Michel Goulet Swatch Card

Wayne Gretzky doesn't own all the NHL offensive records; he doesn't even own all goal-scoring records. As a matter of fact, as far as single-season game-winning goals, Gretzky's best season (1981-82) ties for 12th (with the fifth-highest total), with 12.

Russian scoring machine Alex Ovechkin hit 11 three times: in 2007-08, 2010-11 and 2014-15.

The leader this season, with some 25 games (seven weeks) remaining in the schedule, is Colorado Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog, with 9.

The player with the most pro rated to the fewest games played is Conney Weiland, who scored 14 in just 44 games with the Boston Bruins in 1929-30; as a matter of fact, he had 43 goals and 30 assists for 73 points that year, 12 ahead of teammate Dit Clapper. The Bs led the league with a 38-5-1 record but failed to defend their Stanley Cup Champion title, losing to the Montréal Canadiens in a three-game sweep.

However, only two players share the distinction of having scored 16 game-winners in the same season: Phil Esposito did it twice with Boston (1970-71 and 1971-72), and Michel Goulet with the Québec Nordiques in 1983-84.

This card pays tribute to that achievement:

That's card #RA-MGO from Panini's 2013-14 Crown Royale set and Regal Achievements sub-set; it features a white game-worn jersey swatch and the artistic rendition depicts him wearing the Nordiques' blue (away) uniform.

I got it in a trade in exchange for three or four "regular" Crown Royale jersey cards.

Michel Goulet Jersey Card

Happy New Year!

Usually, people like to start things off by looking forward, with New Year's Resolutions and such, but I'd like to go back to my childhood, to rooting for the Québec Nordiques, to owning white Wayne Gretzky-model red-lettered Titan sticks and blue Jofa helmets, to spending winter playing on outdoors rinks as a forward and playing indoors with my official teams as a goalie.

To the innocence of dreaming of better days ahead. To not realizing the importance and omnipresence of war, greed and corruption. To not having lost my job as translator and marketing analyst effective February 17th, six weeks from now.

And I do this with card #GJ-GO from Upper Deck's 2014-15 Series 1 set and UD Game Jersey sub-set, featuring Michel Goulet wearing the Nordiques' classic blue (away) uniform:

It features a white game-worn jersey swatch with hints of blue thread.

White, like snow. Like a clean slate. Like a blank page.

I hope everyone who had a bad 2016 gets to start anew, and those who ended it on a high note to use it as a springboard to even better things. I wish you all health, happiness and success.

Michel Goulet: 5 Autographed Cards (Part 1)

I'd been meaning to write to Michel Goulet for so long, first when he was an assistant general manager with the Colorado Avalanche, and more recently as a scout for the Calgary Flames. I finally did, this season, sending him a fan letter and these five cards (care of the Flames) on March 24th, 2014, and receiving them all back, signed in blue sharpie, on August 26th, 2014 - a 154-day return:

Ironically, I waited until this season to send, and I pulled a couple of inserts of him throughout the season, so you'll likely be seeing more of him before year's end.

I was happy to get two more cards of him with the Québec Nordiques, the team he helped define in the 1980s with Dale Hunter and Peter Stastny, Anton Stastny and Marian Stastny; he had eight straight 30-goal seasons, with four straight 50-goal seasons in the middle of those; his 121 points in 1983-84 was a record for a left winger at the time and was the second of four times he's surpass the 100-point mark. He was in the league's top-10 for points three times and made the end-of-the-year All-Star teams five times. He garnered top-10 Selke and Hart votes twice each.

The card on the left is from Topps' 1983-84 O-Pee-Chee set (card #292), while the one on the right is from Topps' 1988-89 Topps set, and is #7 in its NHL All-Star sticker sub-set.

                                (continued in the following post)

Michel Goulet: 5 Autographed Cards (Part 2)

                        (continued from the previous post)

He had 456 goals and 945 points (in 813 games) with the Québec Nordiques alone, numbers likely to have gotten him in the Hall Of Fame by themselves, but factor in the other 207 in 276 games with the Chicago Blackhawks for a grand total of 1152 points in 1089 regular-season NHL games and he was a shoe-in as one of the greatest of all time.

I was happy to get him to sign some cards of himself with Chicago, as my only previous collectible of him as a Hawk was this jersey card. It's a bit weird that one of the cards doesn't picture him with his signature mustache (he shaved it off in what became his final season):

All three cards show him wearing the team's red (away) uniform. On the left is card #430 from Pro Set's 1990-91 Series 2 collection; in the middle is card #50 from Pro Set's 1991-92 Series 1 set (the French Canadian Version); and the card at the right is from Leaf's 1993-94 Series 2 set (card #373).

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.

Michel Goulet Jersey Card

Oh, how I wish this were a Québec Nordiques card!

Michel Goulet... the Péribonka (a small village of 500 near Lac St-Jean, Qc) native made quite a name for himself in the 1980s, playing alongside the Stastny brothers - four straight 50-goal seasons, followed by two of 49 and 48, four 100-point seasons and two more with over 90 - he was a force to be reckoned with for my favourite team growing up.

And, sure, by the end of the 80s, his point production was down a bit, and the team was losing a little too regularly, but he was still almost a point-per-game player in his last season in Québec (45 points in 57 games, following a 64 point/69 game season) when he was traded to the Chicago Blackhawks with Greg Millen for three guys who never really made an impact with their new team - Daniel Vincelette, Mario Doyon, and Everett Sanipass. Oh, what a terrible trade!

It was while in Chicago that he made it to the Stanley Cup Finals - losing to the repeat champions Pittsburgh Penguins in four straight games - with a team that also included superstars Chris Chelios, Ed Belfour, Steve Larmer, Jeremy Roenick (who infamously said, after his team lost the last game, ''that's fine, I'm still young, I'll win it someday''), Brent Sutter, Steve Smith, Dominik Hasek, Jimmy Waite, and one of my favourite perennially-forgotten players, Rob Brown.

Unfortunately, Goulet's career was cut short on March 16th, 1994, at the Montréal Forum, where he'd played in so many epic games as a Nordique. Sensing the end was near, knowing it would be one of the last times he would make that trip since he only had 'a few more' years left, he asked for the team's permission to have his wife fly aboard the team plane so she could see him play at the Colisée de Québec and Forum and visit friends and family - the first time he ever made such a demand - and the team agreed. It was in front of his wife that a freak accident occurred, during which he fell to the ice, unaided by either teammates or opponents, for no apparent reason, and slid head-first into the end boards; the play was continuing, but (Canadiens' goalie) Patrick Roy, in a moment of great humanity and fair-play, held his arms in the air and screamed at the referees to get their attention and got them to stop the play. He laid on the ice for several minutes before he could be taken away on a stretcher, in a coma.

He awoke from his coma 45 minutes later, in the ambulance, and his first reflex was to ask the medics if they could drive him back so he could finish the game. He would never suit up in an NHL game, a victim of post-concussion syndrome and post-trauma symptoms.

A year to the day after the accident, the Nordiques retired his #16 jersey. He was named to the Hockey Hall Of Fame in 1998, sandwiched between two Stanley Cups (1996 and 2001) won as the Colorado Avalanche (the team the Nordiques became when they moved to Colorado in 1995) director of player personnel. He has since graduated to assistant general manager.

This card, even if it depicts him wearing the Blackhawks' red jersey, sports an awkward white patch with red stains that look a bit like washed-out blood. It's a little creepy, and I hope it isn't from his last game. It is a 2001-02 Fleer Legacy card by Fleer (at the time manufactured by Skybox), the Tailor Made sub-set (the third player of only eight to have jersey cards in this sub-set, the others being Dino Ciccarelli, Tony Esposito, Guy Lafleur, Denis Savard, Larry Robinson, Mario Lemieux and Borje Salming).