Nitzy's Hockey Den

1973/74 O-Pee-Chee Ring I've been wanting to post this for a while and finally got around to get pics of these beauties from my collection. I've picked these all up over the years at various collectible shows or off the internet. The first one is probably one of my faves, a Maple Leaf cardboard punch-out ring. These were inserted into O-Pee-Chee hockey card packs for the 1973/74 season and were meant to be worn proudly around the schoolyard by the lucky recipient. Thankfully mine is still intact although I am tempted to punch it out, slip it on my finger and wear it to work one day. 1972/73 O-Pee-Chee Logo The year before the ring inserts, O-Pee-Chee began the punch-out collectible fad with these logo cards. Each of teh 16 NHL and 12 WHA teams were depicted. 1973/74 Mac's Milk Cloth Sticker These are part of a 30 card set issued through the NHLPA at Mac's Milk stores in Canada. One would assume that these 3" cloth-textured stickers were meant to festo...

Time for another vintage hockey pack opening. This time it's a pack of 1982/83 O-Pee-Chee that I picked up for three or four bucks. I think I may have got five packs for $15 online a while back. The big ones in this set are the Grant Fuhr, Ron Francis and Dale Hawerchuk rookies worth about $30, $20 and $15 respectively. Let's see what I got. Boom! Doug Smail rookie card right out of the gate. 81/82 was his first full season and he produced 17 goals and 35 points. In 84/85 he topped out at 31 goals and 66 points and went on to play 691 NHL games. His career totals were 189 goals and 397 points. Card is worth a quarter. Ric Seiling and his Great Gazoo helmet were coming off a 22 goal campaign on their way to a 738 game career. Card, a quarter. Hedberg was coming off a season where he played a mere four games in 81/82. After tearing up the WHA with Winnipeg, he and Ulf Nilsson signed with the Rangers in 1978. This year he would pot 25 goals and 59 points and he'...

Here's something really cool. A reader recently contacted me after finding an article I wrote a few years ago about a 1934 Toronto Maple Leafs tour of Western Canada.  (found here)  The Leafs and Detroit Red Wings travelled by train across Canada, playing exhibition matches in Winnipeg on April 14 & 16 and in Trail B.C. on April 18. They then arrived in Vancouver to play a three-game series for something called the Gyro Cup.  The Gyro Club was, and still is a social club throughout North America and it was the Vancouver chapter that hosted the series at Vancouver's Denman Arena. The teams would end up actually splitting the series, each winning a game and tying the third. Every participant in the series was given a Gyro Cup like the one above. The reader (who apparently has quite an extensive collection of hockey memorabilia) acquired this Gyro Cup that was originally presented to Hall of Fame broadcaster Foster Hewitt. A detailed view shows the inscriptions ...

Times have changed. That's about all that can be said about this story I stumbled across in the Montreal Gazette archives. It's the story of nondescript NHLer Rene Boileau, AKA Rainy Drinkwater.  The story goes that the 20-year old Boileau was signed midway through the 1925/26 season, the New York Americans inaugural campaign in the NHL by manager Tommy Gorman. It was either an Americans team publicist or owner Thomas Duggan himself who came up with a fantastic backstory for the young Montrealer. As written in the Gazette fifteen years after the fact, the story fed to the New York media went; "The Americans have signed Chief Drinkwater, a full-blooded Indian from the Caughnawaga Reserve. From the shores of Lake St. Louis, where his forebearers have resided for centuries, to the mad swirl of New York comes Rainy Drinkwater, to play hockey for the New York Americans. Drinkwater, who's real name was Rain-in-the-Face but was called Rainy for short, had resided in a ...

A while back I bought a few unopened packs of hockey cards from the era of my childhood. I'll  do a few posts of what I find inside over the next while. This 1980/81 Topps pack I got for $15 Canadian on eBay. Growing up in Canada,  I of course collected the O-Pee-Chee version of this release, not Topps. The Topps had a strange scratch-off over the player's name on the front of the card and was also a smaller set than its Canadian counterpart (264 cards to 396). Due to the smaller set, Topps misses out on the Mark Messier Rookie card but still has a the Ray Bourque Rookie and Wayne Gretzky Second year issues. Below are the cards in order from the pack I opened. Borje Salming First out of the pack, Maple Leafs Hall of Fame defender Borje Salming. He also has an All-Star card in this year's set, gaining a 2nd Team berth even though he finished second to Larry Robinson in Norris Trophy voting. After collecting 71 points in 79/80 he barely lost the 1st Team nod to roo...