Time to Kill Now – A hockey history blog by Ben Massey

Remembering Gerry Meehan

June 10, 2026 Ave atque vale 5,572 words

Gerry Meehan, forward for six NHL teams and long-time NHL front office jack-of-all-trades, died earlier this month at age 79. Meehan was perhaps most famous as "the man who built the Buffalo Sabres twice" and destroyed the Philadelphia Flyers once. The second captain in Sabres history, Meehan scored one of their most famous goals and led Buffalo to their first ever playoff appearance. As Sabres general manager Meehan got Alex Mogilny out of the Soviet Union, drafted Pierre Turgeon, traded him for Pat LaFontaine, probably lost a trade for Dale Hawerchuk, but made up for every imaginable sin by acquiring Dominik Hasek for a scrub and a fourth-round pick: if that's not the best trade in NHL history I'd very much like to know what is. Meehan's time as GM was relatively short, but few general managers can say they acquired the two best players in franchise history in such a span.

As a player, Meehan was destined for an awkward epoch: the immediate expansion era. Meehan was never considered a star prospect, as a kid he played well for good teams but didn't stand out. He was drafted by the Leafs, but it was the first ever amateur draft, for the few players who hadn't signed with an NHL team already; Meehan went last overall. Although the format was so weird you have to put an asterisk beside this, Meehan was probably the best last overall pick until Patric Hornqvist 42 years later.

Had he been ten years older, Meehan would been lost in the deep dark sea of the Original Six. Had he been ten years younger, he would have benefited from the highest-scoring era in NHL history, for Meehan was a premature '80s Guy if ever there was one. He had good size and skill, was respected, played a versatile attacking game, and got the puck on goal. He was smart on the ice and smarter off it. But he had a rep as a soft player, which when his most famous teammate was Gilbert Perreault took some doing. Despite, or maybe because of this, he played in 672 big league games. Though he wasn't a regular in a big-league lineup until he was 24, he was basically never hurt; he had two eighty-game seasons, a 78, three 77s, a 74, and a 72. He played for one of the worst teams in NHL history, the 1975–76 Washington Capitals, and may have been the reason they weren't the worst team in NHL history. He never came close to leading an NHL team in scoring. His teams always traded him, usually for not much; the team that got him usually improved. Not a great player, and better remembered in the front office, but a man before his time, a Volkswagen Golf during a Buick age, who showed how far you can get with brains and a work ethic.

June 10, 2026 Ave atque vale 5,572 words

How Good Was Vsevolod Bobrov?

May 27, 2026 How Good Was... 3,799 words

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Bobrov (December 1, 1922 – July 1, 1979) is the official first hockey hero of the Soviet Union, to the extent Soviet hockey went in for anything as bourgeoisie as heroism. The "Big Red Machine," the formless, perfectly-engineered game-winning communist automaton, all wheels and cogs and interchangeable parts cast in the foundries of the Red Army, was one-third real, one-third the team's goal, and one-third a contrast to North American individualism that appeared starker than it was. The men, like Bobrov, were still men: they lived and breathed and often enough partied like hellions, flying through the snow in their Ladas with a quart of vodka in the system and smoking Polish cigarettes, differentiated from Guy Lafleur by haircut and quality of goods. They left enough memories that Bobrov was named to the IIHF Hall of Fame on its founding a quarter-century after his death, was named to the IIHF "All-Time Russia Team" in 2020, and the KHL named one of its divisions after him.

Although a well-known Soviet athlete immediately after the war, Bobrov made his first international impact at the Olympics. The Summer Olympics, to be specific; in addition to hockey and bandy (which is to hockey as Pravda is to truth), Bobrov was an excellent soccer forward and captained the Soviet soccer team at the 1952 Summer Olympics. Bobrov began by scoring the equalizer in a 2-1 extra time preliminary-round win against a decent Bulgarian team lead by influential goalkeeper Apostol Sokolov. But that was nothing: the Soviets faced a good Yugoslav team next in the first round proper. Yugoslavia took a 3-0 lead at halftime; while Bobrov was able to make it 3–1 Yugoslavia got the next two to stake a 5–1 lead and, like Tito taking over Albania, they probably thought it was all over. At 75' Vasili Trofimov scored for the Soviets; Bobrov added his second at 77' to make a game of it, then completed his hat trick on 87'. 5–4. Aleksandr Petrov tied the game in the eighty-ninth of ninety minutes, and the Soviet Union had what match referee Arthur Ellis called "the most honourable draw ever recorded." There were no penalty shootouts in those days, so two days later they played again: Bobrov opened the scoring in the sixth minute, but the Yugoslavs took control after that, winning 3-1 and going on to the silver medal, losing only to Ferenc Puskás's unstoppable Hungarian "Magical Magyars." Ellis said of Bobrov, "he, almost single-handed, took the score to 5–5 [. . .] For once, use of the word sensational was justified."

This, it will be remembered, was Bobrov's second-best sport.

May 27, 2026 How Good Was... 3,799 words

The Brilliant Flash of Dennis Maruk

May 20, 2026 One-hit wonders 3,556 words

The 1981–82 Washington Capitals, 26-41-13, were not a great team. Last in the old Patrick Division, though being the early Capitals it was about their best squad yet. They were on the verge of making the playoffs, it showed in the underlying numbers, with their bit-better-than-median goals for and bit-worse-than-median goals against, but it was waiting to come together. They had a 22-year-old Mike Gartner, an 18-year-old Bobby Carpenter, a 23-year-old Bengt-Åke Gustafsson, and a few other young-ish players of reasonable quality. Their captain, Ryan Walter, was 23 and not too bad. So naturally their leading scorer was some guy named Dennis Maruk.

Not by a little bit. Walter was second on the team with 87 points, followed by Gartner with 80; Maruk had 136. He scored four hat tricks, he made the All-Star Game, he was fourth in the voting for the season-ending All-Star team at centre and seventh in voting on right wing, which says something, and sixth in the Hart. He finished fourth in the NHL that year in points, behind Wayne Gretzky, Mike Bossy, and Peter Šťastný; ahead of Bryan Trottier, Denis Savard, Marcel Dionne, Dino Ciccarelli, Glenn Anderson, Dale Hawerchuk, and Bernie Federko, to name only the Hall-of-Famers in the top 20. Third in goals with 60, behind Gretzky and Bossy. Sixth in assists, behind five Hall-of-Famers. Maruk and Bernie Nicholls are the only eligible players to have recorded a 60-goal season and not make the Hall of Fame and Nicholls got 30 assists from Gretzky. It was a killer year. Maruk's mustache may be second only to Lanny McDonald's in the era, and Lanny's in the Hall of Fame too.

This was not Maruk's only pretty good season; he was an All-Star in 1977–78 with the Cleveland Barons, because somebody had to be, and had another 50-goal season and a total of four 80-point seasons. Maruk actually outscored Gartner in each of the four full seasons they played together, and sure Gartner was young; it was four seasons over five years and it was still Mike Gartner. However, hanging out with Gretzky and Bossy was a one-off. 136 points was 29% better than his second-best career total. Sure, he scored 50 goals another time, but it was exactly 50, and his usual level was 30-odd.

May 20, 2026 One-hit wonders 3,556 words

How Good Was the WHA: The Blueliners

May 13, 2026 How Good Was the WHA? 4,456 words

It is unfair, and possibly actionable, to accuse me of quietly stealing article ideas from Twitter replies. Oh, no, I loudly and exuberantly steal ideas from Twitter replies; I dive on them with the frenzy of a pitbull given a steak. So when Andrew Cunningham replied to my first post on the WHA's superstars suggesting that J. C. Tremblay was not really regarded as the WHA's best defenseman at all, I at once saw "content."

My opinion didn't come from nowhere: Tremblay held the points record at the position and won two best-defenseman awards. But Mr. Cunningham suggested Barry Long, Kevin Morrison, Paul Shmyr, and Lars-Erik Sjöberg were better-regarded in their day than Tremblay. Sjöberg and Shmyr were each named defender of the year once, Long and Morrison were not. Tremblay and Morrison were at their best in the WHA's earlier seasons; Sjöberg arrived and (apart from one fluke) Long peaked later, and Shmyr was outstanding throughout. Shmyr and Long had decent NHL careers apart from their WHA accomplishments, Tremblay was of course an All-Star, and Morrison and Sjöberg were in the NHL very briefly. Moreover, though Shmyr and Sjöberg were familiar names, Morrison I knew only from a few stories and Long not at all. They were all serious blueliners in the league and anybody who is quoting World Hockey Association facts from personal memory is a jewel to be cherished in 2026; I certainly couldn't say he is right or wrong.

After all, such personal memories are the stuff history is made of. Statistics are great to fill in the gaps, but they don't nearly tell everything. The World Hockey Association was, as we have now thoroughly established, major league hockey; yet it is major league hockey which is fading from memory without actually being nearly gone. Grabbing these stray 140-character thoughts, filling them with data, and transforming that into perspective is one of the great joys of life.

May 13, 2026 How Good Was the WHA? 4,456 words

The NHL’s Great Pests Were Underrated

May 6, 2026 Underrated players 3,431 words

I'm trying to post every week for a few months, and sometimes you're going to get one that's mailed right in, in an envelope that smells a bit like Blue Buck. You get what you pay for.

Last week I made a throwaway remark about how good a player Ken Linseman was. For the under-35s, Linseman was ubiquitously known as "the Rat" and that's about all you need. He was an incredible player, for a certain meaning of "incredible," all filthy stickwork and imaginative torments, every shift, nineteen minutes a night, seventy games a year. When he finally said just the wrong thing, and you turned on him with your glove slipping off your hand, then unless you were 6'0" and didn't fight much it was not Ken Linseman waiting at all but somehow Dave Semenko or Jay Miller or some other cement-handed ruffian. Oopsie-poopsie.

The man even skated like a deadbeat, trundling along in an Aqualung hunch; his teams should have issued him a trenchcoat. He played hard, he goaded hard, his very face was infuriating, and he was never happier than when he agitated you into a mistake that his team could exploit. He wore #13 in Edmonton and Boston. Even playing alumni games he somehow managed to show up with the most ridiculous swimming-goggles glasses you've ever seen like his very aging process was goading the opposition to take an unwise swing at the Rat. He knew exactly what he was. Linseman was also, incidentally, by all accounts a boisterous but solid human being, and a really good hockey player. In Edmonton he was obviously a cut below the really great players, but still an awfully good second-liner because the first-line centre spot was just plain off limits, and in Boston Cam Neely was definitely his superior, but from the scoring record Linseman was a solid, solid first-line centre for decent teams. No sport other than hockey could produce a player like Ken Linseman. He was an astonishing specimen.

May 6, 2026 Underrated players 3,431 words

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