Mario Gosselin: Two Autographed Cards

As a kid, my first "full-on" contact with hockey - apart from the occasional Saturday night game on TV at a relative's or getting up at 4 AM for mandatory practice at ages 3-4 was the 1986 Stanley Cup Final. Watching Patrick Roy play so well that to this day folks still refer to him as having single-handedly stolen the Cup despite playing on a team stacked with Hall of Famers made me want to take up the sport again after quitting it abruptly - between the pipes, to boot.

But Roy's impact was so huge that in the time of just one summer, seemingly my entire elementary school went from wearing "normal" clothes to Montréal Canadiens attire and jerseys kind of made it uncool for me to follow suit - I was more of an independent spirit, a rebel, even at eight years old - that I still kept Roy as my favourite player and single greatest influence, but my allegiance switched to his hometown team, the Québec Nordiques, who also had a goalie who wore #33: Mario Gosselin.

While Gosselin was a star in Juniors (literally a First Team All-Star in the LHJMQ), and an Olympian with Team Canada at the 1984 Sarajevo Games, that is pretty much where the comparisons with Roy stop; Gosselin was, for a time, one of the best back-ups in the league, but his one season as a starter was the first of many terrible years for the Nordiques - the first time in eight seasons the club missed the playoffs. Roy was winning Vezinas and Jennings trophies in the meantime.

As the Nordiques went through a rough rebuild, they traded away such legends as Peter Stastny and Michel Goulet to make room for the next guard; Gosselin was part of the purge. He would move on with the Wayne Gretzky-led Los Angeles Kings, earning his first win in his first game, which happened to be the one where Gretzky tied and beat Gordie Howe's 1850 career points record, scoring the overtime winner in a 7-6 contest.Gosselin also managed to lose a game that season without even having surrendered a goal, as starting goalie Kelly Hrudey had been taken out of the game and Gosselin himself pulled for an extra skater, except the Edmonton Oilers scored what ended up being the winning goal while he was on the bench (the Kings scored another one to get within one, but couldn't tie the game).

After stints in minor leagues with the Phoenix Roadrunners and Springfield Indians, Gosselin got another chance in the NHL, this time with the Hartford Whalers, a team he'd beaten in two playoff series while playing for Québec. It was the Sean Burke/Frank Pietrangelo era in Hartford, however, and Gosselin was relegated to third-string duties.

Still, he'll always be one of the proud bearers of #33 in my Nation's Capital, as can be attested by these two cards, showing him wearing the Nordiques blue (away) uniform, possibly my favourite hockey jersey of all time:

The card on the left is #250 from O-Pee-Chee's 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee set, while the one on the right is #173 from OPC's1988-89 O-Pee-Chee collection. He signed both for me in black sharpie in the 1990s, when he was just contemplating opening a hockey school (he runs it now, pretty much as a part-time job) and I was finding my own game, navigating through Juniors and national team programs.

Gaston Gingras Autographed Card

What a weird season for St. Louis Blues fans... but totally in line with what a Bob Gainey-led organization - he's currently a "special advisor to GM Doug Armstrong", his protégé from their Dallas Stars days - feels like, as many of the moves and results are reminiscent of his time as Montréal Canadiens General Manager...

First, anointing a #1 goalie without competition too early is one of his signature moves, one he pulled with Carey Price six years too early, trading a staggering number of #1 goalies to make room for him, among which Vezina and Hart winner José Theodore, David Aebischer, Crozier winner Cristobal Huet, and of course playoff wunderkind Jaroslav Halak. Then came appointing no-threat backups, such as Peter Budaj, who just spent two full seasons in the AHL (although, to be honest, I would have put him in this year's All-Star Game).

To make room for Jake Allen to star in net, the Blues first got rid of now-Jennings winner Halak themselves, then co-Jennings winner Brian Elliott this summer, to install Carter Hutton as backup, who had one decent season out of the three-or-four he's played in so far.

Another signature Gainey move - and one that is rarer in professional hockey - is to have both the incumbent head coach and his heir behind the same bench, already labeled. With the Habs, upon firing Claude Julien, Gainey installed himself behind the bench to conclude the season, with "best friend" Guy Carbonneau as "associate head coach" to become full-time boss the next year.

In St. Louis, Ken Hitchcock, in the final season of his six-year term with the Blues, had next year's head coach Mike Yeo with him behind the bench. Not having the benefit of also being the team's GM, Hitchcock saw the players respond more to Yeo than himself, leading to his firing today; Armstrong said he had to let his "best friend go"...

Speaking of the stress of being in the final year of a contract, Gainey had no less than 13 skaters become free agents at the end of the 2008-09 season for a total of 22 player changes that summer - and not just bit players, either: out went ten-year captain Saku Koivu, All-Star Game MVP Alex Kovalev, first-liner Alex Tanguay, All-Star defenseman Mike Komisarek, as well as dependable players such as Tom Kostopoulos; in came Mike Cammalleri, Brian Gionta, Travis Moen, and no less than four new defensemen: Hal Gill, Jaroslav Spacek, Paul Mara and Marc-André Bergeron. Oh, and he traded for Scott Gomez...

In St. Louis this year, in addition to Hitchcock, several players are set to turn UFA this summer (Kevin Shattenkirk, Patrik Berglund, Scottie Upshall, Chris Butler) and a few will be RFAs (Nail Yakupov, Robby Fabbri, Colton Parayko, and pretty much everyone on the Chicago Wolves).

Speaking of Shattenkirk, one player he reminds me of is Gaston Gingras; they have similar styles of play, Gingras may have had a better shot and better skating ability and Shattenkirk may be better all-around, more physical and more impactful nowadays because of the way the game is played - which is why the current player is a #3 defender on a top-level team while Gingras was a #5 and powerplay specialist - but both are 40-some point producers while playing a sound game that moves the puck forward.

Here is Gingras, depicted with the Blues, on card #229 from O-Pee-Chee's 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee set, in one of those airbrushed photos they were so fond of:

Back in the day, OPC either airbrushed the player's new uniform on top of an older picture, or they just added "Now with X" in text on the picture when the design was too difficult or the trade/signing came too late in the summer.

Gingras played with Gainey on the Stanley Cup-winning 1986 Habs, with rookie Conn Smythe winner Patrick Roy in nets, which may have skewed his vision of how to deal with starting goalies. Speaking of which, the Blues also fired goaltending coach Jim Corsi, inventor of the Corsi shot-tracking pretend-advanced statistic, who paid for Allen's and Hutton's sub-par season, where they currently stand in 27th position overall. He was replaced by the two-headed monster of Martin Brodeur and Ty Conklin, because what the team needed this year was another scapegoat and another bizarre occurrence.

Oh, and by the way, the Habs had also let go of their goalie coach, Roland Melanson, after Price choked in the 2009 playoffs. Because history loves to repeat itself around Gainey.

Lanny McDonald: 3 Autographed Cards

Lanny McDonald was a legend as much for his on-ice play as for his world-class mustache, bushy and flamy-red. The Toronto Maple Leafs made him the 4th overall pick of the 1973 draft, and he arguably had the best NHL career of anyone else chosen that year apart from 1st pick Denis Potvin. Other 1973 draft alumni include Bob Gainey, Blaine Stoughton, André Savard, Dave Lewis and Rick Middleton.

But like many other former Leafs greats of the 70s and 80s, McDonald was mistreated by management - he was traded to the Colorado Rockies just because he was friends with Darryl Sittler, who had refused to waive his no-trade clause, angering GM Punch Imlach. McDonald and Joel Quenneville went to the Rockies for Wilf Paiement and Pat Hickey, prompting Leaf fans to protest outside Maple Leaf Gardens.

McDonald scored 66 goals in 142 games with the Rockies, split in parts of 3 seasons, before being moved to the Calgary Flames. In his first full season with the team in  1982-83, he scored 66 goals - a team record that still stands today. He captained the team for their lone Stanley Cup win in 1989, the only visiting team to ever win the Cup on the Montréal Canadiens' home turf, the Forum. And he did so in McDonald-esque fashion, having been scratched for 3 games, coming back in the decisive game and scoring the goal that would propel the Flames to victory, breaking a 1-1 tie. A world-class moment from a world-class player.

I sent McDonald these three cards and a fan letter - care of the Flames' alumni - on January 31st, 2012 and got them all back signed in blue sharpie on March 29th, 2012. They all show him wearing the Flames' red (away) uniform. The card on the left is from the 1984-85 Topps set (card #26), that I traded 12 Dave Andreychuk cards to get my hands on; the card in the middle is from Topps' 1988-89 O-Pee-Chee set (card #234), which I've had since I was a kid; and the card on the right is from the 1987-88 Topps set (card #20), a card I had the OPC version of as a kid but traded for its Topps equivalent as a teen because, as a Montrealer, American cards were more rare in my neighbourhood. The latter two not only show his wearing the captain's ''C'', but also a patch on the right shoulder commemorating the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

Stan Smyl: 3 Autographed Cards

Welcome to my childhood! Stan Smyl was already the Vancouver Canucks' captain when I started paying attention to the NHL in the mid-80s. He was viewed as the Canucks' best player for most of his time, and held many team records, most of which have since been surpassed.

Among them: most points in a single season (88), most points in a single month (31), and the career leader in goals, assists and points. The goals and points marks were beaten by both Trevor Linden and Markus Naslund - his successors as captain - while the assists mark has been bested by Henrik Sedin.

Still, as the original Captain Canuck, he wore the classic Canucks uniforms I thought defined the team - I always hated the blue and green ones they brought back from purgatory a couple of years ago:

I barely knew the 'V' jerseys and, quite honestly, I always found them rather repulsive - and the yellow 'home' jersey was the worst of all. I like the black 'V' more than the retro/current/first ones, though. This one is from the 1982-83 O-Pee-Chee set (card #356) by Topps.

These two, however, to me, are the quintessential Canucks uniforms, as well as those I identify with the most from my childhood. The card on the left is from the first set I ever collected seriously, Topps' 1986-87 O-Pee-Chee (card #50), where my parents would let me buy a 35-cents pack of 7 cards for every errand I ran for them at the convenience store. Notice the patch on the jersey - it commemorates the city of Vancouver hosting the World's Fair in 1986. The card on the right is from the 1987-88 Topps set (card #4).

I sent Smyl these three cards and a fan letter care of the Canucks, where he is currently the assistant general manager, on January 27th, 2012, and got them all back signed in a fading black sharpie on February 16th - the same day I got these Guy Lafleur cards.

Stéphane Richer: 4 Autographed Cards

I sent Stéphane Richer these four cards and a fan letter on October 18th, care of the golf club where he's the resident professional, and got 4/4 back today (November 1st), signed in blue sharpie, with his jersey number (#44) added. Less than two weeks, outside of golf season, and with Richer making three public appearances in that span for charity causes. Talk about a quick turnaround!

Stéphane Richer played parts of two seasons of major junior hockey with the Granby Bisons before turning pro, where he would meet a goalie he would see a lot of in the next few years, Patrick Roy. They would make the jump to the AHL together in 1984-85, winning the Calder Cup with the Sherbrooke Canadiens and the Stanley Cup the following season with the Montréal Canadiens. For the next four seasons, the Habs would be contenders for the President' Trophy during the regular season and would make another Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 1989, where they lost to the Calgary Flames.

But my defining ''Richer moment'' came during training camp prior to the 1987-88 season, when he candidly replied to a reporter's question about his objective for the season with these words: ''I'm going to try to score 50 goals''. The nerve, coming off a sophomore season that saw him score 20 (in 57 games), after a 21-goal rookie campaign (in 65 games)! And yet, he was on pace for most of the season, despite missing 8 games to injury, when came the last game of the season - and he was three goals short. Of course, he scored a hat trick, becoming the first player since Guy Lafleur's heyday to score 50 goals in a single season for the Habs, a feat he would repeat - and surpass - two seasons later, when he scored 51.

No other Canadiens player has scored 50 in a single season since. As a matter of fact, only Vincent Damphousse has managed to reach 40, in 1993-94.

After a ''disappointing'' 31-goal season in 1990-91, he was traded to the New Jersey Devils with Tom Chorske for their captain, Kirk Muller, and backup goalie Roland Melanson, a trade that may have benefitted both teams but sent shockwaves in both teams. Richer would win the Cup with the Devils in 1995, while the Habs won it in 1993.

During his first three seasons with the Devils, Richer scored 29, 38 and 36 goals respectively and, considering their style of play, lets one believe he would have scored at least 10 more per season had he played on another team. And as the decade was ending and Réjean Houle took command of the Canadiens, Richer was brought back to bring the team back to to glory with the absence of Roy - a feat which proved impossible to achieve. Midway through the second season of his Second Coming, he was shipped the the Tampa Bay Lightning with Darcy Tucker and David Wilkie in exchange for ''enforcer'' Mick Vukota, Patrick Poulin and Igor Ulanov, ironically weakening the team even more.

It was all downhill from there - both for the Habs and Richer, who disappeared from my radar and went on to play stints with the St. Louis Blues, Pittsburgh Penguins and the Devils again; he even played 2 games with the IHL's Detroit Vipers in 1999-2000. He retired from pro hockey after the 2001-02 season, but briefly made an appearance in semi-pro play in 2004-05 for the Sorel-Tracy Mission, with whom he tallied 2 goals and 6 assists in 8 games while trying not to kill anyone with his world-renowned powerful slap shot.

Blessed with size and strength beyond that of an athlete from his generation, Richer could have been anything he wanted: sure, he had terrific hockey skills, as his exploits will attest to, and he's now a golf pro - but back in his playing days, he was also a heck of a baseball/softball player, which is what he was doing when he was famously quoted as saying, during the 1994-95 lock-out: ''I don't understand why we're not playing hockey. Let's get a deal done and get back on the ice where we belong. We should be playing hockey.'' And that's all he wanted, really: not the cash, not the attention, just to play.

The card on the top-left was the first card I fell on when I opened my first pack of Topps' 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee cards; it's card #233 in the set, and sees him sporting a thin mustache (for the times), while he had cut it off by the time the card on the top-right came out, from the 1989-90 Topps set (card #153). Notice how both cards sport the trademark Topps/OPC ''uneven borders'' where the card isn't centered properly.

The card on the bottom-left is from the 1992-93 Pro Set collection (card #93) and is the only card I own of that year's Pro Set output that isn't a Parkhurst, so I probably traded for it. It has Richer wearing the Devils' old jersey with the green lines and patches on the shoulder, while the card bottom-right has the more modern one where the green has been replaced by black. That one is a thick card with a foil contour from Pinnacle Brands' 1996-97 Pinnacle Summit (card #99); I'd never seen those cards before last year, when I purchased a whole box of them. Notice the Habs' logo on the bottom: he'd been traded back to the Habs that summer for Lyle Odelein.

Michel Goulet: Two Autographed Cards

I already had a post here where I talked about his stats and, mostly, the cause of his retirement, so I won't repeat it in this post, but one thing I really wanted was to have some Michel Goulet memorabilia in his Québec Nordiques uniform.... and now I do.

All it took was a ''home-and-home series'' pitting alumni from the Nordiques versus former Montréal Canadiens players to get a chance to bring old 80s cards and get them signed.

As a kid, I always preferred the underdog Nordiques to my home-town Habs (except for Patrick Roy, of course, my childhood hero), perhaps as a gesture of defiance, or maybe because their jerseys were spectacular (particularly when they added a red contour to their numbers and lettering in the 90s), but for whatever reason, they were my team.

And from the Nordiques, Joe Sakic and Peter Stastny were the definite defining players, but also Mario Gosselin in nets, Jeff Brown at the point, and Goulet, one of the purest goal-scoring machines of the 80s: 4 straight 50-goal seasons, 7 straight 40-or-more-goal seasons, never less than 20 goals in any season except his very last, where he scored 16 but only played in 56 games before a freak injury forced him to retire. A sad exit for one of the defining moustaches of the 80s.

He was kind enough to sign both cards I brought with another fan's blue sharpie. I didn't hang around too long because so many people were there asking for autographs, and I didn't want to hog the place to myself, but I kind of regret not explaining to him why I chose those two specific cards instead of my usual ''one of every uniform'', but I'll do it here.

Firstly, on the right, is a 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee card (#77), its picture taken during a pre-game skate (as was common for cards in the 80s). I particularly like it because his usual afro looks more like a perm, and because I like to be reminded that he wore Jofa equipment - usually worn by European players at the time, whereas North Americans would wear CCM. Also notice the stick he's using: a white Titan with red lettering - it's the Wayne Gretzky model (with fac-simile autograph on it) that so many of us kids in the 80s were using ourselves, until The Great One was traded to Los Angeles and switched to Easton aluminum sticks on the way.

On the left is a 1988-89 Topps card (#54) where he's sporting the usual blue 'away' uniform (again during the pre-game skate, obviously before a game against the Boston Bruins), but on his right arm, on top of his number is a patch for 'Rendez-Vous '87', an international hockey match-up that replaced the All-Star game that year and was held in Québec City (Goulet was on the NHL team that faced the Soviets, with fellow Nordiques Clint Malarchuk and Normand Rochefort). He really seems to be having a blast on this card!

The Topps card is special to me, because those cards were pretty much unavailable in Canada at the time; The Topps Company were releasing O-Pee-Chee in Canada, and Topps in the U.S. - mostly the same set with the same design and pictures and players, only the Topps set usually had much fewer cards, probably because hockey is more of a niche/big market sport in the U.S., while it's the main sport in Canada. I was not aware of this at the time. But when the sports card market exploded in 1990 and a bunch of card shops started opening, some of them imported the Topps cards; for novelty's sake, I often traded an O-Pee-Chee for its Topps twin - even though they were often worth a little less, usually a 10-25% difference - and it's the case here. Fun/fond memories, though.

Brian Hayward Autographed Card

A friend of mine recently suggested that Brian Hayward was to Patrick Roy what Jaroslav Halak is currently to Carey Price... I had to respectfully disagree.

First off, Hayward did, indeed, play half the team's games, but that was mainly so that Roy could save his energy for the playoffs. It helped a lot that Hayward was a pretty good goalie, too, enough to share the Jennings Trophy with Roy for 3 straight seasons while the Habs were challenging for first place overall, but come April, there was no question who'd be in nets, and he would go on to win an unprecedented three Conn Smythe trophies...

Also, Carey Price has not won anything yet at the NHL level and has yet to prove to be able to eventually keep the #1 goalie job to himself; his poor play is also the main reason behind two early playoff exits in two seasons, something you can't pin on Roy.

And, considering the Stanley Cup is the only championship that matters in the NHL and not the regular-season President's Cup, it's when you separate the boys from the men that it really counts; in that regard, even Hayward is ahead of Price, seeing as he was never the reason behind an early exit and has twice been on a Stanley Cup runner-up team: the 1988-89 Montréal Canadiens, and the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars. Sure, he was the back-up both times, but behind a great man is a great replacement waiting to take his place (see: Halak, who played behind Cristobal Huet).

Unfortunately for Hayward, after his decent season in Minnesota, he was claimed by the San Jose Sharks in the weirdest dispersal draft in NHL history, where he had to share duties with future Habs #1 goalie Jeff Hackett on the worst team in the league. His GAA was terrible both years (4.92 and 5.55), as were his win-loss records (1-4-0 for 1991-92, 2-14-1 for 1992-93 - while Roy was winning a second Cup and second Conn Smythe in 3 Finals over 8 seasons).

A terrible way to end a career for an honest player who knew the game better than most - so much so that as soon as he retired, he became a TV colour commentator and game analyst.

This 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee card (the Canadian version of Topps that usually included more cards than its American counterpart, for some reason) was sent and received by mail when Hayward was a correspondent for CBC's Hockey Night In Canada, signed very clearly in black sharpie.