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- Thread starter Golferdow01
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Jackets get the win 2-1
3074326
Assistant to the Head Coach
Antoine Vermette is quickly becoming one of my favorite players. I love his game.
I know doing what I'm about to do is pretty pointless, but it shows how well Vermette has been playing. If he played like this for an entire season, he'd be on pace for 41 goals (6 goals in 12 games) and 68 points. He's been awesome.
Does Raffi Torres know how to not be clutch? I swear, every one of his goals wins a game. He has 12 goals on the season, and 6 of them are game-winners. The other 6 probably tied the game. :p
I know doing what I'm about to do is pretty pointless, but it shows how well Vermette has been playing. If he played like this for an entire season, he'd be on pace for 41 goals (6 goals in 12 games) and 68 points. He's been awesome.
Does Raffi Torres know how to not be clutch? I swear, every one of his goals wins a game. He has 12 goals on the season, and 6 of them are game-winners. The other 6 probably tied the game. :p
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Yes.
ScriptOhio
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
DaytonBuck;1441484; said:
FWIW, there are black hockey players and (of course) black hockey fans. Here is a nice article on the man that broke the "color barrier" in the NHL.
Willie O'Ree still blazing way in NHL 50 years later
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Willie O'Ree's debut as the NHL's first black player when he suited up for the Boston Bruins. O'Ree now serves as the director of youth development for the league's diversity task force.
After breaking the color barrier for the Boston Bruins against the Montreal Canadiens on Jan. 18, 1958, Willie O'Ree scored four goals in 45 games over parts of two NHL seasons.
Willie O'Ree, the first black player in the NHL, has felt the staggering chill of a death threat arriving in his mailbox. But it didn't come after his first game for the Boston Bruins on Jan. 18, 1958.
The threats have come in the last several years, after the NHL hired him to work with the league's diversity task force to help promote hockey to black youngsters or players of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
"I still have the letters," O'Ree says. "They said, 'We know there are players of your kind in Canada, but you don't need to bring them to the States.' They said they knew what to do with my kind."
One letter warned him not to attend a tournament because it involved teams with minority players. The NHL provided security, and O'Ree attended anyway. After enduring racial taunts, physical challenges and prejudice to play professional hockey, he certainly wasn't going to let a threat disrupt an enjoyable weekend for young players. "I was more fearful for the kids," he says. "I just shook my head that this still goes on."
The NHL, which has 12 black players, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of O'Ree breaking the league's color barrier. He scored four goals playing in 45 games in parts of two NHL seasons.
But his best work might be in the present. At 72, the gentlemanly O'Ree still works for the NHL, conducting 10 to 15 formal clinics a year and visiting schools, clubs, etc. He travels about 80,000 miles a year and, in 10 years as director of youth development for the diversity task force, makes about seven appearances a month.
"He may be more important now than he was back then because today he is reaching the kids," says William McCants, president of the Detroit Hockey Association. "Back then what he did went unnoticed."
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, acknowledging the impact O'Ree has made on the "40,000 children" he has met, knows "he has a resolve and an inner strength that allows him to do what he believes and not let anything get in his way."
His hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick, has built a rink to name after O'Ree. The Bruins are honoring the 50th anniversary, and the NHL will host a game between teams in the diversity program from Boston and Harlem after the Bruins-New York Rangers game Saturday. The Willie O'Ree All-Star Game, featuring the best players from the diversity league but absent since the 2004-05 NHL lockout, is set to return next season.
Baseball and segregation
Growing up in Fredericton, O'Ree says he had no idea what prejudice was before he ventured into professional sports. There were only two black families on his block, but "no one treated us any differently than the white kids."
He matured into a multiple-sport athlete, although baseball and hockey were his main interests. "He was as good as a baseball player as he was as a hockey player," says long-time friend David Hashey, an attorney in Fredericton.
After taking a slap shot to the face in his last season of junior hockey, O'Ree essentially played sports with one good eye. Yet as a second baseman-shortstop, he was skilled enough at 20 to earn an invitation to the Milwaukee Braves' 1956 camp in southern Georgia and first dealt with segregation and prejudice. Black players were housed separately from white players.
"I flew into Atlanta and when I get off the plane, the first thing I see is restrooms marked 'white only' and 'colored only,'" O'Ree says.
He says he knew almost immediately he regretted his decision to try baseball, but he stayed. He recalls one Sunday he made his only trip off the training grounds to attend Baptist services with other black players. After church, they had 20 minutes before the bus took them back to camp. The group wanted a drink and spied a drugstore. "I was cautious, but I didn't see any signs saying we weren't allowed," he says.
Inside, two white men confronted them. "The N-word was used. It was a bad situation, and we got out of there," O'Ree says.
Five days later, when the Braves told him they thought he needed more seasoning, he couldn't have been happier. When he started on his five-day journey home, he remembers he was told he had to go to the back of the bus. "As we got closer to home, I got to move up," O'Ree says. "Even if they had offered me a contract, I would not have taken it. I might have been killed if I stayed down there."
Little fanfare for milestone
Believing he wanted to stay in Fredericton, O'Ree almost turned down a chance at pro hockey with the Quebec Aces minor league team the next fall. But Punch Imlach, the team's manager, talked him into coming. The Aces won the league title. The Bruins spotted O'Ree and gave the wing a chance to play two games in 1957-58.
His first game was in Montreal. Although he broke the color barrier, it barely registered with the local media. "The big news was that the Bruins shut out the Habs 3-0 in the Montreal Forum," O'Ree says, laughing. "To shut them out in Montreal was a big deal. We were in fifth or sixth place. They had won a lot of Stanley Cups."
He played the next night in Boston, again without much fanfare, again without scoring. "But Boston fans loved him because he worked hard," former Boston teammate Bronco Horvath says. "And the fans in Boston knew hockey."
His teammates also admired him, Horvath says. "He never complained, and I was always complaining. Not Willie. A real team man," Horvath says.
Milt Schmidt, O'Ree's former coach, now 89, says, "He always had a smile, no matter what was happening, and he was a very brainy player, always highly regarded by his teammates and the higher-ups."
The difficulty didn't begin until O'Ree made it back to the NHL from the minors in 1960-61, when he was still the league's only black player. He played 43 games that season for the Bruins. "I had a terrible time in Chicago, and I heard racial slurs in Detroit," O'Ree says.
In his first game in Chicago Stadium, playing his second shift, O'Ree took the butt end of the stick from Eric Nesterenko and lost his two front teeth and a lot of blood from a split lip and nose. He responded by clubbing Nesterenko over the head with his stick.
O'Ree says there was a racial overtone to the language on the ice and from the stands. Both benches emptied.
"If there were slurs about him, we had guys on our Bruins, guys like Fern Flaman and Leo Labine, that would go right after them," Horvath says.
O'Ree and Nesterenko were ejected. After getting stitched up, O'Ree wanted to sit on the bench with his team. But he says Schmidt told him "they were worried about my life if I went back out there." Two police officers were posted at the door of the dressing room.
"I turned out the lights and meditated for a while," O'Ree says, "and I remember saying, 'Willie, you don't need this. You can go back to your hometown and play and not go through all of this.'
"And then right there and then I made a decision: No, I'm not quitting. If I am going to leave this league, it will be because my skills aren't good enough. I'm not to leave because someone is trying to drive me out of the league."
It was, however, his final season in the NHL. O'Ree played pro hockey through 1979, mostly for the Los Angeles Blades and San Diego Gulls of the Western Hockey League. The NHL did not have another black player until the Washington Capitals' Mike Marson in 1974.
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Entire article: Willie O'Ree still blazing way in NHL 50 years later - USATODAY.com
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jimotis4heisman
Banned
murray and raffi need to score more... (the team has not lost when one of them has scored)
peca also played a yeomans game last night.
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jimotis4heisman
Banned
actually he is mexican, peruvian candian.
but yes he has a track record of ramping up his game. remeber his 01-02 run with the bridgeport sound tigers in 20 gp he tallied 17pts that year in the playoffs. hes about a .5 point per game player who can change the game with a big hit (i mean big big hit). his game translates better to the richer play of theplayoffs, the type of hockey we are seeing now.
it will be interesting to see about modin. he sitll is not skating.
chimmer and klesla are slated to likely play in one/both of the games this weekend.
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jimotis4heisman
Banned
nikita has been recalled. hitch holds the determing factor of playing time. may or may not play. they want to atlease expose him to the playoff chase atmosphere and practice experience.
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Fungo Squiggly
Mortal enemy of all things Bucky
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'18 BPCFFB II Champ
'18 Keeper League Champ
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