I was surprised to find that the '28 Stanley Cup finals were not actually the first time Lester Patrick played goal. In an amateur game early in his career, the goalie was injured and Patrick had to mind the net for a few minutes. This happened occasionally in the old days, when there were no line changes and teams carried only one or two substitutes and no backup goalie. Under the original rules of hockey, the whole 7-man team was expected to play the full 60 minutes except in case of injury.
In those days, it occasionally happened that one team would suffer an injury or a match penalty and run out of substitutes. If that happened, it was considered good sportsmanship for the other team to remove a man from the ice so both sides would still be at equal strength.
When Lester and Frank Patrick started the Pacific Coast Hockey Association back in 1911, they hired the absolute minimum number of players for their three-team league: seven men each for Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster, plus two substitutes
for the whole league.
The substitutes then would have been used like EBUGs nowadays. Since there were only three teams, there was never more than one game on a given night. The substitutes would have attended every game, skating for whichever team lost a man to injury.
The Patrick brothers often locked horns with the NHA and NHL in the years when they shared control of the Stanley Cup. The NHL won out because the big new American markets simply had too much money for the small West Coast teams to compete. But as the old Western circuit was breaking up, Frank Patrick pulled one last trick on the magnates of the growing NHL.
Frank arranged for the Victoria Cougars (Stanley Cup champions in 1925) to sell their whole roster to the new Detroit club for $100,000. The Portland Rosebuds sold their players to Chicago for the same amount, and the remaining players in the league were auctioned off for another $160,000. The proceeds were split among the owners of the WHL clubs, who used the money to set themselves up in business as a minor pro league with new players.
The thing was, the WHL didn't actually hold the rights to the players they sold. Unlike the NHL, the Patrick brothers' various leagues did not have a reserve clause, which meant that when the league broke up, every one of their players was technically a free agent. Apparently nobody bothered telling the NHL's new American owners that pertinent little fact. They paid $360,000 in total for the rights to players who weren't actually under contract to anyone. But they made out like bandits on the profits from the big new U.S. arenas, and Detroit and Chicago inherited players who were already used to playing together; so I don't suppose anyone came out of the deal with cause for complaint.
The NHL was still an upstart in the world of North American pro sports. In 1928, the entire Stanley Cup finals were played on the Maroons' home ice, the Montreal Forum. Why? Madison Square Garden had already booked those dates for a circus! So the Rangers won their first championship playing every game on the road, in front of a hostile crowd –
and without their regular goalie for much of the series.
Here is the legendary photo of 44-year-old Lester Patrick in his goaltending equipment for the Rangers in 1928.
