Hockey History Spotlight: Pass The Puck, Joe Malone!

For this piece, I had to go so far back in the annals of hockey history that the National Hockey League was in it's first year of operation. The year was 1917/1918 and hockey was so much different. The league had only four teams and seasons were a mere twenty-two games. You would think that hockey would have been more defensive oriented back then, especially due to flat stick blades and rudimentary ice skates and equipment. If you thought this, like I did before some research, you could not have been more wrong.

Games were ridiculously high scoring, with few games ever having a team that scored less than four goals. In the league's first season alone, eleven goals were scored three times, ten goals once, and nine goals five times. Not one forward played the entire season, yet there were five twenty-goal scorers in the short season. The leader of the pack was "Phantom" Joe Malone, a player who could be considered the first true power forward in the game of hockey.

In just twenty games, Malone managed to score a whopping 44 goals, a feat even more incredible than Maurice Richard's 50 goals in 50 games, and a total on par with Wayne Gretzky's 92 goal season. If you equate what he did in such a short time, it is possible that had Malone played over the course of the 82 game season we are used to today, he could have scored more than 170 goals.

But as amazing as his goal scoring ability was, that wasn't the statistic that caught my eye. With all the goals came a mind-boggling lack of assists, and when I say mind-boggling, I mean zero. That's right! In the 1917/1918 season, Joe Malone recorded 44 goals and 0 assists for the season. How is that even possible, I wonder. You can't say that he was a puck hog, because over the course of twenty games, you are bound to touch the puck once before someone scores. Granted, there were no secondary assists when he played, but I still find it incredible. You would almost have to go out of you way not to get an assist.

This got me to thinking, what if there were no secondary assists in today's NHL? How would numbers look for our superstar players if the league was to just come in and take them away? In 1985/86, Wayne Gretzky set the league record for assists with 165. How many of those were primary, I wonder? Well, with individual game logs from that time unavailable to me, it is impossible to figure out. But if we move to a more recent player, Sidney Crosby, we can do some math. I sifted through his game logs from the 2006/07 season in which he recorded 84 assists. After taking a look, I counted exactly 35 secondary assists, which would bring his total down to 49. I'm not picking on Crosby here, just using him as an example.

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