1975 MEMORIAL CUP
New Westminster Bruins, Toronto Marlboros and Sherbrooke Castors
at Kitchener (Memorial Auditorium)
They were the big, bad Bruins and they were beginning an unprecedented string of successes in the world of Western Canadian junior hockey.
After finishing first in the East Division in 1970-71 and flaming out in the first round of the playoffs, the Estevan Bruins packed their bags and moved to New Westminster, a suburb of Vancouver.
They became the New Westminster Bruins. They would turn their home -- Queen's Park Arena -- into the most intimidating facility junior hockey had known.
The Bruins were coached by Ernie (Punch) McLean, who had tutored under Scotty Munro and who would go on to become a legend in his own right.
The Bruins made the first of four straight Memorial Cup appearances in the spring of 1975.
"We like tough, aggressive hockey and that's what we're going to have to play if we want that national title,” said McLean, whose club featured brilliant young defencemen Barry Beck and rookie Brad Maxwell, with Gord Laxton in goal. The leaders up front were team captain Barry Smith, Rick Shinske, Brian Shmyr, Mark Lofthouse, Mike Sleep and Kelly Secord.
The muscle was provided by the likes of defenceman Harold Phillipoff and Clayton Pachal, who could play defence or left wing.
This was a Bruins team built on experience (nine players were in their final season of eligibility) and inexperience (there were nine rookies). But more than that, it was built on muscle and defence.
The league's sixth-best offence didn't put a scorer into the top 10. Shinske topped the club with 80 points; the Edmonton Oil Kings were the only other team not to have at least one player with 100 points. Lofthouse led the Bruins with 36 goals; they had 13 players in double figures.
The magic, however, was on defence where they surrendered only 260 goals, the third-best figure that season.
The Bruins wound up third in the West Division over the 70-game regular season. Their 85 points (37-22-11) left them 14 points in arrears of the pennant-winning Victoria Cougars.
Admittedly, the Bruins had struggled through a lot of the regular season.
"If there was a turning point for us,” McLean said, "it came early in February when we got a break in the schedule and 10 days off.
"I told the guys to go hide, to get lost, just go and do whatever they wanted to. When they came back from that break our team just started to go.”
New Westminster knew it was onto something in the first round when it eliminated the second-place Medicine Hat Tigers in five games.
The Bruins then took out Victoria in six games in the West Division final.
And, in the WCHL final, the Bruins got past the Saskatoon Blades in seven games, winning that seventh game 7-2.
The Bruins became the first team from B.C. to play for the Memorial Cup since the Trail Smoke Eaters in 1944.
"I don't know if anybody believed me or not when I told them we could win it all,” McLean said. "But you can believe this, I meant it.
"Our farm system had started to develop after we'd been in this area for four years. We had the makings of a good hockey team and when we got Richard Shinske from Calgary in a trade, it gave us the extra strength at centre that we needed.”
The 1975 Memorial Cup tournament was again a single round-robin, but organizers had added a semifinal game. Now, after the round-robin portion ended, the top team went on to the final, with the other two teams meeting in a semifinal game. The tournament would be held in the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium.
It would also feature George Armstrong's Toronto Marlboros and the Sherbrooke Castors of coach Ghislain Delage.
The Marlies had coasted through the Ontario Hockey Association's regular season, but ran into all kinds of grief in the playoffs and ended up playing 23 games in 35 days.
They opened against the Kingston Canadians and needed eight games to win that eight-point quarterfinal series. The same thing happened against the Sudbury Wolves, with Toronto winning the eighth game in overtime.
The Marlies won the first two games of the final against Dale McCourt and the Hamilton Fincups, but this series ended up going seven games, Toronto winning the finale 8-3 before 8,261 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The best of the Marlies was centre Bruce Boudreau, who totalled 68 goals and 97 assists (165 points) in the regular season, and Mark Napier.
The lineup also boasted solid goaltending from Gary Carr, with the likes of Mike Kitchen and Mike McEwen on defence, and John Anderson, Mike Kaszycki, Lynn Jorgenson and Ron Wilson helping up front.
However, the Marlies would play the entire tournament without John Tonelli, one of their premier performers. He had been fourth in the regular-season scoring race, with 49 goals and 89 assists.
But once he turned 18, Tonelli sat out all of Toronto's playoff games because he didn't want to risk jeopardizing his chances of playing pro with the World Hockey Association's Houston Aeros the following season.
While the Marlies struggled, Sherbrooke rolled through the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League regular season, winning 51 games, and then coasted through the playoffs, losing just one game en route to the championship.
The Castors ousted the Hull Festivals and Chicoutimi Sagueneens, winning best-of-seven affairs in straight games.
Sherbrooke met Mike Bossy and the Laval National in the championship series, and lost the fourth game 11-10 before wrapping it up with an 8-0 victory in the fifth game.
The Castors had eight players reach the 30-goal plateau, with the best of them being three 19-year-olds -- left-winger Claude Larose, right-winger Michel Brisebois and centre Marc Tessier, their captain. Larose, with 69 goals and 76 assists in 1974-75, had 205 goals over three seasons. The Castors also had the QMJHL's top goaltender in Nick Sanza, who was backed up by Richard Sirois.
The two eastern teams met in the Memorial Cup opener on May 3 before 3,162 fans, well below the capacity of more than 5,000.
Attendance -- or lack of same -- was already drawing queries, as some people pointed out that the 1974 tournament in Calgary had sold out every game with tickets $1 cheaper than at Kitchener.
Toronto won that first game 5-4 on Jorgenson's goal at 12:33 of the first overtime period.
The Castors actually led 3-0 early in the second period -- on two goals from Robert Simpson and one from Brisebois -- before running into penalty problems.
John Smrke struck for two power-play goals, before Napier tied the game at 12:15 with three seconds left in yet another Sherbrooke penalty.
Napier put the Marlies out front 11 minutes into the third period, only to have Larose tie it at 19:31.
Delage blamed the defeat on "foolish” penalties.
"I don't want to put the blame on the referee -- he has a job to do,” he said, referring to Murray Harding of Winnipeg.
Sanza lived up to his billing, turning aside 46 shots. Carr stopped 33 shots.
"We've been there before,” Armstrong said of being down 3-0. "We're more used to the pressure and it was perhaps a little disadvantage to Sherbrooke.”
The Castors repeated the performance in their second game on May 5.
This time, they took a 3-0 lead into the second period against New Westminster and watched as the Bruins scored five straight goals en route to a 7-5 victory.
Berry, Smith, Shinske, Secord, Shmyr, Steve Clippingdale and Pachal scored for the Bruins in front of 3,156 fans. Simpson and Larose, with two each, and Richard Mulhern scored for Sherbrooke.
The game took more than three hours to play and included 14 fighting majors.
According to Dennis Passa of The Canadian Press: "McLean said Sherbrooke was out to intimidate the Bruins, but didn't succeed when New Westminster started skating in the second period.”
Offered McLean: "We weren't skating in the first period. We were watching them go by us, and I think when the guys realized they really had to go to work, they did.”
By now, the McLean legend was starting to build.
One report from Kitchener told of two drills McLean allegedly used to toughen up his Bruins.
In one, a player began behind one net with a puck. While he skated towards centre ice McLean sent players at random to hit the puck carrier. Miss the puck carrier and you were the next puck carrier in what McLean called "target practice.”
In the other drill, McLean supposedly had two players set up back-to-back behind one net; they would then go full speed and collide -- hey, no braking allowed -- behind the other net. If a player bailed out, he had to skate laps.
The Bruins clinched a spot in the final when they scored four third-period goals and went on to beat the Marlies 6-2 before 4,536 fans on May 7.
The Bruins set it up with a great display of forechecking as they outskated and outhit Toronto.
"That's the way we always play,” McLean said.
The Bruins led 2-0 in the first period on goals from Shmyr and Pachal.
Napier scored the second period's only goal and Jorgenson tied the score at 1:54 of the third period.
The Bruins dominated after that. Clippingdale broke the tie at 5:08 and Sleep, Berry and Shinske added insurance goals.
The Bruins took seven of 12 minors in the tournament's first fight-free game.
"Toronto is supposed to have the best power play in the east,” McLean said. "But we've got a fine bunch of penalty killers ourselves.”
Laxton was superb again, this time stopping 27 shots.
That left the Marlboros and Castors to play a one-game showdown on May 9, with the victor moving into the Memorial Cup final against the Bruins.
And that semifinal game belonged to Boudreau.
A 68-goal man in the regular season, Boudreau strutted his stuff in front of 3,498 fans. He struck for five power-play goals -- Napier set up three of them -- as Toronto hammered Sherbrooke 10-4.
"I guess this will make me sleep a lot better tonight,” said Boudreau, who went into the game without a goal in the tournament.
He admitted he may have been "pressing” but added that "I think we skated for 60 minutes out there and that was the big thing.”
Boudreau had 12 goals in 23 playoff games prior to the tournament. He felt he should have done better but some of the blame for his slump could have been placed on a freak injury he suffered just prior to the playoffs.
During a practice, Boudreau fell on one of Armstrong's skates and needed 16 stitches to close a cut to his face. He would suffer from double vision for about a month but said he could see perfectly the night he scored five on the Castors.
The Marlies struck for five third-period goals, three from Boudreau, as they knocked Sanza out of the game. Robert Sauve, who had been picked up from Laval, came on in relief and finished up.
McEwen, with two, Anderson, Smrke and Jorgenson had Toronto's other goals.
Larose, with two, Brisebois and Fernand Leblanc scored for Sherbrooke.
"The momentum that George Armstrong has put into this team is unbelievable,” offered Sherbrooke general manager George Guilbault. "They play very discipoined hockey and are a talented hockey team.
"We had to play catch-up hockey all night and as you've seen, you're definitely not able to do that in a Memorial Cup tournament.”
And the Marlies won it all two days later when they erased a 2-0 deficit late in the first period and went on to a 7-3 victory over the Bruins before 4,382 fans.
"They always start out a bit slow,” Armstrong said of his Marlies. The players tossed him into the shower in their dressing room, and when they got back to their hotel they threw him into the swimming pool.
Toronto tied the game with two goals 33 seconds apart before taking a 5-3 lead into the third period.
Anderson and Kaszycki scored two goals each for Toronto, with Jorgenson, Napier and Boudreau adding one each.
Phillipoff, Secord and Lofthouse replied for the Bruins.
"Marlies got a few lucky bounces at the wrong time for us and that's all you need in junior hockey in a one-shot deal,” McLean said.
According to one report, Anderson's goals were both of the "fluke” variety.
The first, late in the opening period, tied the game 2-2. Anderson rifled a shot high off one of Laxton's shoulders. The puck bounced high in the air, landed and bounced into the goal.
The second, early in the middle period, was actually a centring pass. It hit Laxton on the back of one pad and ended up in the net.
It was the Marlies' second title in three years and the seventh in their history. This one may have been a little more special because they had six times faced playoff elimination.
Three trophies were awarded for the first time at the conclusion of the 1975 tournament.
Smith, the Bruins' captain, was awarded the Stafford Smythe Memorial Trophy as the tournament's most valuable player.
The George Parsons Trophy, for sportsmanship, went to Smrke.
Carr went home with the Hap Emms Memorial Trophy as the event's outstanding goaltender.
NEXT: 1976 (Hamilton Fincups, New Westminster Bruins and Quebec Remparts)
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