Nathan MacKinnon had been a Hart Trophy nominee for 24 hours when, one afternoon last week, he leaned forward in a chair at the Colorado Avalanche's practice facility and flashed a scarcely perceptible smile. If his brilliance on the ice this season was enough to establish his MVP case, he still wanted to make a point about his team - the best for which he's played, in his estimation, since he arrived to revive the franchise as the No. 1 draft pick in 2013.

"I think our record speaks for itself," MacKinnon said on a Zoom conference call with reporters. "We're (two points) out of first in the West with a hurt team all season. I think when our team's healthy, we've lost one or two games all year."

Pedants and doubters could quibble with the significance of that last remark. The Avalanche were almost never healthy in 2019-20, so it's understandable that a small sample would produce few defeats. Yet it's also easy to grasp the transcendent 24-year-old center's logic. Except for MacKinnon, every member of Colorado's core - from Gabriel Landeskog to Mikko Rantanen to Cale Makar to Philipp Grubauer - missed extended time because of injury, often in tandem, and the Avs didn't falter. Imagine what they could do as a group at full bore.

The Avalanche's first genuine Stanley Cup contender of the MacKinnon era is fit and itching to steal the show in the NHL's bubbled playoff tournament. Not since Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg's overlapping heyday has an Avs team been this equipped to go deep. If Vancouver's Quinn Hughes doesn't win the Calder Trophy, Makar will. Even in a regular season cut short by the coronavirus, MacKinnon's 93 points in 69 games were just shy of his career high. Together they form the foundation of a potential juggernaut.

The Western Conference, winnowed to 12 remaining teams, offers a huge challenge for Colorado. The defending champion St. Louis Blues seem as safe a pick as any to return to the Cup Final. They've been there before, as have the Vegas Golden Knights, a phenomenal puck-possession team whose .606 points percentage - third in the Western Conference behind the Blues (.662) and Avalanche (.657) - probably understates the threat they pose. The fourth-place Dallas Stars conceded the fewest goals (2.52 per game) in the conference. No other dark-horse Cup candidate can match Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl's Edmonton Oilers in star power.

With MacKinnon and Rantanen signed long term, stud prospects in the pipeline, and the cap space to accommodate a raise for Makar next summer, Colorado appears primed to surpass each of those teams and run the West for years to come. That forecast might not even have to wait till 2021, though. Hockey Reference's Simple Rating System judged the Avalanche to be the conference's best team this season, the product of finishing in the top five league-wide in offense and defense despite that rash of important absences.

This point bears repeating: None of the aforementioned stars are hurt anymore. Suffice to say they're excited for the round robin to begin Sunday in Edmonton.

"We have no weaknesses," MacKinnon said.

"I came (into Colorado) a couple years before Nate," Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog said, "so we've been through the same lineups and the same teams, and I don't think we've ever seen a stronger lineup than this in our tenure here. I think we're just scratching the surface on what we can do."

The last time Colorado reached a conference final was in 2002, the year after Sakic, Milan Hejduk, Alex Tanguay, and Patrick Roy led a stacked roster to the club's second Stanley Cup title. (You might recall that Ray Bourque, then 40 and on the verge of retiring without a Cup, was also on the team.) The Avalanche's next 16 seasons produced as many first-round series victories as top-five draft picks - four each, characteristic of their swing between fleetingly good, wretched, and the mucky ground in between. (A fifth high pick, last year's No. 4 choice Bowen Byram, arrived in the system as the result of a trade with Ottawa. More on him later.)

Following three straight down seasons early in MacKinnon's career, the last few have looked increasingly promising under head coach Jared Bednar. Colorado started 2019-20 hot with seven wins in eight games, but the injury onslaught began in the ninth contest when Rantanen toe-picked and twisted his left ankle, and it never abated. Rantanen sat out for 16 games; so did Landeskog starting five nights later. Makar missed eight games in December and five in March. Rantanen (again), Grubauer, Nazem Kadri, and Andre Burakovsky had each been shelved with various ailments for weeks when the regular season was suspended on March 12.

Colorado's savior was MacKinnon, who wound up registering 43 more points than his closest teammate, Makar, due to these circumstances and his own dominance. MacKinnon scored in bunches, such as the 24 points he supplied in the 14 games that Rantanen and Landeskog both missed in the fall. He scored beautifully, as when he burned three Canucks defenders on an end-to-end rush and potted a wrister in overtime. His 318 shots were the most in the NHL. Draisaitl and Artemi Panarin - MacKinnon's fellow Hart and Ted Lindsay Award finalists - had splendid seasons, but couldn't elevate their teams to the same heights in less adverse situations.

"It's tough when you're missing six, seven guys who are usually in the lineup, and then you have to kind of carry the team," Rantanen said. "Guys did a really good job stepping in, but he was the horse leading the army."

Among those contributors who pitched in were four offseason acquisitions brought in by Sakic, now the Avalanche's longtime general manager, to replenish the forward ranks: Burakovsky (a 20-goal scorer for the first time), Kadri, Joonas Donskoi, and Valeri Nichushkin. Colorado is deeper offensively and much stronger defensively than in years past, aided in the latter category by the sterling play of goalies Grubauer and 30-year-old rookie Pavel Francouz. The Avs posted this season's third-best team save percentage (.932) at five-on-five, per Natural Stat Trick. Obliged to handle a month's worth of starts when Grubauer was hurt in a Feb. 15 outdoor game, Francouz excelled in his longest stretch as an NHL No. 1, winning eight of 12 appearances.

Splitting time against the Minnesota Wild on Wednesday, Grubauer and Francouz combined to make 32 saves as the Avs won their lone tune-up game in Edmonton 3-2. Which goalie will start beyond the round robin remains undecided, and Bednar has classified the question as a good problem to have.

"We haven't accomplished anything yet," Landeskog said. "But at the same time, there's no reason for us not to feel confident going into (the playoffs), knowing that we have 20-plus guys that are out here and can really contribute."

Stars coach Rick Bowness recently told NHL Network that he considers the Avalanche the hardest team to beat in the West, citing their abundant speed and skill as a major edge in this accelerated restart. That combination is the expected product of a squad's elite players skewing young - compared to MacKinnon, Rantanen, and Makar, Landeskog is an old head at age 27 - and it only figures to intensify. As soon as next year, the Avs' defense could feature Makar, Samuel Girard (already a top-four mainstay at 22), and Byram and Conor Timmins, celebrated prospects who both made the 31-player bubble roster. Alex Newhook, college hockey's rookie of the year in 2019-20, should follow shortly at center.

Keeping this core intact under the salary cap - Colorado had more than $5 million in space when the season ended, per CapFriendly - is attainable because of MacKinnon's criminally team-friendly deal, which he signed in 2016 before his ascent to megastardom at an average annual value of $6.3 million. St. Louis and Vegas, those other incumbent Western powers, are up against the cap with much older cores. MacKinnon is inked at that price through 2022-23, providing three years of runway beyond this postseason to solidify a renewed Avs reign.

Not that MacKinnon is in the mood to wait. On his Zoom call before the Avalanche departed for Edmonton, his MVP nomination already bagged, he praised his teammates for uplifting him on the ice this season and for their closeness as a group. He thought about what's attainable right now, with competitive games afoot again and this roster finally at full health.

He scored against the Wild on Wednesday, off another solo rush, fewer than five minutes into the unofficial start to his playoffs.

"To leave a legacy, you have to win," MacKinnon said. "That's not what I'm really looking to do, leave a legacy, but I want to win with these guys."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

There's a story Richard Johnson likes to tell about Bobby Orr and flying, though it's not the one the city of Boston reveres. As the curator of The Sports Museum, the TD Garden's in-house shrine to local sports lore, Johnson is familiar with the sight that inspired the statue outside of the arena: No. 4 in black scoring before being tripped in the St. Louis Blues' crease, airborne in the second after he clinched the Stanley Cup for the Bruins in 1970.

Johnson is part of the Bruins' extended family, dating back almost 40 years to when he was hired for the job. In fact, his experience with the team goes back even further.

He was 13 years old when he first set foot on a plane, newly trusted to travel alone to visit his brother in Canada. Johnson arrived at Logan International with a frayed copy of The Hockey News and $20, seeking the sort of inconceivably cheap fare that was exclusive to the era. The next flight out was full, but he was able to snare an open seat on a private craft departing shortly thereafter.

"I walk across the tarmac, up the steps," Johnson said. "I could not have been more gobsmacked in my life, at any moment, when I arrived and I was on the Boston Bruins' charter, heading to Montreal in March of 1969."

Bruins fans won't have any close contact with the team during this year's playoffs, but their formidable regular season produced plenty of reasons to get excited from afar. David Pastrnak won a share of the Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy, and no team allowed fewer goals than Boston's 2.39 per game. Yet, as the league's hub-city postseason dawns in Toronto and Edmonton, Johnson's generation has grounds to contemplate days of yore - and of Orr, specifically, the catalyst for what remains the Bruins' greatest run of success in a century of play.

The format of these 24-team playoffs has no precedent, but Boston's latest pursuit of the Cup is linked indelibly to two touchstone moments in the franchise's history. The first is that sweep of St. Louis 50 years ago, an anniversary the Bruins were to honor at a home game in late March before the coronavirus pandemic upended everyone's plans. The other is from last year, when Jordan Binnington and the Blues dashed Boston's championship hopes at The Garden in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

That vexing 4-1 defeat kept the Bruins' veteran cornerstones - Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, David Krejci, Zdeno Chara, and Tuukka Rask - from claiming the second Cup they've chased together for an unusually long time. The only titles the club has won since Orr's goal in 1970 came soon afterward in 1972 and then much later in 2011, the latter of which was Marchand's rookie year. Contrast that haul with the seven finals Boston lost since 1972 and you have a perennial contender with a lot of close calls to rue.

Who in this strange summer holds the edge in the Eastern Conference? The 100-point Presidents' Trophy winner backstopped by Rask, a Vezina Trophy nominee who led the league in Goals Saved Above Average? The Tampa Bay Lightning, a loaded team out to shed its own baggage - that sorry sweep against Columbus last year? The field, bolstered by the presence of Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, and by the unpredictability that's expected to govern the results of the restart?

On the opportunity that awaits the Bruins these next two months, Johnson has another question, reflecting a vision fit for his line of work and 2020.

"Wouldn't it be sweet to have a photo op at some point - probably everyone would be wearing a mask - of Chara and Bobby Orr shaking hands in front of the trophy?" he said. "The years have gone by, but when you win a Cup, everything sort of blends together."

The Bruins were excellent during the regular season, reeling off separate win streaks of six, eight, and six games. That stands in contrast to what befell the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox earlier this year. Tom Brady departed in free agency and Mookie Betts was shipped to the Los Angeles Dodgers. MLB's and the NFL's most frequent champions this century have taken a hit, leaving one true title threat to campaign for Boston sports supremacy.

"Winning a Stanley Cup or any kind of major trophy in Boston is a big thing," Rask said during the Bruins' pre-playoff training camp last week. "That's our goal. That hasn't changed. Obviously, everything else around it in the world has changed, so we just have to try to adapt and try to build that groove and chemistry back up."

Combined with the city's recent title history, the immense promise of this Bruins roster was always bound to engender high expectations. Boston ticked every box in 2019-20. Rask - who backed up Tim Thomas during the 2011 Cup run - long ago assumed the role of tested star No. 1 netminder; his save percentage figures (.929 overall and .939 at even strength) were the best among NHL starters this season. Chara and Brandon Carlo anchored the league's third-best penalty kill, and Torey Krug ran the point on a power play that ranked second. Pastrnak (95 points) and Marchand (87) placed fourth and sixth in NHL scoring, respectively, while Bergeron, Boston's "Perfection Line" center, is a Selke Trophy finalist for the ninth straight year.

"We kind of feel like we can do anything. We just feel like we can control the complete game," Marchand said earlier this season about the thrill of playing alongside his linemates when everything clicks.

Until the Bruins entered the bubble in Toronto, though, Marchand and Bergeron hadn't skated with Pastrnak since March, as the latter was in quarantine after coming in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Pastrnak's wasn't the only absence that discombobulated Boston's return. Trade-deadline pickup Ondrej Kase missed camp in its entirety, and Krug, Krejci, Charlie Coyle, and Charlie McAvoy each sat out various sessions. Rask recently fractured a glove-hand finger doing box jumps but said it won't hinder him in Toronto. It all shined a spotlight on the need for complementary players to be ready for the moment, whether or not conspicuous lineup adjustments - Jaroslav Halak starting in lieu of Rask, or Anders Bjork supplanting Pastrnak on Bergeron's right wing - have to be made.

"We've said that all along. Take out the injury factor. There could be people who, for (COVID) testing purposes, fall behind and you have to rely on your depth," head coach Bruce Cassidy said during camp. "We're experiencing a bit of that right now, even though we haven't played any games."

For Boston, those begin Thursday night with a single exhibition versus the Columbus Blue Jackets, followed by a round robin featuring each conference's four highest achievers. After pacing the league in points through 70 games, the Bruins' playoff seed will be decided in a tiny sample: one game apiece against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Washington Capitals, and Philadelphia Flyers. Those teams and the Pittsburgh Penguins all finished the season with points percentages above .620. Lower down the Eastern standings, the Blue Jackets, Toronto Maple Leafs, and New York Rangers have either the stinginess or firepower to trouble a favored opponent if they advance past the qualifiers.

Of course, it's impossible to predict how any team will handle this postseason's signature challenge of quickly segueing into high-stakes hockey following months of lockdown and forced rest. This uncharted territory isn't lost on Bruins president Cam Neely, who wondered recently if this year's Cup should come with an asterisk - as a point of pride, not shame, "because of how difficult and mentally challenging it's going to be" to win it all.

By now, Boston has waited abnormally long - nearly 14 months since the 2019 playoffs concluded - to try to redeem that Game 7 letdown against St. Louis. A five-goal effort to avoid elimination on the road a few nights earlier didn't carry forward to the decisive affair last June 12, when the Bruins failed to score on Binnington until 2:10 remained in the third period. Where Orr once splayed joyously in mid-air, last year's final ended with Marchand in tears and Chara peering through his face shield - protection for his freshly fractured jaw - at the Blues' celebration across the ice.

"Those guys have less years in front of them than they do behind them in their careers. They look at the team that they have around them. They look at the opportunity that's in front of them. They want to seize that," Neely said of the Bruins' veteran core. "These guys have had a taste of winning. They've had a taste of probably the worst possible scenario: losing in Game 7 of the final.

"They are still hungry. They're a hungry group, and I think it really pulls everybody along."

The Sports Museum at TD Garden has been closed since the season paused in March, and Johnson has been furloughed since April, waiting for the day the building reopens. But he doesn't need to be there to rattle off select memorabilia the museum preserved from Orr's prime, whether it's one of Phil Esposito's aggressively curved sticks, a goalie mask with painted stitches that Gerry Cheevers wore in practice, a photo of Orr embracing late Bruins trainer John "Frosty" Forristall, or the miniature Stanley Cups that were awarded to Forristall - like all Bruins personnel - in 1970 and 1972 and loaned to the museum by his family.

Nine years ago, during the Bruins' most recent championship summer, Johnson got a phone call summoning him to The Garden's executive offices. When he arrived, he learned that every full-time arena employee receives a special gift, as a representative of his childhood team asked for his ring size. Johnson's name is on his ring, which he treasures.

History has no direct bearing on how the Bruins will fare in the bubble - not on Pastrnak's readiness to face Philadelphia Flyers goalie Carter Hart on Sunday nor on how they navigate this 24-team playoff structure. But Johnson can't be the only Bostonian to plumb its depths for meaning, to rhapsodize about big anniversaries, to find relevance in past triumphs, to see a 50-year throughline from Orr to Chara, and to long for a new good story to tell. Ideally, one that ends happier than last year's.

"I would never count chickens in any way shape or form," Johnson said. "But I'm certainly hopeful with this team. (It has) so many key members of the 2011 team. They know how to do it."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Francis Xavier Goheen's chest wasn't really the size of a house, and it's hard to believe each of his thighs was as thick as a slighter man's waist. But Tony Conroy, his teammate in the 1910s, figured there's fun to be had in hyperbolizing, and hints of truth to be found in the comparisons, too. Goheen was maximally strong for his 172 pounds. Out went his given names, replaced by a nickname destined to stick: Moose.

"It wasn't just Goheen's size that impressed Conroy," hockey historian Alan Livingstone MacLeod wrote many years later. "He rhapsodized about Moose's remarkable speed and competitiveness, too."

Moose Goheen was one of the best hockey players of his era, a distinction that endures without most people knowing it today. He was a defenseman from Minnesota, the "State of Hockey," a claim founded on the back of the national amateur titles his squads won around the time of World War I. He served in Belgium during that period, then medaled there when hockey made its Olympic debut at the 1920 Games.

The Boston Bruins and Toronto St. Pats (soon to be the Maple Leafs) craved his physicality and scoring punch. But Goheen declined contract offers at every turn, preferring to play at home in St. Paul - and to keep working all the while at the local power company.

That Goheen never suited up even in the embryonic NHL ensured history would overlook his feats. Roger Godin, another historian and author, lamented that fact in a book about Goheen's St. Paul teams. Sports Illustrated omitted Goheen from a list of Minnesota's 50 greatest athletes, Godin noted; a Twin Cities newspaper rated him 59th in a similar exercise. Those affronts wouldn't have flown in Goheen's day, when keen observers considered him the spitting image of Eddie Shore, the legendary hard-nosed Bruin.

Hobey Baker was the only American player to precede Goheen for induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. When pioneering defenseman, coach, and team executive Lester Patrick called Goheen the best player the U.S. produced, his endorsement still fell short of the highest praise Moose received. A few years after he shone at the Olympics, the St. Paul Pioneer Press conferred him another towering title: "The Babe Ruth of American hockey."

Hockey's Babe excelled in baseball and football too as a kid in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, at the turn of the 20th century. Yet when Goheen reached young adulthood, his flair on the ice pushed him a few miles south to St. Paul, where his hockey career began at the elite amateur level with the St. Paul Athletic Club. Moose and the AC's won three national championships before and immediately following the U.S.'s engagement in the war, establishing a throughline of Minnesotan devotion to the game that later enabled the creation of the NHL's North Stars and Wild.

"The State of Hockey began with these men," Godin wrote in "Before the Stars," his 2005 book about Goheen and the AC's.

Nominally a defenseman, Goheen had the ability, build, and drive to play any position, from rover - back when teams iced seven players a side - to a single reported appearance in goal. But he was at his best on the blue line. From there, he spearheaded dazzling end-to-end rushes several decades before Bobby Orr popularized the act. Minnesota sportswriter Halsey Hall opined in print that no spectacle in sports "could ever beat the sight of Moose Goheen taking the puck, circling behind his own net, and then taking off down that rink, leaping over sticks along the way."

"His body was just like a rock," Bev Goheen, Moose's daughter-in-law, once told the author Seamus O'Coughlin. "When he came straight down center ice, he was going through no matter who was there. He had one thing in mind and that was to get the puck in the net."

Then as now, gaining possession to try to score meant displacing opponents from the disc. Goheen endeared himself to the home faithful - and galled countless onlookers outside of St. Paul - with his affinity for crunching checks. Late in his career, word surfaced in newspapers that he and Shore had separately challenged Art Shires, a major-league first baseman who moonlighted for a time in boxing, to a bout.

That isn't to say Goheen had to stray from his usual domain to stoke conflict, as exemplified by Hall's memory of a road game in which Goheen broke the wrist of an opposing star.

"The town was furious. It thirsted for Goheen's blood, promising danger to his existence if he played the next night in the two-game series," Hall later wrote. Against his coach's wishes, Goheen insisted that he dress and brave whatever wrath awaited him.

"The players ganged on him. The fans grabbed at him as he roared along the boards," Hall continued. "And, to nobody's particular surprise but to their overwhelming admiration, the star of the game was Moose Goheen."

While the likes of Shore and Patrick competed for and lifted Stanley Cups, the self-avowed pinnacle of Goheen's hockey life was the 1920 Olympic tournament in Belgium, where two years earlier the U.S. Army Signal Corps had tasked him with laying telephone wire over reclaimed battlefield terrain. Those Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp to boost depleted Belgian spirits in the wake of the war. 1920 marked hockey's introduction to the Olympics, and the occasion called for Goheen to return to the country in a different kind of American uniform.

To maintain the ice at Antwerp's Palais de Glace, the seven-team hockey bracket took place in April, several months before the rest of the games, though puck drop was postponed a few days because of the Americans' late arrival by ship. Goheen, three St. Paul teammates, and the rest of the U.S. squad were saluted by a crowd when they docked, and the schedule delay didn't deter them from racing to a 29-0 win over Switzerland, whose 46-year-old winger Max Sillig was elected president of the IIHF midway through the tournament.

Sillig's inclusion on the Swiss roster at his age was hardly the most extreme thing about the event. Each game lasted 40 minutes, split into two periods, which still was ample time for lopsided scores to proliferate. The knockout format of the day eliminated the host Belgians and France after one game apiece, each a shutout loss to Sweden. The Winnipeg Falcons, the senior amateur club that represented Canada, thumped Czechoslovakia 15-0 and the Swedes 12-1, but the hard-fought win that effectively sealed the gold medal came in between, a 2-0 victory over the Americans.

Losing to Canada still afforded the U.S. a shot at silver, which they clinched by blanking Sweden 7-0 and Czechoslovakia 16-0 on consecutive days. (The lone goal Czechoslovakia managed to score in Antwerp was timely, coming in a 1-0 win over Sweden for bronze.) North American speed and skill had triumphed in Europe, and St. Paul's contingent got to sail home as lauded men. Goheen, the anchor of the back end, scored seven goals - six against the Swiss - and electrified the Palais de Glace with his splendid signature rushes.

After Antwerp, Goheen's career split into two phases: his continued time as an amateur and his jump to the pros, with the St. Paul Saints in 1925. He played a season in the ill-fated Central Hockey League and several in the American Hockey Association, a minor circuit with three Minnesota teams and others as far as Winnipeg, Detroit, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Through it all, he kept a day job at Northern States Power - the utility, by coincidence, whose successor company Xcel Energy now sponsors the NHL Wild's arena.

(Source: HockeyDB)

Goheen enjoyed his work, which was steady and paid well, and he used this logic to justify rejecting the NHL's frequent - and, for the period, lucrative - overtures. The Montreal Wanderers wanted to sign Goheen in 1917, the NHL's inaugural season, according to O'Coughlin, the author. A two-year offer worth $4,000 annually failed to convince him to join Toronto in 1925. The Bruins attempted to bring him aboard at the outset of 1928-29. Boston won the franchise's first Cup that March, but without Goheen, whose reported $12,000-a-year salary request proved too steep.

So resolute was Goheen's allegiance to his home state and to Northern States that he turned down the chance to play for the U.S. at the first Winter Olympics, at Chamonix, France, in 1924. Speaking to O'Coughlin many years later, Goheen's daughter-in-law connected his thinking to the conditions of his upbringing in White Bear Lake. Goheen grew up poor, she said, and he grew accustomed to retrieving coal chunks from the side of nearby train tracks to heat his childhood home. The adult Moose played with abandon between the boards, but away from the rink he shied from what he perceived to be undue risk.

"Moose's big thing was security," Bev Goheen said. "That had everything to do with the decisions he made in his life. When he got his job at Northern States Power, that paycheck meant everything to him."

Rather than teaming with marvelous St. Pats center Jack Adams or celebrating Boston's title with Shore, sticking in St. Paul made Goheen a hometown hero - and persona non grata in rival Minneapolis. Hostile away crowds always seemed to invigorate Goheen, one St. Paul news report waxed in 1923: "He plays such a hard game and causes so many spills that there is ample chance for fandom's ire." Yet when he retired and began to try his hand at officiating, Goheen proved supremely and surprisingly popular in the neighboring Twin City.

"Possibly because he has had plenty of chances to study hockey officials, Frank is our idea of what a good one really is," Minneapolis Star columnist Charles Johnson wrote in 1931. "He moves up and down the sideboards without most of the crowd seeing him, and he doesn't miss a thing. He steps into the spotlight only when absolutely necessary."

Old-timers from Goheen's generation went to the wall to defend him. They would have been joyed to see him inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame on Aug. 18, 1952, as part of the nascent museum's fifth class - and aggrieved had they come across Jack De Long's reaction column in the Vancouver Sun, in which De Long objected to the enshrinement of an amateur who hadn't played an NHL game.

Within a few days, De Long reported to his readers that he'd "just made contact (violent) with the Loyal Order of the Moose (Goheen) Society," members of which phoned him in droves to vouch for the defenseman's credentials. The GM of a local minor pro franchise said Goheen was a "swell fellow," and therefore Hall-worthy. One of De Long's friends was said to have presented a sounder argument: Goheen was the Babe Ruth of U.S. hockey.

The recognition Goheen received during and after his lifetime - he died at 85 in 1979 - could never compare to that of the Babe, but his legacy is watertight. He was the second American to enter the Hall after Baker, a charter inductee who starred in college at Princeton in the early 1910s. Baker never turned pro, and died mysteriously in France shortly after World War I ended. In his book on Goheen's St. Paul teams, Godin mused about the partnership they could hypothetically have formed: the lithe Baker acting as his decade's Wayne Gretzky, Goheen the equivalent of Mark Messier.

Goheen was elected to the Hall the very same year as one Ernie "Moose" Johnson, a fine two-way defenseman on west-coast teams in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, whose champions used to play for the Stanley Cup. The timing was apt, Goheen hinted in a speech in 1958, when he saw fit to reveal another layer of his story.

"I was never a moose, either, at 172 pounds," Goheen said, reflecting on his earliest years in the senior amateur ranks in St. Paul. "But Tony Conroy named me after Moose Johnson of Portland."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Hall of Fame debates are a staple of sports arguments - whether a player's amassed the credentials to be honored among the best in their sport is prime fodder for discussion over a beer. We're spotlighting a collection of players who we believe either deserve the distinction but haven't yet been inducted, or don't quite measure up but had a great impact on their franchise or sport.

The year was 1993, and Curtis Joseph was getting jobbed out of admittance to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

At the time, Joseph was a rising star in his fourth NHL season with the St. Louis Blues, and had gone to lengths to prove he could capably shoulder an immense workload. Over 68 games in 1992-93, he led the NHL in shots faced (2,202), saves (2,006), and save percentage (.911). Per Hockey-Reference, his 16.2 point shares - an estimate of team standings points for which a player can take credit - were most among goaltenders, a cut above Ed Belfour's 13.0. Not only did Joseph pace the league in goals saved above average; his total, 57.42, blew away Belfour's remarkable 39.36 and is still the best single-season GSAA mark since the mid-1970s.

Yet when Vezina Trophy votes were counted that spring, Joseph placed third in the tally, behind Belfour, then with the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins' Tom Barrasso.

The argument against inducting CuJo to the Hall depends in large part on the hardware he lacks, be it the Stanley Cup - he never reached a final in 19 seasons with the Blues, Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Phoenix Coyotes, and Calgary Flames - or individual laurels such as the Vezina. That shortcoming helped keep Joseph out for the ninth year running Wednesday when the class of 2020 was revealed.

Selection committees and armchair pundits employ this sort of superficial reasoning across sports, and the coda to Joseph's brilliant 1992-93 season illustrates its flaws. Entertain this alternative scenario: Joseph's stats and uplifting impact on his middling Blues team remain the same, but Vezina voters of the day actually recognize and value what his mastery compared to league average signifies. They award him the trophy, and two decades later his career is deemed Hall material.

Whether that first outcome should have been realized - whether Joseph, not Belfour, would have been the just Vezina victor in '93 - is beside the essential point. Joseph was terrific that season and shone in many others, and to dismiss his Hall case outright because he never won a major award is to think simplistically.

Joseph, a 5-foot-11 acrobat in the crease, was rarely afforded the privilege of backstopping a superb team, and when the lineups in front of him fit that bill, like the defending champion 2002-03 Red Wings, he didn't lift them over the top. (Blame J.S. Giguere.) On the whole, though, he was a workhorse whose numbers support favorable comparisons to titans of his position. And he tended to elevate his game when it really mattered, equipping him to carry several pedestrian Blues, Oilers, and Leafs squads deeper into the postseason than was their right.

After signing as a college free agent with St. Louis in 1989, Joseph went on to finish in the top five in Vezina voting in five of his first 11 seasons, including a close second-place showing behind Dominik Hasek in 1998-99. He was No. 4 in Hart Trophy voting with the Leafs that season, and the following year he won the King Clancy Memorial Trophy for leadership and humanitarianism, a nod to his charitable work with sick children in Toronto.

Consistency and longevity were hallmarks of Joseph's. His 943 career games played are sixth-most in league history and his 454 wins rank seventh; only Martin Brodeur, Patrick Roy, Roberto Luongo, and Belfour eclipse him in both categories. (It has to be noted that Joseph is third in career losses, with 352.) His 51-shutout total isn't top grade, but he authored 16 in the playoffs, third to Brodeur and Roy. Few goalies saw more rubber: Joseph faced 26,795 shots, sixth-most ever, and made 24,279 saves, also sixth all time.

"He thrived with more shots against him, and not a lot of guys are like that. In fact, very few guys are able to do that when they get peppered all the time," retired goalie Kevin Weekes wrote about Joseph at NHL.com in 2015.

“When I think of CuJo, I think of a goalie who gave his team a chance to win every night," Glenn Healy, Joseph's former backup with the Leafs, told the Toronto Sun in May. "What more was he supposed to do?"

Goalies like Joseph suffer when their names appear before the Hall from a high bar and a double standard. Belfour is a Hall of Famer; so are Brodeur, Hasek, Roy, Grant Fuhr, Billy Smith, and Rogie Vachon. Somehow, only those seven men have been inducted at the position in the past 30 years. As the New York Post's Larry Brooks once pointed out, many of the goalies who are enshrined played the bulk of their career prior to World War II. A mere 22 are products of the NHL's Original Six era or later.

Former New York Rangers stalwart Ed Giacomin is the only one of them who never won a Stanley Cup, an otherwise uniform barrier to entry that voters don't extend to skaters. That knock applies to Joseph, but not to Barrasso, Chris Osgood, Mike Richter, or Mike Vernon, fellow marginal Hall candidates from CuJo's era who have eight championships between them. It all goes back to Brooks' point: maybe the Hall of Fame committee's expectations for netminders are unreasonably high. (At least this year's class includes Canadian women's legend Kim St-Pierre, a three-time Olympic gold medallist.)

Joseph keeps even finer company in Hockey-Reference's career-similarity tabulation, which compares players at the same position based on their adjusted point shares by season. The quality and arc of his career rate as most similar to that of Vachon, the three-time champ with the Montreal Canadiens in the '60s and '70s who entered the Hall in 2016, 34 years after he retired. Among the other goalies with whom Joseph is classed: Belfour, Brodeur, Roy, Tony Esposito, and Henrik Lundqvist.

That isn't to say Joseph was better than any of them - just that he belonged in their orbit, as the dominance he summoned regularly in the playoffs attests. Joseph's Toronto clubs were never elite, but he spearheaded postseason runs in all four of his years there. He stole first-round series victories for lackluster Oilers teams against much stronger opponents: the Dallas Stars in 1996-97, when games of 43 and 38 saves keyed OT road wins in Games 5 and 7, and the Colorado Avalanche in 1997-98, when he erased a 3-1 series deficit by allowing just one goal the rest of the way.

Working backward, we arrive at his magnum opus: the 1993 playoffs with St. Louis. That was the year Joseph saved 61 of 63 shots in a double-OT loss to the Leafs, who might have reached the final had Wayne Gretzky's high stick on Doug Gilmour been penalized later in the spring. Joseph made 57 stops the next game, this time to win in double OT, and he prolonged the second-round series as far as Game 7 despite the Blues being outshot, on average, by 12 attempts per night.

If only that could have bolstered his Vezina case. At least Joseph got to relish ending the eventual Vezina winner's season. Belfour and the Blackhawks finished 21 points ahead of the Blues in the '93 Norris Division standings but were swept from the first round, undone by their inability to solve CuJo. Joseph's save percentage in the series was .957, and he blanked Chicago in Games 2 and 3, cinching the first of those historically tremendous 16 playoff shutouts.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The job for which Phil Pritchard is admired and widely known - shepherding the Stanley Cup to events, parties, and championship parades across the hockey-playing world - overshadows his official role at the Hockey Hall of Fame: vice president and curator of the resource center. Behind the scenes in Toronto, he tends to the Hall's vast material archives, which include 4,000 sticks taken from various eras and milestone games. He planned to sort and catalog some of them one still afternoon earlier this week.

"You caught me in the office," Pritchard said by phone Tuesday. "It's quiet. Nobody's here."

So went a workday in Pritchard's life absent the NHL, with no flight to catch or Stanley Cup Playoffs to follow - and with the trophy itself securely encased at the Hall, waiting just the same. Decades into his term as the Cup's most recognizable keeper, Pritchard, 58, is accustomed to being in public and in motion. Now he mostly sits in his backyard in nearby Burlington, Ontario, marking the passage of time via his choice of attire: a tuque in March, right after the season paused due to COVID-19; a T-shirt and shorts as summer beckons.

Even as the NHL trends toward a comeback, it isn't yet known when the league's 24-team playoffs will begin, or if Pritchard will feature in the familiar tableau that heralds the end of every season. As Gary Bettman speaks into a microphone and is booed after the final game, Pritchard and his Hall colleague Craig Campbell carry the Cup to the ice so that it can be handed to the jubilant victorious captain. The St. Louis Blues were crowned champions June 12, 2019 - a year ago Friday, and an anniversary that this year's Stanley Cup Final, if it can be held, will necessarily miss by several months.

"For me, it's the best part of the season. There's a new chapter in the life of the Stanley Cup," Pritchard said. The difference in 2020: "All those emotions that were building up as we headed into March have been put on hold."

Though he's endured full and partial NHL lockouts before, the ongoing hiatus represents new territory for the 32-year Hall employee. During Pritchard's first week on the job, he volunteered to accompany the Cup to a suburban minor-hockey function that Friday night. The duty stuck, and these days, the NHL's typical postseason schedule calls for him to travel with the trophy throughout April, May, and June as they stop in a succession of participating cities.

Pritchard is on the road about 180 days per year, maintaining an expansive itinerary even before the playoffs and the revelrous global tour that the winning team gets to organize and enjoy. This February alone, Pritchard and his silver charge spent five days in the Northwest Territories ahead of Hockey Day in Canada festivities in Yellowknife; touched down in Colorado for an Avalanche-Kings outdoor game; and visited St. Louis native and ardent Blues fan Jenna Fischer - Pam on "The Office" - at her California home.

Early in March, Pritchard took his most recent trip with the Cup to Northern British Columbia for a charity event with Broad Street Bullies-era Flyers defenseman Joe Watson. He was supposed to pop into the Vancouver area the weekend of March 13-15, only for the season to be suspended a day earlier.

The Cup has been locked in the closed Hall building ever since, and Pritchard has logged plenty of time at home, where he lives with his wife Diane and their three children, plus his son's girlfriend and their daughter. Everyone is healthy, and it's been wonderful, for once, to eat three meals a day together, Pritchard said: "Hopefully my kids feel the same." Save for the occasional office visit, he mans his computer and phone at the backyard gazebo, where the family dog, Zoe, has been at his side for every Zoom meeting and conference call.

Those calls include weekly check-ins with the NHL to discuss return-to-play considerations and what-ifs. Players returned to the ice in small groups this week for voluntary training sessions, but timing and locations still have to be confirmed for the league's agreed-upon playoff format. Pritchard, meanwhile, is awaiting word on the role he might play at the conclusion of a hub-city final. Whether he'll be present to deliver the Cup as usual is one of many open questions.

"Like everyone else, I'm ready whenever," Pritchard said. "The Cup is here. It's clean, ready to go. It's preserved. It's secure. There's no worries about that. Like it's done for the last 127 years, it's hoping it's going to have a winner."

Only twice in that span has the trophy gone unawarded: in 1919, when the final was cut short because of influenza days before Hall of Fame defenseman Joe Hall died, and in 2005, thanks to the season-long lockout. More commonly, Pritchard devotes his summer to facilitating the championship club's customary day-with-the-Cup tour. Last year, the Blues brought it to 36 cities in the United States, Canada, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and were said to have caused the first traffic jam in the history of 85-person Calahoo, Alberta, the hometown of head coach Craig Berube, when 3,000 people turned up to celebrate.

Could a title tour of any size plausibly be staged this year? That's to be determined, Pritchard said, since it will depend on what the world looks like when the postseason ends. Another development to watch: whether the coronavirus pandemic dissuades players, now and in the future, from repeating certain traditional, intimate expressions of joy, such as kissing the Cup or drinking from its bowl.

"We'll wait to see what the new normal is," Pritchard said. "Obviously, sanitization and following health codes are really important. It'll be no different with the Stanley Cup or coming through the Hockey Hall of Fame or going to a movie. We'll be following (the) guidelines. I know the players and their families will, as well. What that will be yet, nobody knows."

Pritchard is far firmer on this matter: If the playoffs proceed as planned, the eventual winners' achievement shouldn't be saddled with an asterisk, real or metaphorical. With the caveat that he's conspicuously biased, Pritchard said he thinks the Cup is the best trophy in sports in part because its championship engravings recount every season's conclusive storyline: "SERIES NOT COMPLETED," in the case of 1919, or the names of the Blues a century later.

For the past while, Pritchard has stayed in weekly touch with Campbell, Mike Bolt, and Howie Borrow, fellow regular handlers of the Cup. Hockey's shutdown has given him occasion to reminisce about the dance that he and Campbell are used to performing annually toward the end of the final. Once a team reaches three wins in the best-of-seven, the Cup is whisked out of sight, and as potential deciding games unfold, they wait in the wings to see if the series is settled or extended a couple more nights.

The exercise has afforded him the gift of patience even as excitement peaks. Knowing what's at stake in the next months, he can be patient now, too.

"If we have a Stanley Cup champion, that is great," Pritchard said. "As long as we're all healthy, that's even better."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

It's invitingly easy to contrast Dalton Smith's NHL career, all 86 seconds of it, with that of his dad, Derrick, a reliable depth center for elite Flyers teams in the 1980s. Or those of his uncles, Keith and Wayne Primeau, who combined to play 1,683 regular-season games. Or that of 20-year-old Cayden Primeau - Keith's son, Smith's cousin, Carey Price's emergency backup, and the youngest goalie to appear in the league this season.

If the Smiths and Primeaus aren't hockey royalty, they're surely part of its noblesse. Hailing from a family so accomplished is a blessing and a challenge, Smith said over the phone recently from Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown east of Toronto. The members of the hard-nosed old guard press him to finish his checks and stay in top shape. They suggest little ways he could refine and raise his game, knowledgeable guidance he's fortunate to have and for which he's grateful.

The attendant obligation that's shaped Smith's time in the sport: trying at once to add to their legacy and to fashion his own distinct story.

"Growing up and seeing them and always idolizing them and wanting to be like them, it's obviously a lot harder to do than to dream of," said Smith, 27, a 6-foot-2, 210-pound left winger in the Buffalo Sabres organization. "That's always been a tough part: trying to get there."

On New Year's Eve 2019, Smith got there, finally and then fleetingly. Nearly a decade after he was selected 34th overall in the 2010 draft, he delivered on the promise that that draft slot conveys for one minute and 26 seconds, the ice time Buffalo entrusted him with in a revenge game of sorts against Tampa Bay. In his NHL debut, he also earned a two-minute roughing penalty.

Fittingly for a veteran minor-league grinder, these numbers make Smith the rare player (one of 10 in the past 20 years) whose career penalty minutes total exceeds his NHL time on ice. Buffalo returned Smith to the AHL's Rochester Americans early in January, so as it stands, he owns the NHL's seventh-shortest career since 1997, when ice time became an official stat - one second less than former Sabres winger Sean McMorrow's 1:27, and less than everyone else who took a shift in 2019-20.

"Hey, I'll take it," Smith said. "It was the best time of my life so far."

That this designation doesn't rankle Smith speaks to the significance of the twists and trials - a trade, several AHL contracts, an ECHL demotion, his necessarily continued effort to keep pace in a faster and increasingly skillful game - he faced en route to his stint in the show. Smith played exactly 400 games for six teams in the minors before the Sabres, who were coming off three straight losses, were hobbled by injury at forward, and were seeking to augment the muscle in their lineup, signed him to a two-way deal and recalled him from Rochester on Dec. 30.

Even for a high second-round pick, it's difficult to reach the NHL under any set of circumstances and for any duration. Sometimes, it's nice to notice and celebrate even the briefest cameo, as those around Smith did around the time of his call-up.

The day before the game against the Lightning, Rochester forward Rasmus Asplund told the AHL team's website that Smith's value as a leader and energizer belies the minimal media attention he tends to receive. "I'm really happy for him, so I hope he gets a couple minutes to enjoy it as well," Asplund said, more prophetically than he perhaps intended. Speaking to the Olean Times Herald a few days after Smith's debut, Wayne Primeau called his nephew "the ultimate team guy" and praised him for never quitting on his dream.

"He'd been looking for this moment for the longest time. Nothing better than getting to call him in my office and let him know he's been recalled," Rochester head coach Chris Taylor told theScore recently. "I could just tell on his face: It was the best thing that's ever been told to him in a long time."

Back in 2010, Smith was coming off a 21-goal, 129-PIM season with the Ontario Hockey League's Ottawa 67s when the Blue Jackets drafted him at No. 34, an endorsement of his work ethic, combativeness, and offensive punch that ran counter to NHL Central Scouting's assessment of his standing within the class (the bureau rated him 73rd among eligible North American skaters). Smith's scoring chops never translated to the pros, and at the 2014 trade deadline Columbus dealt him to Tampa Bay, along with Jonathan Marchessault, for Dana Tyrell and Matt Taormina.

After his entry-level contract expired the following year, Smith bounced between a few farm clubs - Boston and Philadelphia's AHL affiliates; Carolina's outpost in the ECHL - before latching on with Rochester in 2017. Mentioning his limited production there across the past three seasons (four goals and 15 points in 135 games) prompts Taylor to counter, "I wouldn't go off his stats too much." His coaches and teammates appreciate that he asserts his presence on the ice, believing that his physicality and dogged forechecking create space and scoring chances for his linemates. He fights, too, 78 times in all as a pro.

Smith's breakthrough call-up came a month after Lightning defenseman Erik Cernak elbowed Buffalo's Rasmus Dahlin in the face and was suspended two games. At Tampa Bay's morning skate on Dec. 31, fellow blue-liner Luke Schenn pulled Cernak aside for a quick tutorial on how to fight, contingency training in case the likes of Smith sought retribution.

In Buffalo that night, it wasn't Cernak but Schenn himself who jawed with Smith after a whistle eight seconds into the second period, sparking a gloves-off tussle that the linesmen hurriedly broke up. They were assessed offsetting roughing minors, one of two contributions to the stat sheet that Smith managed in his four shifts. Seconds after Smith and Schenn's penalties expired, Sabres winger Marcus Johansson ripped a wrister past Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, and Smith skated in from the neutral zone to join the celebration.

His final line: 1:26 TOI, 2 PIM, +1 for his career.

"I wasn't sure how much ice I was going to get, but I just knew that I had to try to do something," Smith said. "Tried stirring some things up."

Two days later, the Sabres sent a fourth-round pick to the Flames for Michael Frolik, and they reassigned Smith to the AHL on Jan. 6, at which point Taylor remembers him returning to Rochester with a certain glow. Even that short stay enabled him to skate in two more pregame warmups, amass some practice time, and elevate his confidence noticeably. Everything about his demeanor suggested he'd reoriented his mindset, Taylor said: "He got that one taste, he wants that taste again."

If Smith is to clamber back to the NHL, the job at hand is to sign a new deal when he enters free agency this offseason. He said there's no team with which he'd rather be affiliated than Buffalo; he appreciates the chances the Sabres have given him, and in line with the feedback they provided, his summer plans center on working to improve his skill and his foot speed, things he's consistently had to do since his graduation from junior. Remaining employed in an evolving game means keeping up with the rate of change, and with the flow of play.

Before Taylor moved into coaching, he was a point-per-game caliber center in the minors for much of the 1990s and 2000s, including for nine seasons with the Americans. One of Taylor's first Rochester teammates was Eric Boulton, a heavyweight winger - and former ninth-round draft pick - who scored four points and added 276 PIM in 1999-00, his final AHL season. Boulton stuck in the NHL at age 24 and went on to play 654 games. Smith is three years older, and enforcing is a disappearing role, but his coach sees symmetry there, having watched Smith strive for a while now to shore up his shortcomings.

"You hope Dalton can follow that same path," Taylor said. "Age doesn't matter to me. It's what you're doing to try to get better, and he is getting better."

In that pursuit, he has a peer in Cayden Primeau, the rookie Canadiens prospect who had a .908 save percentage with the AHL Laval Rocket this season, and who turned away 67 of 72 shots during two relief appearances for Montreal back in December. Smith, who debuted in the NHL 26 days after Primeau, lauded his cousin for what he's already accomplished and said he relished contributing, those few weeks later, to such a cool shared family experience.

Rochester was second in the AHL's North Division, seven points ahead of Laval and six behind the Belleville Senators, when the schedule halted on March 12 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The subsequent cancellation of the season, combined with Buffalo's exclusion from the NHL's 24-team playoff format, made for a disappointing yet understandable end to Smith's 2019-20. Prioritizing health and safety was the right call, he said. Incidentally, 86 seconds - plus two minutes in the box - was all his year required to be special.

"It's a phone call I've been wanting to make to my dad for a very long time," Smith said, reflecting on his call-up. "It just leaves me even more hungry to hopefully do it again."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

At first, sports returned in dribs and drabs: UFC, NASCAR, Germany's Bundesliga. Soon, the plan goes, they'll be back en masse. Disrupted and displaced by the coronavirus, the NBA and NHL want to stage their playoffs through the summer at centralized sites. Shortened MLB and MLS seasons could follow, with the NFL and college football campaigns possibly beginning on schedule after that. The Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, and the National Women's Soccer League have already set June restart dates. There's money to salvage, fans to entertain, a gloss of normalcy to project.

That crowds won't attend games for a while is a given, but much is left to finalize before more of these comeback proposals become reality. What specific health and safety regulations will leagues enact? In which hub cities will the NHL set up shop? Can MLB's players and owners even hope to solve their compensation dispute?

Beyond logistics, though, a deeper dilemma shadows the whole exercise. Is it ethical for team sports to resume during a pandemic?

The implications of this question are myriad and serious. To return in the COVID-19 era, leagues need an abundance of tests and the willingness to keep playing through positive cases. Players and many other, older people will bear these health risks so that the show can go on. Viewers watching at home must square this knowledge with their desire to consume and enjoy the spectacle.

To explore these issues and more, theScore solicited the perspectives of four expert ethicists:

• Jack Bowen, the co-author of "Sport, Ethics and Leadership"
• Shawn Klein, a philosophy lecturer at Arizona State University
• Steven Mintz, a professor emeritus from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
• Stephen Mosher, a sport studies professor at Ithaca College

Their thoughts, which they shared in separate conversations this week, have been condensed and edited for clarity.

theScore: What do you think of the prospect that major team sports could resume in the next couple of months?

Bowen: On the one hand, players are freely engaging in this enterprise. (Leagues are) saying, "Here are the risks, and we've mitigated the risks, and we're following the directives." The players get to freely choose and decide whether or not they go out and play. It almost comes down to this core focus on liberty. But it gets interesting because there's certainly a tacit pressure to play.

You've got these pressures: the pressure of money, the pressure of being on a team, the pressure of being lambasted and mocked by society and fans. Now you have players feeling pressured to come out - and it's potentially very risky. Basketball (for example), that's a really risky venture. We've got people nervous about going to the market and being in the same aisle as someone 10 feet away with masks on. Now you've got people basically nose to nose aspirating in each other's faces.

Mintz: I think it's more important that the measures are put in place to protect the players, protect the public, rather than, "Is it (starting in) one, two, three months?" Things have to be done, like testing - at least once a day, maybe even more often. Contact tracing. Possibly (isolation) of players from others during the games. What stadium? How is that going to work?

The leagues have been dealing with these issues, but they're quite complex, and every possibility has to be thought out. My view is: better to be a little bit later in opening than opening too soon, and perhaps having some sort of an outbreak in the sporting event as a result.

theScore: For sports to return, a range of people - players, coaches, officials, team personnel, outside workers such as hotel staff - may have to put themselves at elevated risk of contracting the virus. How should their well-being be weighed against the financial impetus to start playing again?

Mosher (all answers by email): ​Ethically speaking, this is a life and - possible - death situation. I would be completely supportive of any personnel who argue they are not willing to put themselves or their families in jeopardy. I would hope the unemployment system would also be supportive. However, I would also argue that the well-being of the players and support personnel has always been outweighed by the profit motive of the owners.

Klein: To some degree, that's each individual's weighing, in terms of their own risk tolerance, their own risk profile. I think for the players as a whole, or at least on average, they're in a demographic, being relatively young and healthy, (that has) a fairly low-risk profile in general. Obviously, individual players might have some kind of immune compromise or they might have diabetes - something that might put them in a different risk profile.

The managers, the other staff, obviously they tend to be a little bit older, so that might expose them to more risk. But at the same time, they're also able to engage in some of these precautions that the players can't do on the field or in training. Physical distancing is kind of out the door when you're talking about playing sports. Wearing masks is probably not healthy because of the amount of oxygen you need to take in if you're running. But the coaches and staff and others can certainly do that for the most part.

Bowen: A very good friend of mine just became president of a local private golf club. They started a very soft opening, abiding by county directives, where they opened up courses. His concern was: "Goodness. That's us now forcing maintenance workers to have to come back to this situation where they may not feel comfortable. There's a lot of pressure here because this is their job and their livelihood."

Again, we could say, "Hey, they're free (to make choices)." Who this cohort is is also really relevant. The people who are running the janitorial component of these (pro) stadiums, etcetera, are coming under different financial pressures than, likely, the players themselves. That's a real concern.

theScore: To return to play, leagues will test players and other personnel regularly, if not daily. If they're being asked to perform for our entertainment, maybe it's right that they receive that sort of privileged access to tests. On the other hand, leagues conducting that much testing could divert resources away from the public. How should decision-makers weigh that calculus?

Mosher: This is a deeply challenging question, not because it is hard - because it isn't. The hoarding of testing and other PPE (personal protective equipment) for elite athletes should never be weighed against the general public. Of course, the world of elite spectator sport has never taken into account the general welfare.

Mintz: I'd like to think by the time they would be tested - by the time the season started - we would have testing for everybody in society. By then, whether it's a month or two months or whatever, I don't think that issue of, "They get tests and we don't get tests, and they're somehow more valued by society," will be as (significant), especially when you throw in the dimension of the public interest in getting sports back: the good feeling that it gives. It even contributes to wellness and mental health.

I think more of a factor is whether the baseball league or the football league can get it done. Can they actually get the tests, administer the tests, do the contact tracing? There's competency that's involved. As long as they can live up to that standard, I think it's really fine.

theScore: In March, the NBA shut down immediately after Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. The NHL, MLB, and college basketball followed suit the next day. Once sports return, positive tests likely won't impel leagues to automatically halt play again. Is it justifiable to continue playing if someone involved in the competition gets sick?

Mosher: For me, the answer is clearly no. But human reasoning is quite often neither logical nor moral.

Mintz: That's clearly one of the risks. That's why you have to immediately quarantine that person, test everybody else on the team or who has had contact with them. If they all test negative for the virus, I think, yeah, it's legitimate to go forward. If a team is worried about the legitimacy of going forward should that happen - if a player contracts the virus, or an official - then they shouldn't start in the first place.

I'm not talking about an outbreak where the whole team is down. Obviously, there, you have to stop in your tracks. But this has to be considered. The consequences have to be dealt with in advance. They should not restart unless they're willing to continue on with proper measures should there be a relatively minor outbreak.

Klein: When we go back to March, as little as we knew, it made sense, I think, at that point to postpone things when (the virus) started showing up. It seems now that with the amount of testing that (players are) going to be subjected to when they return, there will be (a) much higher ability to identify and then isolate those who might be exposed and carry it.

At this point, given what we seem to be learning about the virus, I think you can make a case for keeping them open even if there are positive tests. Now, if there's a whole team going down, that might change things. But I think if you have a few positive tests here, there, that seems compatible with continuing to play - if what we seem to know now continues.

theScore: Compared to the pros, do colleges have a higher ethical bar to clear for staging sports since their athletes aren't paid?

Mosher: Since the above situations referred to situations where the players/laborers do have contractual obligations, the morality can become murky. However, colleges and public school sports are completely different situations, where the players/laborers are utterly dependent on the "adults" making decisions that protect them. Perhaps that's why the NCAA schools are still without anything resembling a plan.

Bowen: College-age kids are over 18 - it's really the only difference (between college sports and youth sports). They're still under the banner of an educational umbrella. Again, there are so many tacit pressures there for them to play, whether it's the (athletes in the) big sports trying to get to the pros, or scholarships. It seems to me that that's a relevant enough difference, where you could say, "We're not going to allow college, but we are going to let pros make that choice."

Klein: Maybe slightly higher, particularly if the schools are back in session. Then there's maybe a greater chance of spread through the school from the athletes. With professionals, they're in a tighter community and so their exposure might not bleed out.

I know some schools have announced that if they're not in session, if they aren't having in-person classes, they're not going to have the athletes playing. Other schools are going forward with that. I'm torn on that. They are student-athletes, and if you're not having (extracurricular) student programs going on, it's hard to see what the basis would be - other than financial - for the exceptions for athletes.

ASU never officially shut down. We went online, but everything was still officially open. In that kind of situation, maybe it's still OK to have the athletic programs open, as well.

Again, it's another moving target. There might be a slightly higher line that (colleges) need to cross just because of the kind of institution they are - their broader base and embeddedness in a community that the professionals might not have.

theScore: I imagine many fans feel torn about sports returning right now. They might have qualms about the health risks for those involved, while also understandably feeling excited to have this beloved product back. What are we to make of that friction? How can fans reconcile those conflicting feelings?

Mosher: ​"Fans" can't reconcile these conflicted feelings because health risks are based in science and rational decision-making and rooting for one's team is based on emotion.

Bowen: Americans have spent a lot of time thinking about it in light of recent concussion discoveries - the question of, "Are you ethically culpable if you're watching football, or wearing football jerseys, or going to games?" You know what's happening to the brains of the players. There's an argument that any consuming that you do, or any participation in that sport that you as a consumer have, you're either explicitly or tacitly supporting it.

I think it falls back on how one assesses the liberty question of the players playing the game.

Mintz: The large question is: How important is sports and broadcasting sports in our society? Quite frankly, I think it's very important. It may be the most important form of entertainment that we have. We've all been in mental anguish the last three months. Probably, sports have a wellness component to them. I think there's a responsibility of the sports teams to get started, if they can safely, as soon as possible for the good of society.

It's a balancing act. What are the benefits? What are the harms? The key thing is, again, you've got to have the controls in place to make it relatively safe. It's never going to be 100% safe.

Klein: Fans are really hungry for the games to return, for a number of reasons. You have the entertainment and escapism factor. But if that's all it was, there's plenty on Netflix to keep us occupied for years. A lot of classic games are being re-aired, and those are fun to watch. But they're just not the same thing as live, actual sports. There's a majesty to sport. There's a drama to it unfolding before you, even if you're thousands of miles away.

The connection that we have with each other through fandom is deep and important for fans. I think that's missing. We can connect in terms of, "Oh, I can't wait for this to get back going." But actual connection during the games and watching the games, I think, is something that we're excited to (have) back. Almost all fans, we understand the health concerns. We don't want it to come back in a way that's going to put anybody at any real serious, undue risk beyond what might already exist within the sport and life.

theScore: If the major leagues return with altered schedules or playoff formats, should the eventual champions have their accomplishments tagged with an asterisk?

Mosher: ​My own personal view is that the asterisk-ing of records is simply foolish.

Klein: No matter what, the season will always be understood as the "COVID season" in the same way that (with) strike-shortened seasons, it's always part of the conversation. It's going to be part of the history, as it should be. But I don't think there should be an asterisk there. They certainly still have to compete in those games and overcome the obstacles that are in front of them. At the end of the day, the champions that are crowned are going to have earned it. That strikes me as being deserved.

Mintz: The players didn't ask for this. It was an unforeseen event. Their accomplishments should not be belittled. In many respects, it might even be valued more, because they put their personal health at risk in order to provide a very highly valued entertainment product to the public.

Bowen: The funny thing about rules is they're all just these made-up human constructs. It's 90 feet to first base - that wasn't given to us by the gods. (This season) we're saying, "Here's how you win the trophy at the end." Everyone enters and says, "OK, we understand the rules." I would not put an asterisk by it. These are the human rules for this human endeavor that we're about to engage in. Once you guys all agree: "Ready? Begin."

theScore: Are there any other points or ethical issues you'd like to discuss?

Mosher: ​As our semester came to an end online, many of my students wanted me to present to them an argument that we need sports to return. I simply wouldn't because human beings don't need sports, nor do they need competition. What all human beings have done throughout history is demonstrate the need to play. Would our society be less interesting without sport in it? Yes, but we would get by.

Klein: I think this absence has highlighted (two) important things: There are more important things in the world than sport, but also, sport is important to our lives and our sense of (self). Personally, as a fan, I'm looking forward to sport being back. I don't mind watching the Bundesliga. It's fun. But I want to watch the teams that I watch regularly again.

Mintz (via follow-up email): One thing I'd like to add, from an ethical perspective, is the notion of a common purpose. During these tough times, a sense of community is important. Our health depends on the actions of others. We should act responsibly, as should our neighbors. This extends to players themselves, team officials, and staff. It could include wearing proper protective equipment - (such as) masks when not on the field - sanitation, and frequent washing of hands.

My point is there is an "ethic of society" component that should be considered beyond compassion and empathy. Each sports league/team has to do everything possible to foster the community interest by protecting the players, officials, and staff - and the public, if and when fans are allowed back in the stadium.

Bowen: I am a little curious about what the messaging will be (when sports resume). These guys are guarding each other in basketball. The women's soccer league is opening in three weeks. "Oh, everything must be fine - let's go out and party and live our normal lives." I'm trying my best to follow what expert scientists are saying, not what sports leagues are doing, but humans aren't following the science. They're following the social trends.

In this case, the optics and the messaging could affect things like not mitigating harm and sending mixed messages, which people will then act on. The leagues need to be really aware of that. I feel like the leagues need to take that on as part of their social responsibility - to say, "Look, here's what we're doing. Stay at home and watch these games with your family. Be safe." That sort of messaging could go a long way.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

When 31 general managers log on, in June or in the fall, to the NHL's first virtual draft, expect the proceedings to evoke the spirit of the Sidney Crosby sweepstakes - the last player bonanza the league held under such weird circumstances.

The upcoming draft shares a certain symmetry with the 2005 edition, and not only because touted top prospect Alexis Lafreniere - like Crosby - hails from the QMJHL's Rimouski Oceanic. Anomalous events will have forced the league to reschedule and relocate both drafts: to the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, in the case of Crosby's entry to the league, and, presumably, to executives' home offices across the U.S. and Canada in this moment of physical distancing.

GMs in recent weeks have expressed objection to staging this draft in June, considering the 2019-20 season might yet resume in some form afterward. The typical selection process has been upended, sort of like it was when the overdue conclusion of a 10-month lockout forced the league to move the show on short notice to a muted conference room.

It was a peculiar setting for a transformative weekend in league history: July 30-31, 2005, when the Penguins capitalized on their luck in a free-for-all lottery by picking the superstar who's since led them to three Stanley Cups - and when several other storylines that would change the NHL were spoken into existence.

Ahead of the 2020 draft's particular unorthodoxy, let's relive some of those subplots from '05: the legendary batch of goalies selected, the crestfallen teams that shortly thereafter won the Cup anyway, the negation of a possible Crosby-Alex Ovechkin partnership, and more.

Penguins' odds pay off

With no 2004-05 standings from which to set a draft order, the NHL modified its rules for the 2005 lottery to give every team a weighted shot at the first overall pick - and the 17-year-old center who'd spent the span of the lockout racking up 168 points in the QMJHL.

The league conferred the best odds - three lottery balls in the draw - to the four teams that hadn't reached the last three postseasons or won any of the past four lotteries: Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Columbus, and the Rangers. (The Blue Jackets and Penguins drafted No. 1 in 2002 and 2003, respectively, but only after Florida earned and traded both picks.) Ten teams received two balls each for making one of those postseasons or winning one of those lotteries. The remainder of the league's clubs got a single ball apiece.

That distribution left Pittsburgh with a mere 6.25% (1-in-16) chance to earn the top selection, scarcely exceeding most other teams' odds of 2.08% (1-in-48) and undermining the belief of cynics and conspiracy theorists that the NHL rigged the lottery to save the Penguins from bankruptcy. Fortune smiled on Pittsburgh that July, while the Blue Jackets landed at sixth overall and the Sabres and Rangers fell out of the top 10.

The upshot of 2004

It was a stroke of luck that revived the Penguins and guaranteed the franchise would evolve into a perennial contender. But history might have unfolded differently if not for a previous setback.

The last time NHL hockey had been played, in 2003-04, the Penguins' 58 points constituted the worst regular-season total in the league. Yet despite a lottery format stacked heavily in favor of the last-place club, Pittsburgh lost the ensuing draw to the Capitals, who also jumped Chicago for the right to draft Ovechkin and, as a result, received only one ball in the Crosby raffle.

What twilight-zone scenario might have ensued had the Penguins won the 2004 lottery and selected Ovechkin, thereby enabling the Blackhawks to take Evgeni Malkin at No. 2 and leaving Washington without a foundational star? The Capitals, Sabres, Blue Jackets, and Rangers would have all seen their odds to land Crosby improve slightly, but imagine this: Maybe Pittsburgh's remaining two balls would have been sufficient to win again, empowering the Penguins to deploy Ovechkin on Crosby's wing for the duration of their careers.

Champs near the top

How's this for an only-in-2005 moment - an oddity befitting a unique draft. Two teams finished below .500 in '03-04 and received top-three picks that, achingly, didn't net them the generational talent available. Those clubs then combined to win the next two Stanley Cups, beating Pittsburgh to the prize even as Crosby became the NHL's first teenaged Art Ross Trophy winner.

Carolina and Anaheim lifted the Cup in 2006 and 2007, respectively, but each did so without its top '05 draftee on the roster. The Hurricanes dealt defenseman Jack Johnson, the No. 3 pick, to the Kings following their championship season - before Johnson left the University of Michigan to turn pro. Bobby Ryan, the Ducks' selection at No. 2, made his NHL debut in 2007-08 as GM Brian Burke's club set about defending its title.

Of all people, Darren Helm - a fifth-round pick at No. 132 - was the first player from the 2005 draft class to lift the Stanley Cup; he centered the Red Wings' fourth line during their triumphant postseason run in 2008. (Two other Detroit draftees from 2005, second-rounder Justin Abdelkader and fourth-rounder Mattias Ritola, each played a pair of games that season but didn't feature in the playoffs.)

Greatest goalie draft ever?

That statement is true in recent memory at minimum. The 2005 draft produced four current NHL starters - Carey Price (No. 5 overall), Tuukka Rask (No. 21), Jonathan Quick (No. 72) and Ben Bishop (No. 85) - but a simple list of names woefully undersells the merit of their collective efforts this past decade:

• Two of those goalies - Price and Rask - have each won a Vezina Trophy; Bishop has been a finalist on three occasions, and Quick twice.

• Quick won the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Stanley Cup in 2012 and backstopped Los Angeles to another championship in 2014.

• Rask helped the Bruins reach the final in 2013 and 2019; Bishop did the same with the Lightning in 2015.

• Price's astounding .972 save percentage - he allowed three goals in five games - led Canada to gold at Sochi in 2014 during the last best-on-best Olympic tournament.

• Bishop, Price, and Rask each boast one NHL season with a save percentage greater than .930, marks that land in the top 25 all time.

• Rask led the NHL in Goals Saved Above Average when the league halted the 2019-20 season. Bishop, now playing in Dallas, ranked fifth; he was tops in that category last season.

The crop of goalies drafted in 2012 is comparable in quality and depth. Andrei Vasilevskiy (No. 19 overall) was the 2018-19 Vezina recipient; Connor Hellebuyck (No. 130) is favored to win this season; Matt Murray (No. 83) is a two-time Stanley Cup champion; Frederik Andersen (No. 87) can generally be counted upon across 60-plus starts per year. But the netminding alumni of Ottawa's Westin draft in 2005 have set a formidably high standard.

Surprise success stories

Crosby, Anze Kopitar (the No. 11 pick in 2005), and Paul Stastny (No. 44) are first, second, and third in their draft class in career scoring, a telltale measure of sustained excellence. Keith Yandle would have surely been selected far earlier than 105th overall if any front office figured he'd rise to fourth on that leaderboard.

In a sense, Yandle, the slick, durable Panthers defenseman who hasn't missed a game in 11 years, is characteristic of the 2005 draft as a whole. Players taken all over the board have distinguished themselves in unexpected ways. The class of 2005 includes:

• Another renowned hockey ironman in Cogliano, the No. 25 overall pick who appeared in 830 consecutive regular-season games from 2007-18. That's the seventh-longest run in NHL history; Yandle is fourth at 866 games and counting, with two spots between him and Doug Jarvis' decades-old benchmark of 964.

• A Stanley Cup hero selected last overall. Hornqvist, the 230th pick, scored the title-winning goal when Pittsburgh knocked off Nashville - the team that drafted him - in 2017.

• The NHL's all-time shortest skater in 5-foot-4 Nathan Gerbe. The No. 142 pick stands one inch taller than Roy Worters, a Hall of Fame goalie from the pre-Original Six era.

• Several top defensemen selected after the first round: Marc-Edouard Vlasic (No. 35), the only player from this class aside from Kopitar and Cogliano who's eclipsed 1,000 games played; Anton Stralman (No. 216), the lone seventh-rounder beyond Hornqvist still in the league; and Letang (No. 62), the six-time All-Star whom Pittsburgh drafted one pick after fellow blue-liner Michael Gergen, a future ECHLer who last played in 2012.

The Capitals comparison

It's worth contrasting the Penguins' headlining hauls from 2004 and 2005 - Malkin and Crosby - with those of Washington, their eternal adversary in the Metropolitan Division. One year after winning the Ovechkin lottery, the Capitals were awarded the No. 14 pick and selected hulking defenseman Sasha Pokulok. He never made the NHL and has played in Quebec's Ligue Nord-Americaine de Hockey since 2012.

Pokulok, to his credit, tore up the LNAH with 60 points in 36 games this season; the French-language Journal de Montreal recently called him the semi-pro circuit's answer to Bobby Orr. It's fair to wonder how his inability to develop as the Capitals once envisioned - a shortfall attributable in part to concussions - hindered the club's championship trajectory. Might Ovechkin have come closer to breaking through before 2018 with the help of another impact teammate?

At least Washington emerged from the lockout with Ovi. At third overall in 2004 and seventh overall in 2005, Chicago selected Cam Barker and Jack Skille, respectively, two players whose journeyman NHL careers rate as disappointments against the expectations of their draft positions. Only the arrivals of Jonathan Toews (No. 3 in 2006) and Patrick Kane (No. 1 in 2007) turned the Blackhawks around, showing - as Pittsburgh did with Crosby - that if a team is bad enough for long enough, it might eventually stumble into a draft worth remembering.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Somewhere, Digit Murphy still has the ski pants she was given at Nagano in 1998, a keepsake from women's hockey's groundbreaking entrance to the Winter Olympics - and her on-the-fly introduction to analyzing games on national TV. She was 36 and established as an elite college coach at Brown University when TNT hired her to work the tournament with Doc Emrick and Joe Micheletti, old broadcasting hands who were by her side as the stress of the stage set in.

"For people who know me, they're like, 'Dij, I can't even believe you would even think that it was nerve-racking.' But you're sitting there in the chair going, 'Oh, my God.' There's millions of people thinking about you," Murphy told theScore. "I was young. Now, I'd be all over it, but back then, it was the first time I'd ever even been on television."

If there really is a first time for everything, Murphy's hockey resume might serve as sufficient proof. Over 22 seasons at Brown from 1989-2011, she became the NCAA's first Division I women's coach to reach 300 wins. Upon joining the Boston Blades in 2012, Murphy led the now-defunct Canadian Women's Hockey League club to a breakthrough pair of championships. She returned to the title game in 2018 with Kunlun Red Star, the CWHL expansion squad she coached for a year in Shenzhen as China sought to elevate its floundering national program ahead of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.

Now comes the latest great challenge of Murphy's globe-trot through the game: spearheading the creation of a pro team at what can generously be described as an inconvenient time.

Murphy, now 58, is the president of the National Women's Hockey League's Toronto Six franchise, the construction of which before and since its launch in April has been complicated by circumstance. Murphy has been building the team - conducting head coach and general manager searches; signing half of her potential 2020-21 lineup - not from Toronto, but from her home in Providence, Rhode Island. It's a necessary concession to the physical distancing protocols that have grounded sports and so much else.

The NWHL is expanding to Toronto, its sixth city, at a unique moment for women's hockey specifically, one in which the sport's most recognizable players - the Americans and Canadians who line up on either side of that splendid international rivalry - continue to spurn their continent's lone pro option. Under the banner of the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, stars from Hilary Knight to Marie-Philip Poulin to Kendall Coyne Schofield spent the 2019-20 season headlining the Dream Gap Tour, a traveling series of privately sponsored exhibition games intended to magnify their call for a new league.

"Our mission … has not changed and we are still moving forward with next season - in full force," the PWHPA wrote in a statement the day the NWHL announced its Toronto expansion. "Simply put, the opportunities that the NWHL will provide may be good for some players, but it's not the opportunities that we want for our players or for future generations of young girls who will play the game at the highest level."

Into this chasm - the gulf between opposing ideas of how to safeguard and grow the game's pro prospects - steps Murphy, the pioneering figure with ideas of her own. In September, the Boston Pride became the NWHL's first privately (rather than centrally) owned team. Toronto is the second, nudging the league in the direction Murphy thinks it needs to go: toward independent owners making long-term plays for the support of their chosen markets, focusing all the while on empowering women on and away from the ice.

"The vision that I see is: women owning the sport themselves, playing the sport, driving the sport not only from a player perspective, (but) from an ownership perspective, from GMs, coaches all being female," Murphy said. "Now, we can collectively own the space where women can actually watch it, play it, and thrive in it."

Murphy was fundraising for a startup to connect women athletes and business leaders when the onset of the coronavirus shutdown stalled her momentum. She wound up instead taking charge of this unusual expansion team - the rare pro club to come into being with sports paused.

Murphy had been in regular contact with Johanna Neilson Boynton, a former Harvard hockey captain who liked to pick Murphy's brain about her years in the game. Boynton, the CEO of a home construction company in Massachusetts, is also the Toronto Six's lead investor. Soon enough, she convinced Murphy to join her and team chairman Tyler Tumminia in senior management.

Their roster is taking shape. The franchise hired a GM last week - Mandy Cronin, a retired goalie who helped found the CWHL back in 2007 - and participated in the NWHL's five-round online player draft last month. Murphy has so far signed 13 players; seven of them, including former U.S. national team winger Shiann Darkangelo, took part in last season's Dream Gap Tour following the demise of the CWHL in spring 2019.

"She's very for the players, making sure that we're taken care of," Darkangelo said of Murphy, whose Kunlun team she played for in 2017-18. "She's a big visionary and doer and dreamer. That's what she's best at, I think: painting the picture for the future of women's hockey and getting people to buy in."

Even when set against hundreds of wins and an Olympic sojourn, Murphy's year in Shenzhen - her most recent stint behind the bench, during which she also coached China's women's team in the third division of the world championships - rates as memorable. Buoyed by the brilliance of Finnish goalie Noora Raty, whose .944 save percentage led the CWHL, Murphy guided Kunlun to a 21-6-1 record and an overtime loss in the 2018 Clarkson Cup title game.

Despite the gap in quality between the national programs of the U.S. and Canada and those of every other country, the resources afforded to Murphy abroad far exceeded those of women's pro franchises in North America. Coaching in China was phenomenal, she said, thanks in part to the professionalization of the experience: the first-class flights, the televised games, the big banners featuring likenesses of the players - with costs funded by deep-pocketed team ownership.

"It was legit," Murphy said. She added: "It's interesting that when you go outside of the U.S., you think about it as less gender equity because they don't have Title IX (a federal civil rights law passed in 1972)."

Instead, Murphy said, "the (women's) sports programs, some of them, are more elevated."

Securing what its members consider to be fair compensation and working conditions was the animating purpose behind the PWHPA. Throughout last season, the Olympians at the fore of the Dream Gap Tour expressed their desire for a new league in which all players are supported by training and game-day staff; can play, practice at reasonable hours, and store their equipment in one all-purpose facility; and, crucially, earn a living wage. In the NWHL in 2019-20, some players earned up to $15,000 under the league's $150,000 salary cap, and every player received a further 26% raise through a split of sponsorship and media revenues.

Murphy, who said she respects the PWHPA and supports its ideals, doesn't believe its presence is antithetical to the NWHL's. Competing women's hockey organizations can coexist, she said, though she figures all parties would be stronger if aligned - ideally with the NHL involved in a top league as a partner, not as an owner or operator. In that vein, she's convinced a prevailing future business model shouldn't mirror that of the NCAA, wherein women's teams don't have to be sustained through supply and demand.

"That's where the players, now, have to step up and be part of this new leadership model that grows professional sports," Murphy said. "They can't just think that money's going to (fall) from the sky or someone else is going to take care of them. They need to be part of this growth mindset."

Katey Stone, the head coach of Harvard's women's hockey team since 1994, shared a story about the tight-knit nature of the world she and Murphy occupy. Despite a rivalry pitting Harvard against Brown numerous times each season - including three conference playoff games in one four-year span - Stone and Murphy used to occasionally hit the road together for joint recruiting trips, an arrangement between friends to maximize the reach of their respective budgets.

Those excursions and fiery matchups attuned Stone to her coaching counterpart's relentlessness and competitive bent. It's those traits, Stone said, that make Murphy optimally suited to navigating the complications of her Toronto assignment.

"I call her 'The Tornado' for a reason. That's the kind of energy she has," said Stone, who for a while supplanted Murphy as the winningest coach in Division I history. "She's going to do what she can to make the NWHL Toronto franchise the best it can be. She'll create energy and enthusiasm that people are going to want to be a part of.

"They're going to want to play there, they're going to want to work there, and they're going to want to go see those games when they can."

Whether the 2020-21 season begins in November, as the NWHL hopes, or at some later time due to public-health guidelines, Toronto's expansion lineup will have to take aim at the Pride, the league's new standard-setter. In lead investor Miles Arnone's first year at the helm, Boston topped the league standings at 23-1-0 with a plus-77 goal differential - only to miss out on a title shot in mid-March when the Isobel Cup championship game was called off the day before puck drop.

There are key personnel and logistical matters left to settle - Toronto's head coach and home arena remain undetermined - but Murphy said contending for the Isobel Cup will be an immediate expectation. In that pursuit, she can lean on precedent, and not just the titles she won with Boston's old CWHL team. As part of a committee of college coaches, Murphy helped select the U.S. Olympic players whose gold-medal victory she analyzed next to Emrick and Micheletti in Nagano.

Though Murphy's club won't exclusively hire women off the ice, she thinks it essential that the NWHL promote their candidacy for major jobs that usually go to men: "The more women in (hockey) ops, in game ops, in coaching that we can employ, I think the better for our model."

As for the importance of thinking local, the other key in her blueprint for advancing the game, Toronto has a high number of registered women's players fortifying the ranks of the latest hockey-loving population she's out to court.

This squad isn't Toronto's first women's pro team. The CWHL-owned Furies won a title by beating Murphy's Blades in the 2014 Clarkson Cup. The Markham Thunder, operating out of a Toronto suburb, edged Murphy's Kunlun club in the 2018 final. Both folded along with the rest of the league.

If it seems daunting to try to prosper in their stead - at this demanding time in a place where so many pro sports are already entrenched - Murphy isn't stressed.

"We're not going to, off the bat probably, sell 5,000 (tickets), but maybe we could in one game. You never know," she said. "And if we can consistently sell out a 1,000-1,500-seat arena, good, let's do that - and then step it up and build a loyal fan base."

Note: This story has been edited to reflect the name of the franchise, which was revealed on Tuesday.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Sports history is littered with great teams that dominated their regular seasons only to fall short of ultimate glory in the playoffs. Our writers are paying tribute to those teams who were Almost Famous. After tackling MLB, NHL, and NFL, up next is another NHL edition.

Rarely in sports does a decade, a familiar yet stilted unit of measurement, sum up an era so tidily. Three teams dominated the NHL in the 1970s: Bobby Orr’s Boston Bruins, the Broad Street Bully Philadelphia Flyers, and the dynastic Montreal Canadiens, who bridged Jean Beliveau's last hurrah with the incredible reign of Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden, and company.

Other franchises could have won a title; three came within games of doing so. But they never broke through, and some of history's longest Stanley Cup droughts persisted instead.

Those poor recurrent runners-up were the Chicago Black Hawks - the name's two words weren't merged until 1986 - the New York Rangers, and the Buffalo Sabres, who each iced at least a few excellent teams at varying points of the '70s that invariably fell short in the playoffs. Sometimes they lost to each other. Sometimes they were favored in the Cup final against, say, Montreal, only to squander a two-goal lead at home in Game 7.

Different strengths turned Chicago, New York, and Buffalo into contenders. The Rangers had starpower and were built to defend; the Sabres' famed French Connection line powered offenses that scored nearly 4.5 goals per game. All three aligned behind a common sob story: In a league that expanded in phases from 12 to 18 teams, they were on the right side of the competitive imbalance that ensued, but couldn't top the whole gauntlet in any one year.

Chicago was first to suffer from this period's particular cruelty.

Three Hall of Famers - forwards Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita and goaltender Tony Esposito - played for the Black Hawks in the early '70s, an assemblage of top-tier talent on par with that of Boston (Orr, Phil Esposito) and Montreal as Beliveau handed the torch to Lafleur. Like several fellow contenders in a polarized league, coach Billy Reay's clubs frequently surpassed the 1.00 mark in Hockey Reference's Simple Rating System (SRS), which gauges a team's strength based on its schedule and goal differential. (By comparison, no 2019-20 team was above 0.75 when the season paused.)

Chicago's regular-season promise was rendered hollow when Tony Esposito, who won the Vezina and Calder Trophies in 1970, flopped in a semifinal sweep that season against the soon-to-be-champion Bruins. The Black Hawks came similarly close in 1972, when a superior Rangers team edged them in the semis; 1973 was the year of a surprising run to the final following Hull's jump to the World Hockey Association; and 1974 ended, along with another Vezina season from Esposito, against Boston in six games.

In all, Chicago's best five-year span produced losses in three semifinal series and two Cup finals. No playoff defeat hurt more than 1971, when Montreal's quarterfinal upset of all-time juggernaut Boston (SRS: 2.29) established Chicago as the remaining favorite. Up three games to two against the Canadiens in the final, the Black Hawks fell 4-3 in Game 6 in Montreal and then blew a 2-0 lead at home in the decisive matchup. Such is the risk of letting Jacques Lemaire aim, fire, and score from the neutral zone.

Though Montreal delivered this smarting blow, Bruins-related misfortune bookended and shaped Chicago's lost half-decade. Black Hawks general manager Tommy Ivan kneecapped his team with an infamous 1967 trade that sent Phil Esposito to Beantown alongside Fred Stanfield and Ken Hodge. Chicago got one back on Boston by signing Orr in 1976 - after the mangling of the wondrous defenseman's left knee ensured his best days were behind him.

Rather than end sometime in the '70s, the Black Hawks' spell without a Cup totaled 49 years (1961-2010). They were upstaged in that category by the Rangers, whose record 54-year drought (1940-1994) endured because the GAG Line wasn't able to buck it.

Three Rangers teams were stellar in this era: 1971, 1972, and 1973. In the first of those years, they lost in the semis to a better Chicago squad; in the third, Chicago's semifinal win without Hull constituted a big upset. The intervening '72 season marked the peak of Jean Ratelle, Vic Hadfield, and Rod Gilbert's cumulative powers: these members of the GAG (goal-a-game) Line became the NHL's first trio to score 40 goals apiece. Bolstered by the Hall of Famers Brad Park on defense and Ed Giacomin in net, New York recorded a .699 points percentage despite losing Art Ross Trophy candidate Ratelle to a broken ankle in early March.

When the playoffs opened a month later, New York ousted the reigning champion Habs in six games and then swept Chicago, setting up a gem of a meeting for the Cup. Boston was the opponent, and though the Rangers held Phil Esposito without a goal all series, Ratelle managed just one assist after hastening his return from injury. The Bruins won Games 1, 2, and 4 by one goal. In Game 6 they clinched the title at Madison Square Garden with a 3-0 shutout, the product of a team effort that Orr, who scored the winner, described as a "perfect game."

Like Chicago, the Rangers' best shot to win had faded by the time Buffalo, an expansion entrant in 1971, arrived on the scene in earnest. The franchise has never won a Cup, a deficiency that was consummated in the '70s despite four straight seasons of standout play. Led by Gilbert Perreault, Rick Martin, and Rene Robert - the French Connection line - the Sabres could skate with anyone and score in bunches. But after the comparably great Flyers beat them in the 1975 final, they went on to bow out in three consecutive second rounds.

In that '75 season, Buffalo posted a .706 points percentage and then authored a signature six-game victory over the powerhouse Habs (SRS: 1.72) in the conference finals, delaying the dawn of Montreal's next dynasty by a year. Two memories resonate from the subsequent Cup final. One is the Fog Game, when humid weather and the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium's lack of air conditioning conspired to cloud the action at ice level. (How severe was the fog? We don't call Game 3 the Bat Game, even though Sabres center Jim Lorentz straight up killed one with his stick that same night.)

The second memory: Bernie Parent shutting the door. Buffalo won the Fog Game 5-4 in overtime, but the Flyers' netminder still allowed only 11 goals in the series, stymying the Sabres' vaunted offense with a .937 save percentage. Parent cemented his Conn Smythe Trophy performance when the series returned to The Aud for Game 6: his 32 stops powered Philly's 2-0 Cup-clinching win.

So went a decade that was uniquely unforgiving to all but a select few teams. Final confirmation of this trend came in 1979, when Lafleur, Lemaire, and Dryden's impossibly stacked Canadiens rolled to the title, their fourth in four years, with a five-game win in the Cup final.

Montreal's vanquished opponent: the Rangers, who were nowhere near as loaded as in the GAG Line's heyday, but who resurged unexpectedly that season to pull off a seismic upset in the conference finals. With Phil Esposito - acquired from Boston for Park and Ratelle a few years earlier - in tow, the Rangers eliminated the heavily favored New York Islanders in six games, postponing the coronation of a new dynasty until 1980.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.