Time to Kill Now

I have to imagine no rule so obvious has had so much ink spilled over it as the icing rule. Touch, no touch, or hybrid? How hard can you play the body trying to make or beat out an icing call? Should you be able to ice the puck on the penalty kill? If your goalie is out and you ice the puck, where's the faceoff? It has sure taken a lot of thought to get to the form we have today.

In order to be quibbled over, the rule had to be invented. That came surprisingly late in the day: before the 1937–38 season, Boston Bruins supremo Art Ross got the icing rule into the books alongside other familiar, and controversial, rules: consequences for firing the puck over the boards, a faceoff if the goalie ties the puck up along the boards (now sadly practically obsolete), a penalty shot for a skater deliberately covering the puck near the goal, and so on. It was part of a Depression-era effort to speed up play and increase scoring, and therefore excitement, at a time when the very league was holding on for dear life.

You probably know that, and you may have heard of the infamous game in which the Bruins "iced the puck" nearly 90 times, resulting in a borderline-inevitable 0-0 tie. What you may not know is that infamous game was on January 3, 1932. Over five years passed between the nadir of the no-icing era and the first flash of what became the icing rule, and we don't really know why.

Punch Imlach must be the worst great coach in hockey history—or the greatest terrible coach. Good luck picking. We associate him with surliness and victory, and Dave Keon could tell you how well Punch played the "ruthless win-at-all-costs loyalty-free bastard" game, but Imlach also drove Frank Mahovlich out of town when he was one of the best forwards in hockey, convinced prime Carl Brewer to return to amateur hockey, and gave up on enough talent that the Leafs could have been the Habs. He built the second-best of the 1960s expansion teams, the Buffalo Sabres, but the difference between second and first was a long way. As surely as Imlach whiped the last championship Toronto Maple Leafs across the line, he also set the tone for the great underachieving Leafs of three generations: teams which knew better than to give their best because whatever they did, the cobra could turn and strike. Teams with plenty of money and talent and an underlying suspicion, so long as you punched problems like Tie Domi or did not presume to be too talented, this was a pretty soft gig.

Some men make hard, unpopular decisions because they would rather win than play favourites. Punch Imlach was not that man. Few were more passionate than Punch Imlach, and few held to their favourites with more tenacity. The number of miles he tried to ride out of Dick Duff, Eddie Shack, or Floyd Smith long after it was time to put them down blows the mind. He took those guys to the Sabres and it didn't work, except for the troublesome fact that it kind of did: it was a team that could never win a title but was, for a hot minute, better than it had any right to be. And the Leafs? So what if Johnny Bower was 75 years old and had pleurisy; he led the league in save percentage three times in his forties. Tim Horton got his license in a Model T, and Allan Stanley was somehow older, and unbelievably it worked exactly well enough.

And he won. He won in the Original Six, but they don't repossess the pennants just because 26 more teams came later. He won more than any other coach of his era who wasn't Toe Blake, and the Habs were almost a special case. You couldn't exactly say he won in Buffalo, but he definitely did not bad. He is the best Leafs' coach since the Second World War and maybe the best Sabres coach ever. Everyone blames Harold Ballard for what happened in Toronto, but old Harold's been dead for almost 40 years and his idea of hockey looks a lot like Punch Imlach's. Some people, even when they seem to know everything about the game, can't get teams to win, and some, even when they seem insane, overachieve for longer than seems possible.