Over the holidays, I've enjoyed reading Bob Duff's The First Season, a comprehensive account of the very first NHL season, conducted in the winter of 1917-18. It got me thinking about the player eligibility rules I set up for my Strat-O-Matic hockey league. At the present time, I'm using only players who did not play in the NHL and whose careers were, essentially, pre-NHL. (As such, I'm not including players like Vladislav Tretiak -- those who did not play in the NHL but played concurrently with that league.) Given the complexity of amateur and professional options for elite hockey players in that formative era of the 1900s and 1910s, I've had to make some judgment calls on which players are part of my pool. Rightly or wrongly, Harry Watson (the first one) is in and Moose Goheen is out, but I could go either way on some of those borderline cases. In reading The First Season, however, I've realized that quite a few legendary hockey players finished out their storied careers during that inaugural season. Should I really be excluding the likes of Art Ross, Harry Hyland, and Jack Laviolette just because they played out the string in the NHL's first season? Or what about Russell "Barney" Stanley, who suited up for just one NHL game in his entire career? I'll need to ruminate further prior to the start of Season 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment