and now is that Emile Francis didn’t think to send a letter to season-ticket holders.
Of course Emile went, too, with John Ferguson replacing The Cat as general manager and taking command behind the bench. Most of the unloading was Emile’s doing. He had been the one to unload Vic Hadfield, Eddie Giacomin, Jean Ratelle, Brad Park and even before them, Harry Howell, Teddy Irvine, Jim Neilson and Gilles Villemure.
Most of the remaining holdovers were ushered out by Ferguson, who enthusiastically welcomed the new wave of Rangers that would feature Maloney, Ron Greschner, Ron Duguay, Mike McEwen, Mario Marois and Pat Hickey.
“The younger guys loved Fergy and he loved the younger guys,” Maloney, who made his NHL debut at 18 years and four monthsplus for Francis midway through 1974-75, was saying last week. “The older guys, you’d probably better talk to them.” Hello, Stemmer. “It started when they traded Hadfield, that raised everybody’s eyebrows,” Stemkowski said. “Game 7 in Philly, he probably shouldn’t have been playing because he was injured, he couldn’t fight, then [Dave] Schultz-[Dale] Rolfe happens, we get a too-many-men penalty late, Vic’s in the penalty box, and then he’s traded ... for Nick Beverley! Oh, boy.”
Brief interlude: Unsolicited, and as if it had happened last week, Stemkowski launches into a defense of his teammates’ decision not to intervene in the scrap. Hadfield has explained it to me before and so has Park. There isn’t a Ranger extant who believes the Rangers lost that semifinal Game 7 in Philly because of that incident.
“And even all these years later, I get asked about it all the time,” Stemkowski said. There is, by the way, no remotely comparable flashpoint in the Era of Excel- lence Without Winning the Cup II that just ended.
But OK. The Old Gang had run its course. John Davidson was coming to town. So were seat-fillers like Doug Jarrett, Bill Goldsworthy, Don Awrey and Dallas Smith — all pretty darn good players in their day whose days had come and gone by the time they got to New York.
“Of course we had Phil [Esposito] and [Ken] Hodge here, and Phil was trying to recreate the line they had in Boston with Wayne Cashman as the left wing,” Stemkowski told Slap Shots. “Cashman was a righty who played the off-wing, so Fergy went out and traded for Bill Goldsworthy.”
Goldsworthy was 32 at the time and had been a big-time goal-scoring right wing for the North Stars, getting 237 goals in the immediately preceding seven years prior to the November 1976 trade for Billy Fairbairn. He had scored two goals in the season’s first 16 games for Minnesota.
“First practice, they have him listed on the board at left wing with Phil and Hodge,” Stemkowski said. “Goldsworthy walked in to Fergy’s office, told him he never played left wing in his life and wasn’t about to start. So that was that. He never played left wing for us.”
Goldsworthy, in fact, played all of seven games with the Rangers (one assist) before he went to the AHL and then the WHA.
“Some of the older guys like Gilles Marotte and Doug Jarrett, let’s just say that I didn’t receive the warmest welcome from them,” Maloney said. “It’s not like we’re seeing now with this group, where the veterans are working with the kids. There were some good guys, don’t get me wrong, but no one was helping me take their job.
“That’s kind of the way it was, a different era. At the same time, Fergy didn’t have a lot of use for the veterans and if we — the younger guys — knew that, the vets must have known, too.”
Rod Gilbert, essentially forced into retirement by Ferguson early in 1977-78 following a contract dispute, must have known.
“That went back to a game at the Forum in the ’60s when Fergy was checking Rod, and Rod went off on him for four goals and took 16 shots,” Stemkowski said. “He never forgot that. He never forgot those things that happened when he was a player. He didn’t like me because when I came up with Toronto, I thought I needed to fight, so I had a pretty good scrap with him, and he always remembered that.
“I stopped fighting, too, when I realized that the goal-scorers drove Cadillacs and I was driving a Pinto.”
There were imposters wearing the Blue Shirt, which, most blasphemous of all, was turned into the prototype for the original NHL Jets. The Rangers were bad (but building) in 1976-77, then lost a three-game preliminary round in the 1977-78 playoffs to the Sabres after finishing 30-37-13.
Forty years ago, there was upheaval and there were lost seasons. But the 1974 draft produced Maloney, Greschner and Eddie Johnstone, the 1976 draft produced Don Murdoch, Dave Farrish and McEwen and the 1977 draft yielded Lucien DeBlois, Duguay and Marois. All nine were significant contributors to the 1978-79 team that went to the Cup finals with Fred Shero behind the bench. Walt Tkaczuk was the only holdover from the 1972 finalists; Steve Vickers the only other survivor from the 1974 series against the Flyers.
So dark rebuilding clouds can have a sliver lining. Turnarounds can be accomplished within a reasonable amount of time and it can happen here if the kids in the current pipeline develop the way the kids did back in the ’70s.