The winds of change are blowing through the Portland Winter Hawks’ organization. . . . Dean (Scooter) Vrooman, who left the Winter Hawks more than a year ago after a lengthy stint as the team’s much-loved play-by-play voice, remembers the legendary Brian Shaw in a story that was prepared a couple of years ago as part of a book project that never got off the ground . . .
PART 6:
After the Winter Hawks won the 1983 Memorial Cup, Brian Shaw and Ed Chynoweth came to the forefront to deal with another festering problem. Before 1983, there weren’t any rules in the NHL-CHL agreement regarding 17-, 18- or 19-year-olds being called up to NHL teams.
Yes, there was one rule under which NHL teams couldn’t take players younger than 20 years of age and assign them to professional minor league teams. But they could call up juniors any time they wanted. This had happened off and on before 1983 and it was a simmering issue, but the 1983-84 Winter Hawks brought it to a head.
Shaw had every reason to believe his 1983-84 team would be strong again – so strong, in fact, that he traded centre Ray Ferraro to the Brandon Wheat Kings. Shaw’s thinking was that Ferraro would be a 19-year-old third-line centre behind Hawks’ stars Ken Yaremchuk and Alfie Turcotte. But even after telling Portland that Yaremchuk would return to the Winter Hawks for his 19-year-old season, the Chicago Blackhawks changed their mind and kept him in the NHL.
At the same time, the Calgary Flames decided to keep Winter Hawks’ team captain Rich Kromm, 19. The Vancouver Canucks called up left-winger Cam Neely, an 18-year-old first-round draft choice. Finally, the Montreal Canadiens, in the throes of one of the storied franchises worst seasons, called up Turcotte, another first-round draft pick.
The recall of Turcotte meant that four underage players were called up to the NHL, all in the same season and all from the same major junior team.
Before Montreal called for Turcotte, I remember interviewing Montreal GM Serge Savard like it was yesterday. I was thinking during the entire interview that he was going to call up Turcotte because the Canadiens couldn’t get any worse and perhaps it would give the piranhas of the Montreal press corps something positive to write about instead of second-guessing every move Savard made.
I was right. Turcotte packed his bags and joined Yaremchuk, Kromm and Neely in the NHL. It was truly an amazing moment in league history to be a part of.
The Winter Hawks started out 10-2 that season, but once Neely and Turcotte joined Yaremchuk and Kromm in the NHL, it didn’t take long for Shaw’s hockey team, and his world, to unravel. The Hawks had never had a losing season in Portland, but they would go 23-37 the rest of the way.
Shaw was always popular with the press because he spoke his mind, which made him rather very quotable. He shot from the hip and made great copy. So he made a lot of headlines in 1983-84, telling anyone who would listen about the travesty of teen-agers in the NHL. Lots of money, no billets or host families or support staff, no ability to relate with older professional players, many of whom had families and were too busy to mentor teen-age prospects. And, worst of all, none of the four Winter Hawks’ underage players were playing very much, if at all, on their NHL teams.
“How can the NHL have the audacity to call up these high-impact junior stars and just put them in the press box to watch their teams play?” Shaw asked repeatedly.
Meanwhile, he publicly called the 1983-84 Winter Hawks a midget team because he had to call up 15-year-olds Dan Woodley and Jamie Nicolls, and even 14-year-old Dave Archibald, to play major junior hockey.
Glen Goodall played a full season in Seattle as a 14-year-old in 1984-85. This was ridiculous, Shaw argued.
So he and Chynoweth, another compelling speaker and a respected voice in the media, went on a public rampage to change the rules. It probably helped Shaw’s case that Yaremchuk, Kromm, Neely and Turcotte all performed below expectations in the NHL.
Neely, it could be argued, was the only one to eventually mature and become the player that scouts had projected. But it wasn’t just those four players. There were quite a few compelling stories of players being rushed to the big time only to fail. It made sense. It was just not good for most players this young to be launched into professional hockey.
So Shaw and Chynoweth spearheaded a move throughout the CHL hierarchy aimed at negotiating a new agreement with the NHL, one that would outline only specific extreme circumstances where NHL teams were allowed to keep players younger than 20 years of age on their rosters, or even to call them up.
The system, which went into affect in the late 1980s, is still the model that is used to this day and has probably been responsible for the timely development and maturing of many junior players to noteworthy NHL careers.
The Winter Hawks rebuilt and had terrific teams in 1986 when they once again played host to the Memorial Cup, and in 1987 when they reached the league final, losing in seven games to the Medicine Hat Tigers.
But I personally got to witness Brian Shaw deal with the other side of hockey – losing. Since coming to Portland in 1976-77, things had pretty much gone his way. Oh, there had been some playoff disappointments in the late ‘70s, but the Winter Hawks were clearly the model franchise in all of junior hockey.
However, things changed in 1987-88.
It would be the first of a stretch of three seasons out of four where the Hawks would be near the bottom of the league and would miss the playoffs. The main reason, without question, was that other teams had caught up to and, indeed, passed the Hawks in the areas of scouting and acquiring talent. More and more teams were looking at the long haul and there were fewer high-impact players being acquired through trades. It meant that you either beat the other team in the scouting trenches or they would beat you.
Kamloops revolutionized the WHL when Blazers general manager Bob Brown hired Ken Hitchcock, out of the Sherwood Park, Alta., midget ranks, in the mid-1980s. Hitchcock was much, much more than a good coach. He knew where the players were and developed the WHL’s first true scouting network. These days, every team in the league has a scouting network, but Shaw was slow to react and revamp his own team’s scouting personnel and methods.
Consequently, in spite of having two of junior hockey’s best forwards in Dennis Holland and Troy Mick, both of whom were acquired via trade, the 1987-88 Winter Hawks won only 24 games and gave up a whopping 449 goals. Shaw called that edition of the winter Hawks “Team Disaster.”
And after regaining prominence and reaching the league final the next season through a couple of stunning quick-fix acquisitions, the problems in Portland’s scouting system became acute when the team won only 24 games in 1989-90 and 17 in 1990-91.
(Part 6 of 7)
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