KILREA ENTERS AHL HALL OF FAME
Longtime Ottawa coach joins former Springfield Indians teammate Bartlett for honour
There wasn’t much a 24-year-old Brian Kilrea needed to know about Springfield, Mass., in the fall of 1959 that he couldn’t learn from uncles Hec, Wally and Kenny.
The uncles knew all about the owner, the notorious Eddie Shore. Uncle Hec had played against Shore. Uncle Kenny and Uncle Wally had even played for him. They could tell him first-hand stories of the head coach, an ornery Pat Egan, having played against the no-nonsense Alberta cowboy.
The uncles could have even told Brian that, once you went to Springfield and became Shore’s “property,” chances were you were saying goodbye to dreams of the National Hockey League.
What the uncles couldn’t have envisioned telling their favourite nephew was that, almost 60 years later, Kilrea would still be celebrating the closest thing the AHL ever had to a dynasty: the Springfield Indians of the early 1960s.
On Monday, 49 years after playing his last AHL game, Kilrea will join former Springfield teammate Don Bartlett in the 2018 class of inductees in the AHL Hall of Fame at Verona, N.Y.
“Not too many may remember I was a player before I was a coach,” said a laughing Kilrea, spent this week the way no other 83-year-old retirees do: helping pal Don Cherry, also a former Springfield teammate, coach Team Cherry in the CHL Prospects Game in Guelph.
“I’m proud of it,” Kilrea added about finally getting recognition for his playing career. “I think of some of the names I played with and against. They would have been stars in the NHL today.
“At that time, there was just six teams in the National League and six more in the American League. You had to be pretty exceptional to make it. It was a different time.”
A 2003 inductee of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto as a builder in recognition of his stellar career as coach of the Ottawa 67’s, Kilrea and longtime pal Bert O’Brien went to Guelph on Tuesday and returned home Friday.
After taking in the 67’s celebration of the franchise’s teams between 1997 and 2007, Kilrea will load up his family for an easy trek to the Turning Stone Casino in Verona, N.Y., where AHL All-Star Game and Hall of Fame festivities begin Saturday.
Kilrea expects to hold court with fellow AHL alumni in one of the resort’s many bars. Stories and beer should flow easily.
Fittingly, Kilrea has a connection with every member of this year’s class of inductees.
That list starts with Bartlett, though the pair haven’t seen one another since that spring day in 1960 when they hoisted the Calder Cup as AHL champions with a powerhouse Indians team coached by Egan.
Kilrea was a young star centre on that team, but had pretty much given up on his NHL dreams after just one game with the Detroit Red Wings and was almost resigned to a long stay in Springfield under the infamous Shore.
Bartlett was 27, having already spent time with the Montreal Canadiens and 126 games with the New York Rangers before Shore picked up the Verdun native to bolster a lineup that already included future NHLers Floyd Smith, Parker MacDonald, Bill McCreary, Eddie Shack, Orland Kurtenbach, Kent Douglas, Ted Harris and Gump Worsley. Springfield would eventually become the only AHL team to win three consecutive Calder Cups with eventual AHL Hall of Fame members Harry Pidhirny, Jim Anderson, Bruce Cline, Noel Price, Bill Sweeney and Marcel Paille, plus now Kilrea and Barlett.
That’s seven Hall of Famers on a roster of barely 18.
“I imagine (Bartlett) has changed and I have changed,” Kilrea said. “We’ll both be looking to see who has changed more. Then we’ll get into the stories.” Kilrea’s AHL stats are amazing. His first season, at centre between Anderson and Cline, he had 14 goals and 27 assists in 63 games. Then he jumped to 20 goals and 67 assists and then to 20 goals and a league-leading 73 assists in 1961-62, when he finished fourth in league scoring behind Sweeney, the Hershey Bears’ Willie Marshall and the Buffalo Bisons’ Barry Cullen.
All told, Kilrea put up six seasons of 20-plus goals and seven seasons of more than 60 points. He finished with 624 points in 623 games with Springfield, where he still holds a franchise record with 442 assists.
Another inductee is Don Biggs, who played against some of Kilrea’s best 67’s teams with the Ontario Hockey League’s Oshawa Generals from 1982 to 1985 before starting his pro career with Springfield in 1985-86.
Then there’s AHL scoring legend Glenn Merkosky, who wound up as head coach of the OHL’s Sudbury Wolves and coached against Kilrea in the 1990s before earning three Calder Cups with Adirondack.
It’s a given that Kilrea’s induction speech will include Shore’s name.
“I’m sure a (Shore) story will come up,” Kilrea said. “I’m working on the speech, but I don’t have the speech nailed yet. I do know it will be short.
“And those Shore stories. … Today they are funny. I’m not sure they were so funny in the day. But I will mention some of them.”