[troutman]

I think Grapes used to complain that Espo was taking 3+ minute shifts in the 70s.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/spor...ticle34268774/

"This was the 1950s," Kingston said. "Nurmi had been an influence on Zatopek, and Zatopek's focus was all on speed play for training – go hard and then rest. That had an impact on all of us. In 1967, Clare and I talked about how to apply that to hockey – and that shifts had to change and shorten. You'd go hard and then you'd rest.

"But it was light-years before it ever came to the NHL. In '67, I'd become a short-shift guy because I'd seen that from my own interval training. You do shorter intervals and you recover faster. Now, is the optimum shift 25 to 30 seconds? Is the optimum 30 to 45 seconds? For sure the optimum is a lot less than two minutes, or a minute and a half, which is where it was in the late 1950s."

Teaching NHLers the value of shorter shifts proved problematic, and Bowman said that when he moved on to Buffalo from Montreal, he developed a tactic to make the point to his players.

"We used to scrimmage a lot more then than they do now," he said. "I had a football horn and a stopwatch. I used to go as close to a minute as possible. At 50 seconds, I'd blow the horn to let them know they'd been on for 50 seconds and the next chance you get to change, take it. If they didn't change, I'd blow the whistle and stop the play and say, 'We're already at a minute [and] 10, and you're not even close to getting off.' For me, the shorter shifts came in the 1980s."

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/th...kable-records/

That moment came in February of 1994. Frustrated with Kovalev’s habit of staying out too long on shifts — a notorious superstar move that always drives coaches crazy — Keenan decided that the situation called for extreme measures. So with roughly five minutes left in the second period and the Russian youngster at the end of one of his typically elongated shifts, the coach decided to send a message. When Kovalev came to the bench, Keenan wouldn’t let him sit down, sending him right back out onto the ice. Then he did it again. He kept doing it for the rest of the period, refusing to let Kovalev come off for a rest until the horn sounded.

This was back before we had official time-on-ice stats, so the true length of the shift is up for debate. The official NHL video of the incident calls it five minutes, while most Ranger fans seem to remember it being more like seven, and Keenan recalls it as being closer to 10. At this point, we might as well go ahead and round it up to a full period.