Vegas wasn’t the first
50 years before the Golden Knights, Hall, Bowman led the expansion Blues to the Stanley Cup Final.
Retirement appealed to Chicago Blackhawks legend Glenn Hall, “Mr. Goalie,” who had no plans to return to the crease for the 1968 season when St. Louis Blues general manager Lynn Patrick called.
“Lynn asked me if I still wanted to play because they took me in the expansion draft,” Hall, 86, recalled on the phone last week from his farm in Alberta, Canada. “I told the Hawks I might retire but then I told Patrick I’d play one year for $50,000. He said, ‘Holy cow, Glenn, how about $45,000?’ I said, ‘Let’s split the difference.’ So I signed for $47,500 — and squirreled away enough money to buy this place.”
The salary was more than double what Hall ever made in 10 terrific seasons with the Blackhawks (1957-67), an investment nobody in St. Louis doubted after the Hall of Fame goaltender helped the Blues become the first expansion team to play in the Stanley Cup Final. The Golden Knights became the second this week when their series against the Washington Capitals began Monday in Las Vegas, 50 years after Scotty Bowman coached the Blues further than anybody in hockey imagined.
Bowman, the NHL’s winningest coach with 1, 244 victories and nine Stanley Cup titles, replaced Patrick behind the bench after 16 games in November 1967 and redirected the Blues on a historic path. Their distinction deserves an asterisk because all six expansion teams — half the NHL that season — were placed in the West Division, guaranteeing one would play for the Cup. The division-winning Philadelphia Flyers went 31-32-11 for 73 points, which would have finished sixth in the East. The Blues finished the regular season 27-31-16 before getting hot in the playoffs.
S o w h i l e t h e G o l d e n Knights reaching the finals in a 31-team league puts them on the verge of producing one of the greatest moments in sports history, what the Blues accomplished lacks the overall significance to everyone but those who still remember it fondly.
“A special year,” Bowman, 84, said of the first of his 30 seasons as an NHL head coach. “The league was a lot different then, and it only cost expansion teams $2 million to get in compared to the $500 million Vegas paid. But the biggest similarit y between the two teams is the two goalies: Glenn Hall and Marc-Andre Fleury (of the Golden Knights). They’re like two peas in a pod.”
Fleury, 33, a strong Conn Smythe Trophy candidate, came to the Golden Knights after winning three Stanley Cup rings with the Penguins. Hall was 36 when he joined the Blues after stints with the Detroit Red Wings and Blackhawks.
In the 1968 Cup loss to the mighty Montreal Canadiens, Hall won the Conn Smythe despite the Blues get t i ng s wept i n a s er i e s t h a t i n c l u d e d t wo ove r - time losses. Each game was decided by one goal.
“We forced the Original Six team to sweat and they wanted to win without sweating,” Hall said. “We made them work.”
Hall made everyone else on the ice more confident knowing he was in net, much the same way Fleury affects the Golden Knights.
“Glenn carried our team,” B owman, a B l a c k h awk s senior adviser, said. “Like Fleury, he was the face of our franchise that first year.”
The growth of the league and changes to the game make any other comparisons between the ’68 Blues and ’18 Golden Knights moot. Consider Bowman’s fondest memory of the Blues’ playoff run: To shore up depth the day before a Game 7 victory in the first-round series against the Flyers, Bowman vividly recounted c alling up 43-year-old Doug Harvey, the longtime NHL star defenseman who was the player-coach of the Blues’ minor league affiliate in Kansas City. “I think he played 40 minutes and we won,” Bowman said. “Imagine doing that now.”
It’s hard to, even though the Golden Knights do have their share of unlikely contributors on a team whose only star is their goalie. Bowman commended hockey architect George McPhee for building a championship-caliber roster with pieces tossed onto a scrap heap of squandered talent.
Besides nabbing Fleury in an expansion draft that exposed players with bad contracts, Bowman believes two shrewd moves allowed the Golden Knights to grow quickly into a contender. The first involved the Florida Panthers trading forward Reilly Smith to the Golden Knights only if they agreed to take Jonathan Marchessault in the expansion draft due to salary-cap considerations. The Golden Knights’ most dangerous line comprises Smith, Marchessault and William Karlsson — the discarded Columbus Blue Jacket who scored 43 goals after combining for 15 in the two previous seasons. The trio combined for 92 goals.
The other difference-making transac tion Bowman cited involved acquiring center Erik Haula and forward Alex Tuch from the Minnesota Wild. The addition of a savvy veteran like James Neal complemented the skill. The edge every member of the “Golden Misfits” brought to town kept complacency out of the dressing room. The experience of coach Gerard Gallant, fired by the Panthers early in the 2016-17 season, made him the ideal leader for a bunch of players nobody wanted.
“There were all kinds of theories why a team couldn’t win in Vegas but they overcame it all,” Bowman said. “It’s impressive.”
It’s almost unfathomable. No modern-day expansion team in the NHL, NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball has posted a winning record in its first season, according to ESPN. The Westgate Sportsbook gave the Golden Knights 500-to-1 odds to win the Cup last fall. For context, the odds of No. 16 seed Maryland-Baltimore County upsetting No. 1 seed Virginia in the NCAA tournament were only 40-to-1 before the Retrievers stunned the college basketball world.