Stanley Cup

The Stanley cup, the trophy awarded each year to the team winning the hockey championship of the world, is a small, insignificant-looking container, filled with dents because it is a Canadian tradition for the winning team to drink champagne out of it and in the celebration of many victories the cup has not always been handled carefully. It is competed for, after the regular playing season ends, in a complicated series of play-off games, a series designed for box-office purposes rather than for scrupulous fairness in picking a winner. Thus the Boston Bruins, the Chicago Black Hawks, the New York Rangers--finishing in the order named in the American group of the National Hockey League--played a preliminary series against the three leading teams in the International group--the Montreal Maroons, the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators.

The Rangers won in the third-place playoff. Ching Johnson, big, bald, hooknosed, hip-swinging defense man of the Rangers, played with a grotesque aluminum protector strapped around his broken jaw. Frank Boucher, star centre, wore a cast of tape and bandage around ligaments he had torn away from his left collarbone shortly before the series. They came from behind in the third period of the deciding game with Ottawa, scored three times in three minutes, won at 5 to 2. Howie Morenz of the Canadiens, the fastest skater in hockey, his round, heavy shoulders hunched toward his stick, his strong legs pumping in characteristic gait resembling a shuffle, but matchless in speed, broke a tie and won his team's series by curling a high shot past Gardner, frenzied Chicago goalie, who had stopped everything up to that time. Against the Rangers in the second round of the playoffs, Desrivieres, rookie of the Canadiens, got his stick on the puck at a moment when the regulars of both teams were exhausted by an overtime period which had lasted 68 minutes. Desrivieres flipped it in, and in the second game, played in Madison Square Garden, the Canadiens had no trouble winning again, qualifying for a final series against Boston.

Now something happened that seemed impossible in the light of past performances. The Bruins had broken all records in the regular season for number of points and number of goals scored. They had won 38 games, lost only five. They had beaten the pugnacious, heavy Maroons in a bruising first-place play-off series. In a way, by their point lead and their victory over the Maroons, they had already, so far as most people could see, won the world's championship twice, but the Canadiens, brilliant, temperamental, undependable, and given a chance by the queer play-off system which puts the first three teams in each group on an equal basis regardless of what they have done in the regular season, found a way to stop them. Instead of using all their speed in attacking, in their usual fashion, they went down the ice only in occasional rushes, concentrated on defense, the two wings wedging the opposing puck-carrier, the centre checking back for passes, and the ordinary defense men furiously upsetting any Bruin who managed to get through this network. Morenz seemed to be in a thousand places at once, shooting oftener than anyone else, checking back like a lightning bolt. For a while in the last period of the second game, played in Montreal after the Canadiens had won in Boston, the Bruins played with five men down the ice. They whacked shot after shot against the pads of Goalie Hainsworth, scored once and seemed about to do it again when the gong rang and the game ended with the Canadiens winners, 4-3. Idols of the French section of Montreal, the Canadiens rushed jubilantly to the dressing-room, hearing, as they put on their clothes, the murmur of the crowd waiting in the cold outside the Forum for them to come out and take a bow.

The Lady Byng Trophy. Than hockey, no game offers greater opportunities for dirty work among the players. To tone up the sport, each year the Lady Byng Trophy is awarded, after a poll of sports writers in the various cities of the circuit, to the man adjudged the most gentlemanly effective player in the National Hockey League. Last week it was given, for the second year running, to Centre Frank Boucher, New York Rangers.

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