Hockey's First Throwback Sweater

Preamble: You may notice that the sweater illustrations in this post are approximately 1000% percent better than the ones I've had in the past. That's because these illustrations were done by fellow SIHR member Danny Laflamme, who is developing a virtual sweater museum for the SIHR website, and who I'm sure you'll agree does one hell of a job. Danny has kindly allowed me to use his illustrations on my blog. Thanks Danny!


When in need of an alternate uniform, NHL teams will often use a throwback design. For example, when Ottawa and Vancouver played their Winter Classic match earlier this month, both sides wore jerseys inspired by sweaters from decades ago in their cities' respective hockey histories. But this tradition may be older than you think. Arguably, the first throwback uniform design was used in 1920.

In 1920, the NHL's Ottawa Senators faced the PCHA's Seattle Metropolitans in the Stanley Cup finals. The eastern club wore the sweater illustrated below (essentially the same as their 1912/13 uniforms, which as we saw last time forced the Montreal Canadiens to adopt a sweater which became the iconic version we now know).

Seattle wore extremely similar sweaters. Both uniforms featured barber-pole stripes in a three-colour pattern, both including white and red. The only differences were that Ottawa used black as their third colour, while Seattle used green. The Metropolitans sweater is illustrated below.

The western team also had an 'S' on the front of the sweater, but that would not have always been visible to opposing players (or teammates for that matter), and as such the Senators opted to wear an alternate sweater design. They wore a simple white sweater with a large black 'O' on the chest, for Ottawa.

Now, if you're not familiar with the history of Ottawa hockey sweaters, you might just think this was a minimalist approach to avoid confusion with Seattle while still marking the club appropriately. What could be simpler? But there's one more sweater to look at, which Ottawa (then more often called the Generals) wore during the 1897/98 season:

The 'O' is certainly different, and there's no way to be certain that the 1920 alternate design was intentionally based on this 22-year-old (at the time) sweater, but the similarity is quite striking. I'm quite happy to conclude this was probably the first throwback sweater. What do you think?

The Unintentional Arrival of Hockey's Most Recognizable Uniform

Preamble: You may notice that the sweater illustrations in this post are approximately 1000% percent better than the ones I've had in the past. That's because these illustrations were done by fellow SIHR member Danny Laflamme, who is developing a virtual sweater museum for the SIHR website, and who I'm sure you'll agree does one hell of a job. Danny has kindly allowed me to use his illustrations on my blog. Thanks Danny!


Hockey's Most Recognizable Uniform

It's no secret that although the Montreal Canadiens have had essentially the same sweater design for many decades, in the club's early years they wore very different uniforms. In recent seasons, the Habs have trotted out several throwback jerseys to celebrate their history. In the team's first season of 1909/10, the sported a sweater like the one below. A modern throwback jersey based on this design was worn in one game by Montreal in the 2009/10 season.

In 1910/11, the Canadiens used an entirely new sweater design, illustrated below. Again, the modern club wore a version of this design 100 years after its original use. This is the first appearance of the bright scarlet red that is now so intimately associated with the club. And look, Toronto fans: the Habs had a maple leaf emblem well before your club even existed!

This sweater also lasted only one season, and the team switched the one below in 1911/12. At the very least, the club retained the calligraphic 'C' emblem, instead of changing everything entirely once again. In fact, this sweater looks something like an 'away' version of the previous one.

Everything was changed entirely once again the following season. In their fourth season, the Habs were using their fourth new sweater. The version also had a modern jersey based on it, used in the 2012/13 season.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Barber-pole stripes such as the ones used in this design were fairly common for hockey sweaters in the game's early years. In fact, it turns out they were too common...


The Unintentional Arrival

Partway through the 1912/13 season, Montreal ran into a problem. The Ottawa Senators complained about the new Canadiens sweaters, because they were too similar to the Senators' design, making it easy to confuse players from the two teams for each other on the ice. Ottawa wore sweaters like this:

You can understand how, in the heat of the action on the ice, a Senator might mistake a Canadien for a teammate, or vice-versa. So, Montreal had to adopt a new sweater that they would use when playing against Ottawa. The Senators had worn such sweaters for many years, and so it was up to the junior team to make a change. Montreal kept the red and the blue colours, and took the 'C' style from their very first sweater from 1909/10, and came up with this:

The development of this new design, arrived at only because another team took issue with their preferred sweater, into the form we now associate with the Habs is clear. In fact, it seems this new design was popular, because the very next season (1913/14), saw the adoption of a sweater design that is finally recognizable as the modern Montreal uniform. It was the team's sixth sweater design in five seasons, but this one stuck. Really stuck.

And so, the original design of the most recognizable hockey sweater of them all was not intentional. The team had no desire for a new sweater at the time the need for one was thrust upon them by another team. This is certainly one of the greatest happy accidents in the game's history.

1904: Rowing Club v. Senators

One reason Billy Breen may not be as well-known today as he deserves to be is that he was never a member of a Stanley Cup championship team. Perhaps Billy McGimsie wouldn't be in the Hall of Fame, wouldn't be known at all today, if the Kenora Thistles had failed in their Cup challenge against the Montreal Wanderers.

As captain of the 1904 Winnipeg Rowing Club hockey team, Breen led his club on his one and only Stanley Cup challenge against the mighty Ottawa Senators. The Ottawa lineup was just full of legendary players: goaltender Bouse Hutton, point Harvey Pulford, rover Rat Westwick, centre Frank McGee and right wing Alf Smith. That's five of seven in the lineup that are in the Hockey Hall of Fame today. The western squad had just one in rover Joe Hall, who really built his Hall of Fame credentials later in his career as a defenceman.

Realistically, Winnipeg would seem to have had little chance, and going into the best-of-three series they were given none by the experts. The first game bore this out, as Ottawa came away with a 9-1 win in a chippy game on December 30, 1903. But things turned around on January 1, 1904 when the Rowing Club shocked the capital city club by taking a 6-2 decision, with Breen scoring half of his team's goals. Suddenly, it was a series again.

Unfortunately for the westerners, Ottawa played an outstanding defensive match in the deciding fixture on January 4, taking it 2-0 to hold on to the Cup. The game was scoreless until the 41-minute mark, and was anyone's game until they scored their second with seven minutes to play. Winnipeg winger Billy Bawlf was given much of the blame for the loss, his poor performance being disruptive to an otherwise promising forward attack. This was Billy Breen's only shot at a Stanley Cup championship, and it slipped away.

But here's the thing. There's absolutely no shame in losing to this edition of the Ottawa Hockey Club. In the CAHL that season, the Senators went 4-0, scoring 32 goals and allowing but 15. It was a season of troubles, of course, which ultimately resulted in Ottawa dropping out of Canada's highest league before the year was done.

Quebec ended up with the CAHL championship, since they had a 7-1 record after counting two default wins over Ottawa after the latter had dropped out of the circuit. But the Montreal Victorias were really the class of the league (barring the Senators); taking out any Ottawa matches the standings for the season would have been:

Club	GP	W	L	T	GF	GA	GD
Montreal Victorias	6	5	1	0	68	34	+34
Quebec HC	6	5	1	0	50	37	+13
Montreal HC	6	2	4	0	31	40	-10
Montreal Shamrocks	6	0	6	0	27	64	-37

The Vics and Quebec split their two matches, but the former outscored the latter 19-14. Montreal was arguably robbed of a CAHL championship because Quebec was credited with two wins by default over Ottawa, who would in all likelihood would have defeated them both times, while the Vics actually played the Senators twice and lost, ending up 5-3.

So the Montreal Victorias were an outstanding team in Canada's best hockey league in 1904, and yet lost twice to Ottawa, being outscored 14-7. They couldn't do what the Rowing Club did: beat the Senators.

The Oarsmen's 6-2 victory on January 1 was the only time Ottawa lost that season. And Winnipeg's 2-0 loss in the third game of their series was the second-best score any team put up against the Senators in 1904. The westerners' performance in games two and three of the Cup series was a major accomplishment given the quality of the opposition. "Lost the series" doesn't do their effort justice, not remotely. Billy Breen led his team on the ice, and on the score sheet, against a hockey leviathan and came away with more than just their self-respect. They won a match against a team that no one else could beat, and came within a few goals of taking taking championship away from them. That deserves to be remembered.

More on Defence in Point Allocation

Friend and colleague Rob Vollman had some questions about the Point Allocation system when it comes to defence. At his suggestion, here's some more detail with regard to a particular era of hockey history, using the 1925/26 Ottawa Senators as an example.

This team makes for an effective example for two reasons. First, they were an extremely good team but also an extremely defensive one. They finished first overall in the NHL with a winning percentage of .722, even though they scored a below-average number of goals. Only one of seven teams that season scored fewer than Ottawa's 77, yet the Sens finished comfortably ahead of the second-place Montreal Maroons. They won so many games by allowing only 50.6% of the league average in goals against. That would be something like recording 128 points in the 2010/11 NHL season by scoring 213 goals and allowing 116.

Second, the Senators had a very clear delineation between starting players and substitutes. I've written before about the transition between starter-sub to rolling-lines systems, and the Senators were still very clearly in the former at this time. Just look at their traditional counting stats; it's absolutely clear that the starting line (Frank Nighbor, Hooley Smith and Cy Denneny) and defencemen (George Boucher and King Clancy) played far more minutes than any other players on the team. (Note also that all five of these men, as well as netminder Alec Connell, are in the Hall of Fame).

Player	Pos	GP	G	A	PTS	PIM
Denneny, Cy	6	36	24	12	36	18
Smith, Hooley	7	28	16	9	25	53
Nighbor, Frank	5	35	12	13	25	40
Clancy, King	3	35	8	4	12	80
Boucher, George	3	36	8	4	12	64
Kilrea, Hec	65	35	4	0	4	12
Gorman, Ed	7	23	2	1	3	12
Finnigan, Frank	7	36	2	0	2	24
Graham, Leth	6	1	0	0	0	0
Duggan, Jack	3	27	0	0	0	0
Smith, Alex	3	36	0	0	0	36
Total		36	76	43	119	339

The starting forwards scored 86 points and recorded 111 PIM, the subs had 9 and 48. Starting defencemen had 24 and 144 versus zero and 36 for subs. There is obviously a great disparity between their relative playing times, much moreso that we see in the modern game between first-liners and fourth-liners.

Rob's question is, basically, how does Point Allocation avoid seeing the substitute players as historically-great defensive players? If you look at Hockey Reference's Point Shares results for this team, for instance, you get the following:

Player	OPS	DPS	PS
Connell, Alec	0.0	11.1	11.1
Denneny, Cy	7.6	1.5	9.1
Boucher, George	2.0	5.9	7.9
Clancy, King	2.1	5.7	7.8
Smith, Hooley	5.0	1.1	6.1
Nighbor, Frank	3.8	1.4	5.2
Smith, Alex	-1.4	5.9	4.5
Gorman, Ed	0.0	3.8	3.8
Duggan, Jack	-1.0	4.4	3.4
Kilrea, Hec	-0.8	1.4	0.6
Graham, Leth	-0.1	0.0	-0.1
Finnigan, Frank	-1.9	1.5	-0.4
Total	15.3	43.7	59.0

Where OPS, DPS and PS are Offensive Point Shares, Defensive Point Shares and Point Shares. Notice in particular that Alex Smith, spare defenceman, is considered to be just as important to the team defensively as Boucher and Clancy, two giants of hockey history. Jack Duggan also looks right good, but they have him as a defenceman rather than a winger.

Since Point Shares is intended to measure the same thing as Point Allocation, you might not be surprised to find that in most cases, the results are quite similar, at least on the surface:

Player	OP	DP	TPA
Connell, Alec	0.0	24.3	24.3
Denneny, Cy	4.5	1.8	6.4
Boucher, George	2.0	9.0	10.7
Clancy, King	2.0	7.3	9.0
Smith, Hooley	3.3	1.7	5.0
Nighbor, Frank	2.5	3.7	6.8
Smith, Alex	-1.0	5.8	4.8
Gorman, Ed	0.8	2.8	3.6
Duggan, Jack	-1.1	0.8	-0.3
Kilrea, Hec	0.5	2.3	2.6
Graham, Leth	-0.1	0.0	-0.1
Finnigan, Frank	-0.8	1.7	0.9

Although most of the differences are relatively minor, that's actually an illusion, and the mirage is revealed by examining Connell's results. In terms of raw Point Allocation results, Connell is actually credited with 11.4 points, which is extremely similar to the Point Share results. This is because the Point Shares are presently wholly on a raw basis, while the Point Allocation numbers above are based on adjusted games and minutes. Point Shares uses only games played to allocated defensive points, while Point Allocation uses (estimated) minutes played. Connell has 11.4 defensive points in 2,251 minutes, which translates to 24.3 in 4,800 minutes, the basis on which his numbers are presented in Point Allocation.

Realistically, Alex Smith probably played only about 500 minutes in 1925/26, while Boucher played over 1,600; yet Smith is credited with equal defensive points to Boucher. This means that Smith must have been three times as good, on a per-minute basis, than George Boucher. This, of course, is just plain nuts.

Point Allocation therefore has Alex Smith with 5.8 defensive points, but in 2,000 minutes. That's 2.9 per 1,000 minutes (compared to 4.5 for Boucher), while the Point Shares results in about 11.71 defensive points per 1,000 minutes. The Point Allocation numbers are probably a bit high for Smith (remember to look at a player's career, or at least blocks of years instead of a single season), but the Point Shares results are completely unrealistic and totally misleading, in this case.

So, in addition to the defensive fudge factor which I've talked about before, the fact that Point Allocation uses estimates of minutes played also plays an extremely important role in reasonably crediting defensive points. It'll never be more than an estimate, as I've said many times before, but estimating minutes is far more accurate than not doing so, ironically. Now that I'm thinking about it, it's actually the more important factor of the two, and as such I should have mentioned before now. Sorry about that.

Just to illustrate the fudge factor, though, let's look at the Point Allocation results if it were not included. You'll see historic greats Boucher, Clancy and Nighbor much closer to the lesser players defensively, and that's the entire reason for the fudge. Also see Alex Smith being overrated, because the system interprets his lack of offence as an indication of good defence:

Player	OP	DP	TPA
Connell, Alec	0.0	24.3	24.3
Boucher, George	2.0	7.8	9.8
Clancy, King	2.0	7.5	9.5
Smith, Alex	-1.0	8.6	7.6
Denneny, Cy	4.5	2.0	6.5
Gorman, Ed	0.8	5.3	6.1
Smith, Hooley	3.3	1.6	4.9
Nighbor, Frank	2.5	2.2	4.7
Kilrea, Hec	0.5	2.9	3.4
Finnigan, Frank	-0.8	2.3	1.5
Duggan, Jack	-1.1	1.6	0.5
Graham, Leth	-0.1	0.0	-0.1

The final results are surely much more accurate than these. By combining the fudge factor and the ice time estimates, Point Allocation produces reasonably accurate results, which other systems may not.