Hi everyone! I’ve been doing some research lately on some of the more unusual or forgotten moments of the 1970s, my favourite decade of hockey. I personally find the decade to be fascinating, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. The wild brawls, the loud uniforms, the big hair, the frequent franchise moves… it was certainly an interesting time, and a very unique period in professional hockey. I stumbled upon a rather forgotten victory in Seals history, a 4-2 shocker against the Boston Bruins in December 1971. The Seals more than held their own against the eventual Stanley Cup champs, ending the Bruins’ 12-game undefeated streak. This would not be the last time the Seals stunned the B’s by snapping an impressive streak of success (see winning streak: Brooks, Ross), but going back to the December ’71 game, what might be most impressive is that this was the only loss suffered by the Bruins between November 11 and January 6. The 1971-72 Seals may not have qualified for the playoffs that year, but this was certainly a spunky, talented bunch that could have done some serious damage had they not broken up at the end of the season. You can find this week’s new article right here.

Don’t forget to vote for who you believe should be enshrined in the Seals Hall of Fame. You can select up to three names and you can do so by clicking on this link. Thanks to all of you who have already voted! We’re off to a great start, and I’m sure you are well on your way to setting a new record for most participants in a vote for this website.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Yes, it’s time to vote on all of your favourites. It’s time to induct some new members into the Seals Hall of Fame. Once again, we have a tremendous group of nominees, which I’m sure you will agree, are all worthy of induction, but as usual, only three will make the cut. The new inductions to the Hall will be announced in mid-July when the site celebrates its sixth anniversary.

Here are the nominees, in no particular order…

Charlie Burns

Wayne Connelly

Fred Glover

Len Haley

Krazy George Henderson

Nick Mickoski

Bob Murdoch

Al Nicholson

Doug Roberts

Tom Thurlby

So let’s talk about ground rules… You can vote for up to three people, and you can also write in your own vote, if you don’t like the choice I’ve provided (It’s OK, really, I understand…). That’s about it.

I recommend that you read over the 2022 nominee biographies so you can better understand why I nominated these ten former Seals. After that, you can click on the Jotform link at the bottom of the page to take you to the Hall of Fame survey. If you’re in a rush, however, you can click on the survey link right here.

That’s about it for this week. Hope you all have a great weekend! Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Yes, it’s that time of the year when I start getting ready for the Seals Hall of Fame induction, which means I will be taking this week off to prepare the ballot and write up some short biographies for all of the nominees. All eras of the Seals franchise will be represented: the WHL years, the early NHL years, the “Golden” years and the final stint in Cleveland. Next week, the 2022 nominees will be announced and you will all get the opportunity to cast your votes, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out some of my favorite Hall of Shame inductions from the last few years.

If you’re looking for a reason to curse God for having creating celluloid and digital cameras, well, we’ve got the classic induction for the supremely awful MVP: Most Valuable Primate and the almost-as-bad Slap Shot 3: The Junior League.

If you’re feeling bad and you need some cheering up, here are some of the dumbest pieces of cardboard you ever did see. We’ve got the Oshawa Generals cozying up to a TV, Alec Martinez munchin’ on some Froot Loops, Bob Murdoch doing his best “Grampa-Simpson-yelling-at-clouds” impression, Brett Hull on a hunt for treasure, Luke Richardson trying to shake a shaking Blackhawk, and the patron saint of bad hockey cards, the legendary Dave Gagner!

And let’s not forget the classic Aaron Downey-Brad Norton showdown, and Colin Chaulk’s number retirement fiasco! Enjoy, folks!

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Now that my second book is in the can and I have to wait until I receive the edited version before I can take it to the next step in the publishing process, I have very little to do most evenings. So, I’ve been puttering around my hockey book library trying to drum up ideas for my next project. I’ve been toying with the idea of a writing a book about some of the more forgotten people and stories of the expansion era, and as I was sifting through some old articles, I came across a story I had touched on in my book on the Seals: the legendary 14-game winning streak by Boston Bruins goaltender Ross Brooks. For most of his three-year NHL career, it seemed as though this guy just couldn’t lose. Game after game, he came up with a W. First, he started his big-league career on a 12-game undefeated streak, and then in his second year, after losing his first game of the season, he went on to win his next fourteen. In Brooks’ 54 career games, only seven were losses, and his all-time winning percentage of .740 is second only to Ken Dryden’s .743. And yet, the Seals were the team to bring down Brooks’ legendary streak, and you can read all about the game in the articles section.

Also, be sure to check out the newest addition to the Overexposed wing of the Hockey Hall of Shame, and it features first-time inductee Ziggy Palffy celebrating something or threatening someone, I’m really not sure. Maybe you can figure it out here.

Enjoy tomorrow’s Super Bowl, if you’re into that sort of thing, and if you do party with friends or family, stay safe! Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! How are you all doing on this fine Friday? I’m just sitting here listening to a sports podcast, taking it easy. Might read a little later on, and then head off to bed. Yup, it’s been that kind of evening over here. Looking to take the kid out to buy him his first hockey stick, and then sit in the house because it’s supposed to be something like -20 degrees out tomorrow afternoon. Would be a great time to catch an afternoon game, but it’s All-Star Weekend time, which means that if anything does appear on screen resembling a game, it probably won’t be worth the time to watch it. The last All-Star game I watched a few years back, I believe it was on a Sunday afternoon, and I actually, literally fell asleep at one point. I used to really enjoy the All-Star game, but now I can’t even bare to press my thumb down on the remote control to select the channel which will carry it. And with my Canadiens in the midst of arguably their worst-ever season, my enthusiasm for hockey has indeed begun to wane.

So let’s go back to 1973-74, arguably the Seals all-time worst campaign. Not much went right for the team that year, but there was a glimmer of hope as Charlie Finley sold the team, Marshall Johnston took over as coach, and Garry Young returned as a pseudo-general manager. This week’s new article comes from March 14, 1974, the day after Marshall Johnston’s daughter Amy was born. Johnston’s head was probably elsewhere that night as his Seals took on the Detroit Red Wings while his wife Barbara was in the hospital giving birth. The Seals played their hearts out and gave the Wings all they could handle, but goaltender Jim Rutherford was simply too much, and the Seals’ record dropped to 13-45-9. March 1974 was indeed an interesting, if not memorable month for the Seals’ new bench boss. Of course, there was his first NHL win against the Montreal Canadiens at the fabled Forum. That was just the Seals’ second road win of the season. Not long after, the Seals pulled off their second major upset of the month defeating the mighty Boston Bruins whose goaltender that night, the little-known Ross Brooks, had been on a NHL-record 12-game winning streak. A lot of interesting Seals trivia answers that month, indeed.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Enjoy All-Star Weekend, if you’re into that sort of thing, and if you’re not, hang tight, real hockey will be back in a few days. Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Hope everyone has had a great week and is getting nice and rested to start the weekend. As you may have heard, this weekend Ottawa is getting overrun by a band of renegade anti-vaxxing truckers this weekend, which means the rest of us here are pretty much going nowhere close to downtown while this crap passes (God, this pandemic just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?). Then again… have you ever been to downtown Ottawa? I mean, great restaurants and sights and all, but traffic and parking are just God-awful. And expensive too! Sure we have a train that will take us downtown, but between it breaking down every second day and the additional risk of locking yourself up in a potentially Covid-ridden bacteria trap, yeah, I think I’ll stay home. Maybe these truckers are actually doing us a favour by keeping us at home. Social distancing rules! But don’t worry folks, as usual, I’ve got you covered for at least the five or six minutes it will take you to read through all of the new stuff on the site. After that, you’ll have to go play Wordle to keep you distracted the rest of the way. Take your time.

Yes, we’re all growing a little restless these days, and we’re all a little cranky and crabby as Covid keeps mutating, the weather gets colder, and we just want life to get back to normal again, so here’s a little something to lighten the mood: a brand new Overexposed treat, this time featuring Hall of Famer Mike Gartner! And he doesn’t look too happy about it. More like Tiger Williams after getting speared in the breadbasket. You’ll have to go read this week’s new entry to see what I mean.

As for this week’s new article, I picked one from March 22, 1975, when the surging St. Louis Blues, led by their coach, and former Golden Seal general manager, Garry Young, skated into Oakland looking for two points that would get them just that much closer to the Smythe Division’s first-place Vancouver Canucks. Despite icing the better team, the Blues were no match for Gilles Meloche and the Seals on this night, and Young was effusive in his praise of his former team.

That’s about it for this week. Have yourselves a great weekend, and stay gold!

Hi everyone! The answer is that they are all about skinning things, but we’ll get back to that in a minute… How’s everyone doing this fine day? It’s about 25 below here in Ottawa, and it looks like this is going to be the norm for the next few days, which is a real bummer if you just want to go outside and you know, enjoy winter. Or take a ride in the car to avoid losing digits in the freezing wind. That’s actually become a problem around here as I was told today that my car has likely suffered so much from the cold this last week that it is probably frozen to the point it won’t start anymore. It’s just a theory, really, from the CAA – that’s Triple-A to my American friends out there – guy who came to give my car a boost, and when that failed could not tow it to the Honda dealership to look into the real issue because no battery means no turning off the parking brake. Active parking brakes mean no tow. So now a wrecker has to come by to haul my Honda Civic over to the dealership, where I’m either going to be faced with a 30-second fix (fingers crossed) or a several-day fix necessitating massive repairs and hundreds of dollars. Should be a fun weekend!

I kind of feel like the Oakland Seals just after their game against the Boston Bruins November 10, 1969: beaten down, tired, wondering when this day will be over, and as Spence Conley wrote in this week’s article, skinned. In this horrendous negative-star contest, the Bruins directed 63 shots at the Seals’ beleaguered netminding tandem of Gary Smith and Charlie Hodge. The contest was really just a preview of the hell the Bruins were going to unleash onto the rest of the NHL for the next few seasons. In fact, the Seals got to relive this night in March the following season when those same Bruins launched another 63 shots and scored a 7-0 victory. Yup, Bruins-Seals match-ups were indeed hard to watch if you were a Seals booster.

Ok, maybe I need to lighten the mood a bit, so here’s a brand new Overexposed induction for you, and it comes courtesy of the 1983-84 O-Pee-Chee set, an otherwise nice-looking ensemble of hockey photos in my opinion. Today though… ah, not so much. This week’s cardboard atrocity features Atlanta/Calgary Flames great Guy Chouinard shortly after his trade to St. Louis. You know what that means, folks… airbrushin’ a-plenty! That and a helmet that would not only tear every hair off your head, but likely your skin cap as well. You can check out Guy’s worst all-time card right here.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! The weekend is finally here, and I’m feeling great. Sure, it’s literally -20 degrees Celcius outside and I’ll probably lose my pinky toe to frostbite taking the garbage out to the garage tonight, but hey it’s the last day of our son having to endure that dreadful online-learning crap, and we’ll finally have a chance to spend some time sledding or skating outside (assuming, of course, that the temperature drops just a tad), and we can look forward to our lives sort-of getting back to normal, so we can start looking on the bright side.

Another thing that I’ve really been thankful for of late has been the massive updates that were made to Hockey-reference.com. I’ve recently discovered that the site has now posted game logs for every player on the site. So, if I want to know how many consecutive games Joey Johnston scored a point in his rookie season, I have to look no further than Hockey-reference.com. I’m not being paid to promote the site, by the way; I’m just a stats geek who has waited his entire life to have the NHL’s entire statistical history laid out in front of him. I would have killed to have this site at my disposal when I was in the early stages of my own research on the Seals, and I can only imagine what kind of books and research we are going to be treated to in the future now that all of these stats are made available for free!

This week’s article comes from April 14, 1969, which is the day after the L.A. Kings defeated the Seals in Game 7 of the West Division semi-finals. The Seals had given it their all in the six previous games, but by the final contest, they were exhausted, and the Kings took advantage. I was actually a little surprised that I hadn’t uploaded any articles about this game onto the site, considering it technically represents the farthest the Seals ever advanced in the playoffs, so I’m righting a wrong today. Hope you enjoy it.

That’s about it for this week. Hope you all have a great weekend, and I hope you can all enjoy the weather a little wherever you are. Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone and Happy New Year! May 2022 be a mere trash can fire in comparison to the raging dumpster fire that was 2021 and the towering inferno of steel, asbestos and chemical fumes that was 2020. I pray we are finally going to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and if you are a Montreal Canadiens fan like me, I pray we are finally going to see a light in the shape of a first-overall scoring sensation that is going to lead the club out of the ashes. Twenty-twenty-two has gotten off to a rather rocky start so far thanks to Omicron. The NHL has looked absolutely directionless of late, games are getting postponed left, right and centre I have absolutely no idea how they are all going to be made up. The kids here in Ontario have returned to online learning until January 14 (ha ha ha ha, I know, I know… it’s going to be a LOT longer than that if you have any recollection of the Doug Ford government’s past decisions involving schools). Yes, 2022 is not exactly giving me the warm and fuzzies so far as I write this entry exactly 9 days into the new year.

I can say, however, that on the personal side things could not be much better. My son and I have discovered a love for outdoor skating, which I honestly thought he would want to have nothing to do with, but lo and behold, the minute he strapped on the skates he became Mr. Persistent and absolutely refused to use any kind of device to hold him up, and he refused to let me help him skate around the ice. By the end of that first hour, he was able to run-skate everywhere. By the second session, he was gliding around just a bit, and by the third session, he was practically full-on skating. As a Dad, and as my first child to learn to skate, I was very proud. Where I was less proud was how I performed on the ice. You see, I’m really more of a hockey writer than a hockey player. Remember that Kevin MacKay 1991-92 7th Inning Sketch card (check it out right here) where he looks to be doing a dead-on impression of Bambi walking on ice for the first time? Well, the hockey gods punished me yesterday for making fun of Kevin by having me endure the exact same thing. Why I thought I’d be able to just glide out there and do a couple of laps without embarrassing myself, I have no idea. I hadn’t skated in 15 years easy and it’s not like I was Connor McDavid out there way back then either. In fact, I was, and am, more MacKay than McDavid. I mean, I still don’t even know how to properly stop on my skates, which I had also forgotten over the years. After falling flat on my ass (and hip, and knee) more times than I can count, I finally managed to stay on my feet enough to regain some of my pride, and skate a few half-decent looking laps around the rink, but next time I will at least bring a stick and puck to provide me with something to lean on, and make it look like I know what I’m doing.

Anyway, enough about me.

This week, I received an email from Chuck Nan, who did some personal research and managed to fill in some of the gaps in my San Francisco Seals and California Golden Seals game-by-game summaries, not to mention give me some insight into the Seals’ participation in the Western Hockey League all-star games. I have posted updated versions of the two game-by-game summaries, which now feature a complete roundup of all exhibition games played by the minor-league and major-league Seals, and I have added to the all-star and awards sections of the Definitive Franchise Record Book. Thanks Chuck for all your contributions to the site! You can find the three updated pdf files over in the Stats section.

If you are looking for some new reading material, might I suggest this nice piece about former Seals general manager Garry Young. It was written for the Original Hockey Hall of Fame’s which is located in Kingston, Ontario, where I went to university for four years. The article, which you can find here at the OHHOF’s website, talks about the Boston Bruins’ Kingston connection, and how Garry Young was instrumental in building the Bruins into Stanley Cup champions.

UPDATE: McFarland Press has pushed back the publication date of my new book When the NHL Invaded Japan: The Washington Capitals, the Kansas City Scouts, and the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, 1975-76 to May 6, 2022, so you can still pre-order the book on Amazon.com or on the McFarland website, but you’ll be celebrating Valentines’ Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter before you receive it in the mail. That said, it IS coming, so I can’t complain too much, and it will hopefully provide some of you with some summer hockey reading material.

That’s about it for this week. If your team’s games have been postponed due to Covid, enjoy the time away from the NHL, and, if you are lucky enough to be able to do so, take advantage of the winter weather to get some of your own hockey games organized, or get the kids their own sticks and pucks so they can do what we hockey fans have always done in January, and that is skate, skate, skate, and shoot, shoot, shoot. And if you’re like me, and you haven’t skated in over a decade, take my advice and wear some extra padding, and maybe a helmet.

Until next time, stay gold!

Hi everyone! Since most of our favourite NHL teams are currently sitting out this weekend (and let’s face it, probably the next several weeks as well… I smell another hastily organized bubble tournament!), we all probably need a much-needed hockey fix, so here we are, and I’m here to deliver.

This week, I’ve added a new article article from January 3, 1976, the day after the Seals crushed the second-year Washington Capitals 8-5 and Wayne Merrick set a new team record with six points. The win was extremely significant as it not only ended the Seals’ five-game losing streak, but it also got started them on the best nine-game stretch in franchise history: 7 wins, 1 loss, and 1 tie. The hot streak actually got people thinking the Seals had a chance at the playoffs, but alas, it was not meant to be for the sixth year in a row.

I’ll be honest with you though that I had a selfish reason for posting this week’s article. As you know, my next book When the NHL Invaded Japan: The Washington Capitals, the Kansas City Scouts, and the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, 1975-76, is about to be released early in the new year, so if you have any interest in knowing what made the Capitals or Scouts tick their first two NHL seasons, you’ll want to check it out. It is available for pre-order on Amazon as well as on the McFarland Press website.

The other reason I’ve posted the article is that I will be taking a break from the website during these Christmas holidays, and I will be back the week of January 2, the date of the aforementioned Seals’ triumph over Washington. Hope everyone has a Happy Holiday and a Happy New Year.

Until 2022, stay gold!