On one hand, it was an era of some of the greatest players ever, hockey at its highest caliber in the eyes of some, fewer team and players to be moved around.
On the other side, it heavily lacked parity- other than the 1961 Blackhawks, 24 of the 25 Cups were won by Detroit, Montreal, or Toronto.
Also, a lot of Cup runs on that eras were in clusters- Toronto's two Cup threepeats, Montreal's five in a row, Detroit's 4 in 6 years. The 1961 Blackhawks and the 5 Cups Detroit won notwithstanding, Montreal or Toronto won 19 of a possible 25 Cups, and from 1956-1969, Chicago was the only year in which the Cup did not leave Canadian soil. (We talk about how Canada's been Cupless since '93- we forget how there was a stretch throughout the 1960s and the 1980's after the Islander dynasty where the Cup never left Canada save for Pittsburgh's repeat years.)
On the other side, it heavily lacked parity- other than the 1961 Blackhawks, 24 of the 25 Cups were won by Detroit, Montreal, or Toronto.
Well, there were only 6 teams and 3 out of them won the Cup multiple times? Today's NHL can only dream of a state of parity where 50% of the franchises are serious contenders.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SomerHimpson
Also, a lot of Cup runs on that eras were in clusters
The "Golden Era" isn't just in hockey in the 1940s/1950s. It spills over into everything. Hollywood has always considered the 1940s to be the golden era. Baseball has always had the 1940s as that as well. Probably because of the rivalry between DiMaggio and Williams and then Mantle and those great Yankee teams in the 1950s. Not to mention the Giants and Dodgers all in New York. I always think of the Golden Era to be a more simpler time. No reporter ever wrote about how often Mickey Mantle was cheating on his wife. They tried to make the athletes more heroic and focused more on the on field play.
Same with hockey. When we look back at it now, the Habs played in the Forum, the Leafs played in MLG, the Red Wings played in the Olympia, Chicago in the old Chicago Stadium, Boston in the old Boston Garden and the Rangers in MSG. It was the high water time for classic arenas. These were stadiums which had character which the ones today cannot match. It was also very hard to crack an NHL roster with only 6 teams.
1) I don't associate the concept of a "golden age" with any specific decade or time period. I think of it more in terms of what is happening in any particular field or endeavor. The golden age of pro football might be the late 1960s and on into the '70s, when the merger of the NFL and AFL led to the birth of the Super Bowl and the sport catapulting past baseball, boxing, and college football to become America's most popular spectator sport. The NBA's golden age would be the '80s, when the charisma of Magic, Bird, and MJ took pro basketball to unprecedented levels of popularity.
2) The viewpoint of sports league being in a golden age of "higher talent" before the dilution of expansion is a complicated one. On one hand, you have people who insist how much higher the caliber of hockey was before 1967 or baseball before 1961, when athletes fought for fewer available roster spots. But on the other hand, you have fans who point out that these sports in the pre-expansion era drew from a smaller talent pool compared to today. For instance, there are many more Asians, Latinos, and Blacks playing baseball compared to yesteryear. Pre-1967 NHL didn't have much in the way of European talent.
I think what fascinates me about the Original Six era is the recognizable nature of it. You played every team so much, all the guys must have been so familiar to you. It's like a permanent grudge match and pretty much every team will have at least one Hall of Famer on the roster - usually more. Seeing Howe, Lindsay and Co. going against Rocket Richard, Boom Boom Geoffrion and Co. at least 14 times a year must have been pretty intense.
Nowadays, I like games against division opponents most and least. Most because as you get to know teams and their tendencies, the different types of guys on the teams, you appreciate the game more, you see the essence of the game more clearly. And least? Because you also learn to hate their guys, their fans, their arenas, their goal songs (Chelsea Dagger makes me wanna kill), so you hate losing to them.
Now the Original Six I imagine all of that magnified times one hundred and that must have been amazing.
The "Golden Age" is whatever period of hockey you lived through as a child and teenager....
Yep, its the 60s.
Also, in the original 6, winning the regular season championship was held on a par with winning the Stanley Cup. I know the Bruins would sellout pretty much every game despite being the worst team in the league in the early 60s, so the game itself was selling. And the Celtics, who basically won every year, only sold out for games against top teams or doubleheaders.
The Golden Age for baseball has always been considered the 60's. From early in its history to 1947, the game was a white only sport. By the 60's, black players had secured numerous playing positions and were excelling in those positions. However, it was not until the 70's when the first black manager was hired and until the 90's when blacks began to work in MLB offices.
I believe hockey has considered it's Golden Age to be the 60's as well. I think they should change it to the 80's-90's when the European/Russian players began to establish themselves in the league. The Original 6 era was a very arrogant time in NHL history. Many of the owners refused to allow expansion and in turn kept the league a paltry 6 teams when there could have been many more. The owners did this primarily out of fear. They also treated their players like dirt. For that matter, the Golden Age of hockey may have began with Bobby Hull jumping to the WHA. Hull's move gave every player the bargaining power they did not have before, which in turn, resulted in them getting a bigger piece of the pie the owners controlled for so long. Perhaps the icing on the cake of this Golden Age was the aftermath of Net Worth when former players sued the NHL and won.
If Hollywood considers their Golden Age to be the 40's, they should reconsider. Correct me if I'm wrong but most black actors played the roles of servants, porters and labourers prior to and during this era. I don't know the exact date when black actors began to secure more prominent roles, but I would assume it coincides with Robinson breaking the color barrier.
The nostalgia for the original six is based more on the dominance of the Habs and Leafs in those years than on any yardstick of truly outstanding play.
The NHL in the original six days was a marginal novelty limited to central Canada and the north eastern United States. It was run by a collection of lunkheads who were uninterested in improving their product or trying to expand their reach. Four of the six teams were effectively controlled or influenced by the Norris family.
It's no surprise that the Leafs, Habs and Red Wings won the cups through that era - they were the only teams really trying.
It's too bad the Western Hockey League didn't become a major league in the early 1960s. A rival league in a number of solid expansion markets might have jolted the NHL ownership out of its slumber and created an alternative for fans of the game, not fans of the NHL.
The "Golden Age" is an arbitrary concept. I'd argue there is no "Golden Age"; we as humans are very prone to selective memory and nostelgia.
There is nothing about the Original 6 that makes it innately better than any other time period.
As others mentioned, I don't exactly what comprises a 'Golden Age'. But to me, it's got to be late 70's/early 80s'. You have great, generational talents (Lafleur, Gretzky, Bossy), dynasties (Canadiens, Islanders, Oilers), young teams coming of age (Islanders, Oilers), awesome uniforms (how about those Canucks!), and my personal favourite, old-school goalie masks.
I'd give my left nut to be able to watch games from that era in HD.
Golden age of hockey to me means:
1) 70s/early80s - Summit series, dynasties, Miracle on Ice; Canada Cup; really strong non-NHL hockey (Czechoslovakia on its best, Soviets..) which competed a lot against NHL and it meant something back in the time...
2) about 1990 - 1998; Iron Courtain fell, the talent level was high, hockey grew like never before with its high on Tournament of the century in Nagano...
Those are two golden ages for me, first was probably the true golden age, second I was able to follow.
The Original 6 era was a very arrogant time in NHL history. Many of the owners refused to allow expansion and in turn kept the league a paltry 6 teams when there could have been many more. The owners did this primarily out of fear.
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Originally Posted by doug hamilton
The nostalgia for the original six is based more on the dominance of the Habs and Leafs in those years than on any yardstick of truly outstanding play.
The NHL in the original six days was a marginal novelty limited to central Canada and the north eastern United States. It was run by a collection of lunkheads who were uninterested in improving their product or trying to expand their reach.
Agreed with both those sentiments.
What really exposes the Original Six's emperor's clothing, as it were, was the '72 Summit Series. Only 5 years removed from that so-called golden age of hockey, the world witnessed Canada's creme de la creme come perilously close to being defeated by the Soviets. Subsequent Super Series competitions involving individual NHL teams (not all-star squads hastily thrown together) being defeated with overwhelming regularity by visiting USSR club teams completed the eclipse. It wasn't until the post-Iron Curtain era that the NHL could rightfully reclaim its on-ice product as truly being the world's best.
I don't know if many people view it through the lens of racial/ethnic issues or even less so player representation. I know I don't.
I don't know either. My point is that we should. A "Golden" age should not be a time when players were being used and abused and races were excluded. It should be a time when everyone has the benefits of inclusion, opportunity and fairness.
The "Golden Era" isn't just in hockey in the 1940s/1950s. It spills over into everything. Hollywood has always considered the 1940s to be the golden era. Baseball has always had the 1940s as that as well. Probably because of the rivalry between DiMaggio and Williams and then Mantle and those great Yankee teams in the 1950s. Not to mention the Giants and Dodgers all in New York. I always think of the Golden Era to be a more simpler time. No reporter ever wrote about how often Mickey Mantle was cheating on his wife. They tried to make the athletes more heroic and focused more on the on field play.
Same with hockey. When we look back at it now, the Habs played in the Forum, the Leafs played in MLG, the Red Wings played in the Olympia, Chicago in the old Chicago Stadium, Boston in the old Boston Garden and the Rangers in MSG. It was the high water time for classic arenas. These were stadiums which had character which the ones today cannot match. It was also very hard to crack an NHL roster with only 6 teams.
So yeah, golden era? Sure, I think so.
Maybe it's an age thing as I'm in my 40's but this sounds like nostaglia gone mad.
Sure all those things you listed where great but it wasn't so great if you were a black athelite (or person) with all the discrimination going on nevermind that a guy could lay into his wife and the cops would just shrug and say "it's a domsetic thing."
I grew up in a pretty liberal city in the 70's and there were still shades of this kind of stuff going on, god only knows how bad it was in other places.
Every era has it postive and negative sides to it.
About your childhood era always being the best, my childhood era were the 80s and I don't have that high an opinion of 80s hockey, in fact I'd take the Original Six era over it, the 70s and the 90s too.
I also don't necessarily think the term "golden age" is ever meant to say that the best hockey was being played, it's more refering to the atmosphere and importance of it, i.e. how it "felt". In America there's always going to be a "pre-Vietnam" and "pre-Watergate" element to it as well.
The late 60s represent a massive schism in American cultural history, the Vietnam War, counter-culture, the cultural changes on sex, the riots, the increase in crime. America had seen an unprecedent growth in prosperity and quality of life from the end of the war through the 60s. The 70s and the oil shock ended that, too. You had Watergate undermine the trust of people in the American system. Kent State, Sharon Tate's murder, Altamont, the Weather Underground. Seminal events in American cultural history. The years between 1967 and 1976 marked the end of old America in many ways. The development was mirrored in many other Western nations. Europe saw events like the Paris student riots in 68, the rise of domestic communist terrorist groups, the Prague Spring and its eventual suppression by the Red Army, the Munich terror attack in 72, airline hijackings.
For a significant % of people alive then, it marked a significant turn for the worse. A lot of times people look at pop culture too, how the happy 'wholesome' pop of the early to mid 60s gave way to highly divisive political music, drug-fuelled experimentation etc.
In terms of Hollywood, the movie "Bonnie and Clyde" from 1967 is often seen as a turning point as it romanticized and sexualized crime in ways American moviegoers hadn't exactly been used to.
Sports to some extent was part of that, too, I am not sure it was ever as visible in hockey except that the crew cuts of the Original Six gave way to long, flowing manes in the 70s. The escalation of violence post-expansion probably was perceived by some as an outgrowth of the general social disorder, but then some very old-timey people really enjoyed it too.
I think your perspective on the Original Six era will in many ways be colored whether you view America (and Canada) better places after the turmoil of the late 60s/early 70s or worse places. Whether you look at the time between 1945 and 1965 as a time of growing wealth and generally a less troubled and safer time or think of it more through the lens of segregation, women being less involved in the workplace etc.
On one hand, it was an era of some of the greatest players ever, hockey at its highest caliber in the eyes of some, fewer team and players to be moved around.
On the other side, it heavily lacked parity- other than the 1961 Blackhawks, 24 of the 25 Cups were won by Detroit, Montreal, or Toronto.
Also, a lot of Cup runs on that eras were in clusters- Toronto's two Cup threepeats, Montreal's five in a row, Detroit's 4 in 6 years. The 1961 Blackhawks and the 5 Cups Detroit won notwithstanding, Montreal or Toronto won 19 of a possible 25 Cups, and from 1956-1969, Chicago was the only year in which the Cup did not leave Canadian soil. (We talk about how Canada's been Cupless since '93- we forget how there was a stretch throughout the 1960s and the 1980's after the Islander dynasty where the Cup never left Canada save for Pittsburgh's repeat years.)
Hockey's "Golden Age" is the era each person grew up in.
I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, to me that is hockey's golden age. To my dad it was the original six. To some of the young uns around here it was the 90s (makes me shudder) or 2000s.
Hockey's "Golden Age" is the period when you fell in love with the game and NHL stars were larger than life heroes that made a permanent impact on your soul.
I'm always disappointed after watching a game from the 70s and back. Of course there are exceptions but overall the quality of the game was bad. The 80s and forward has been great except the dead puck era. The best hockey I have seen is now so maybe its my golden era
Arguably it goes from the best (high-scoring) to the worst (post-lockout).
How on earth can you argue that the post-lockout is worst? Because scoring is down? And you don't like that every team has fast players, solid tactics and good core skills?
Another thing and this is a big reason why baseball is such a nostalgic game. The era up to the mid 60s was also the last hooray for old Main Street urban America. The last time that a lot of fans could walk or take the streetcar to the arena/stadium.
Many of the parents of today's fans still lived in urban neighborhoods not too far from the sports venues and the streets around the sports venues had taverns and stores.
It's a particularly poignant moment in Detroit where 1967 didn't just mark expansion but also the riots which gave the final push to many Detroiters to move to the suburbs. The riots occurred about a mile from the old Olympia where the Wings played at the time. For Detroit the Original Six era was simultaneously also the last "golden age" of the city.
