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It's clear: The Fog belongs in the Hall |
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In a column published this weekend, the New York Post's Larry Brooks took the Hockey Hall of Fame to task for enshrining Jim Gregory as a builder while once again excluding the late Fred Shero.
I won't knock Gregory or his worthiness. But I will absolutely echo Brooks' support of "The Fog."
Where Fred Shero is concerned, it's sometimes hard to separate myth from reality. As enigmatic and complex as he was, it's undeniable that he was a man ahead of his time.
To this day, Shero gets blamed for the thuggish image of the NHL -- and especially the Flyers -- in the 1970s and some have gone so far as to say Philadelphia's two Stanley Cup victories were somehow tainted because of it. There is also an image of Shero being this sort of bizarre, bumbling drunk who's players essentially coached themselves.
Those views are both unfair and distorted. There was a lot more to Shero than the Broad Street Bullies, cryptic blackboard messages and wandering town at odd hours.
When you go back and and look at the Broad Street Bullies teams, you find a team that many coach could have made into a contender. But it took a special coach in Shero to craft them into champions.
How did Shero lead the Flyers to becoming the first expansion team to win the Cup and, for a three-year period, the hardest team in the world to play against?
He did it by taking a talented core of five or six forwards, a great goaltender, a solid (but largely immobile) blueline and a collection of role players and gave everyone a well-defined role suited to their abilities. Sometimes the role was obvious, sometimes it took several seasons to emerge, but everyone did something that advanced the team's gameplan.
Internally, his brilliance lay in making every player believe their role was equally important to the team as the star players. He kept everyone focused on winning. Externally, he manipulated other teams (and the media) to get distracted by the team's rough-and-tumble image, rather than worrying about its skill. As a result, the Flyers skill group had a decided edge.
Countless coaches have preached the idea that every player is equally important to the team. The difference is that Shero actually had his players believing it. The coach acted like Bob Kelly's seven minutes on the ice were just as important as Bobby Clarke's 25 minutes, and the Philadelphia players bought into it.
One thing most everyone on the team did, without question, was come to the aid of his teammates. When you look over the Flyers roster from the Cup teams, there really were NOT many players who individually could be called enforcers or goons.
Rather, the Flyers exhibited team toughness. As a collective unit, the Flyers made life miserable for opponents. They initiated contact and they had each other's backs.
Why, exactly, should that be a demerit for Shero? For generations before and since, coaches have aspired to create that type of unity among their players. It's very, very hard to convince players to put egos, jealously and self-interest aside. It's not that those things didn't exist on Shero's Flyers. But the results on the ice spoke for themselves, and no one wanted to let Shero down.
Individually, how many of the Flyers Cup team players were truly "goons," at least in comparison to contemporary players on any team in that era? Not many. There was Dave Schultz and, on a lesser basis, Moose Dupont.
Look at the Flyers' rosters from their two Cup teams. Here's what you'll find: Three Hall of Famers (Bobby Clarke, Bernie Parent, Bill Barber), three frequent all-star caliber players (Rick MacLeish, Jimmy Watson and, from the second Cup, Reggie Leach) and a bunch of role players.
Schultz was so over-the-top and given to showmanship that he would have made a good pro wrestling heel. Schultz fought with his fists taped and, at times, pulled hair, headbutted and in general, used any means necessary to win a fight.
Besides, how could people NOT have their eyes on him as held his nose to show the refs and opposing fans that he thought they stunk? Schultz loved being the villain on the road and the hero at home.
Schultz's showmanship and stratospheric penalty minute totals led opposing teams(and the media) to focused more on him than the Flyers team as a whole. For several years, the Flyers benefitted as result.
Defenseman Dupont was volatile and sometimes fit the same sort of description as Schultz. He was definitely a colorful character. There were times Dupont crossed the line and times he stirred up trouble simply for the sake of doing it.
But who else, in the grand scheme of things, regularly played like a "goon"?
Bob Kelly? The Hound had exactly one career season where he topped 200 penalty minutes (his second-highest total was 157 with Washington late in his career). He never played a single game in the minors and had a pair of 20-goal seasons. Bottom line was that Kelly, who hit everything that moved, could actually play the game. It wasn't like he was getting tossed out of every other game.
Don Saleski? Big Bird tried to be intimidating early in his career (he wasn't a very good fighter, by the way), but it wasn't really a natural role for him. He was more of a checking liner who made himself a good two-way player. He had a single season with 200+ penalty minutes (1972-73) and two others with 100+ PIMs (never topping 131-- hardly a staggering total). Meanwhile, he made himself into one of the NHL's better penalty killers and even strung together three 20-goal seasons in a row.
Gary Dornhoefer? Hardly. Dorny was more of a skinny power forward before the term even existed. He knew how to throw elbows, but was never a stick work artist or someone who hit opponents when they were vulnerable. Even his opponents respected him.
Orest Kindrachuk? Nope. He played chippy hockey at times, but he was hardly some madman looking to take out opposing players. He was more a good two-way role player (he had the hands of a top six player, but lacked speed and size). In some ways, Kindrachuk was a poor man's Bobby Clarke -- and a perfect complement to the team that already had Clarke for its first line.
On the blueline, Ed van Impe played a mean old school style, but it was hardly over-the-top. He never had more than a 141 PIMs in a season (and that season came in the Flyers' inaugural year when the Flyers had an undersized, underskilled team in need of an identity).
Among the other starting D, Jimmy Watson was a highly skilled defensive defenseman. His older brother, Joe Watson was less skilled but never a highly penalized player, either. Tom Bladon was an offensive D. Barry Ashbee played tough, but he was never known as a dirty player.
Yes, Shero encouraged the Broad Street Bullies image. This has often led to criticism of his legacy as a coach and to some extent I can understand that.
But people forget that Shero's one and only goal was to win. He emboldened Schultz-- and consequently the entire Flyers team-- to play without fear, on the road as well as at home.
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Now let's look at some of the other key innovations he brought to the game and other career accomplishments.
* Shero was the first NHL head coach to bring in an assistant coach. He then added a second while many teams still had no assistant. Today, of course, every team has several assistant coaches.
Shero was the first NHL headcoach to recognize that, on the ice, no one coach can possibly see everything that's going on. At practice, it makes sense to have an assistant to conduct certain drills and to work with smaller groups of players. And, in the lockerroom, it made sense to have someone closer to the players' ages with whom the players could talk if they had an issue with the head coach.
* Shero was the first North American coach to study the Soviet approach to hockey. If you ever pop in a tape of the Flyers' 4-1 win over the Red Army team in 1976, you will see just how thoroughly Shero absorbed what he took in during his trips to Moscow in the early 1970s.
The seeds of that victory were actually planted many years before. Shero struck up an unlikely friendship with the father of Russian hockey, Anatoli Tarasov. As Scoop Cooper has said, Tarasov spoke no English and neither did Shero, so they were drawn to each other.
In the midst of the Cold War, Shero was able to travel to the Soviet Union to visit Tarasov and watch practices. He even brought back some of the drills with him, such as having players pass around three pucks simultaneously.
Despite the language and cultural barriers, Tarasov and Shero actually had a lot in common in their views on coaching. The strong-willed Tarasov would order the KGB agents to leave the room so he could talk coach-to-coach with his Canadian friend.
As a result, the men sat for hours, communicating the language of hockey with their hands and diagrams while sharing bottles of vodka (another "language" both men had in common, for better and for worse).
* Shero was one of the first North American hockey people to vocally support the idea that top European players could succeed in the NHL.
In 1973, he told the Philadelphia Bulletin in response to a question about Börje Salming, "We should have more Europeans and Russians in the league. But management can't get it into their fat heads they're good enough to play. They always say, 'they lack this or they lack that.' What do they lack? Nothing. Not even guts."
Beneath the surface of the Broad Street Bullies beating the Soviets and trying to intimidate Salming and Inge Hammarström, the team actually has a much deeper and richer history of scouting in Europe than most fans realize. Much of it came from Shero's recommendations.
Did you know that the Flyers were the first NHL team to hire a European scout and to draft a Soviet player?
At Shero's request, the Flyers hired Adolph Kukulowicz in 1973 to scout players in Europe. In the ninth round of the 1975 draft, the Flyers selected powerful Dynamo Riga winger Viktor Khatulev. (The talented player never played in North America. He was later banned from Russian hockey for frequent on-ice fights and off-ice behavioral problems.
* Shero was a winner everywhere he coached. In addition to two Stanley Cups and three Cup Finals appearances with Philadelphia, he won a Calder Cup as coach of the Buffalo Bisons. The next year, he won a Central League championship with the Omaha Knights.
He also came close with two other teams. In 1978-79 (Shero's first season as coach and general manager of the New York Rangers), the team reached the Stanley Cup Finals. Years earlier he lost in the CPHL finals with the St. Paul Rangers in 1963-64.
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Fred Shero is no longer alive to accept an induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. But his son, Penguins GM Ray Shero, would be the perfect person to accept on his behalf.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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