NHL Notes : Canadiens Count On Bob Gainey

What does captain Bob Gainey mean to the Montreal Canadiens? Everything, say his teammates.

“You could see how much he means to the team the way the guys kept looking over at him,” goaltender Brian Hayward said about Gainey’s return earlier this year after he missed the first part of the season with a knee injury.

Says Mats Naslund:

“His words seem to mean so much more than when somebody else says the same thing. I think that’s because he only talks to you when he has something to say. There’s not much complaining in the dressing room when he’s there.”

Detroit Coach Jacques Demers on defenseman Mike O’Connell:

“He seems to be too good a person to be playing hockey.”

Demers calls O’Connell “a stopper,” defined thusly: “Someone who sees both the players’ side and the coaches’ side,” and plays an important role in molding a successful team.

“The guy’s a winner,” Demers says. “He knows what it takes. I don’t remember one bad game he’s played.”

Detroit forward Dave Barr is having a hard time finding a home in the NHL. He has been on three teams this season (St. Louis-Hartford-Detroit) and he has played with five teams in his 200-plus-game NHL career.

The average NHL salary this season is $155,513, which puts it significantly below the other major professional team sports. Major league baseball and the NBA both have average salaries in the low $400,000s while the NFL is in the low $200,000s.

Scotty Bowman, the NHL’s all-time winningest coach who was fired by the Buffalo Sabres early this season, says he’d like to remain in hockey, but he doesn’t want any stress in the job.

He recently told a reporter in Montreal: “If I was to return to hockey, I’m not sure I’d want to start in a job where winning or losing affects your everyday life. (In Buffalo) my authority was being eroded because the owners were getting involved in the on-ice operation of the team. For four months, you could see the situation getting worse.”

Bowman, though, still has kept his hand in hockey. At the recent Rendez-Vous 87 series with the Soviets, he served as a newspaper columnist.

Edmonton’s Wayne Gretzky is the only player in modern times to average more than two points a game, which he has done for the past six seasons. He also has six straight seasons with more than 100 assists, from a low of 109 to 163 last year.

Philadelphia’s Mike Keenan might be someone you would call a “career coach.”

Keenan has coached at just about every level of hockey. He was player-coach of the Whitby-Dunlop Senior A team at the same time he was coaching a high school team. Then he coached in Junior B and Junior A, the American Hockey League, and the University of Toronto, and the Canadian National Junior Team before joining the Flyers.

On the weekend following Rendez-Vous 87, NHL hockey played before five crowds of 17,000 or more, led by the 19,166 in Detroit, and officials believe the series with the Soviets had a lot to do with heightened interest.

“The excitement generated by the international series no doubt played a role in the turnstile count at 12 NHL games on February 14 and February 15,” an NHL news release said.

Average attendance for the 12 weekend games exceeded 16,000, a couple of thousand more than the season’s average.