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Top Five Soviet Players Who Never Played in the NHL

• Vsevolod Bobrov

• Anatoli Firsov

• Valeri Kharlamov

• Vladislav Tretiak

• Valeri Vasiliev:

Which NHL player was the last to play without a helmet?

The days of seeing an NHL player’s hair or lack of it on the ice started to be numbered in the 1970s, especially after the league made it mandatory in 1979 for all players entering the NHL to don one. Anyone already in the league at that time could still go helmetless if they so desired. Centreman Craig MacTavish, once an integral part of the Edmonton Oilers in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, continued to display his greying locks until his final game with the St. Louis Blues during the 1997 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Which player in the NHL invented the curved hockey stick?

The Chicago Black Hawks’ Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita are often credited with first using hockey sticks with curved blades. According to the game’s lore, in the early 1960s Mikita noticed that his broken stick blade, which formed a curve, allowed him to shoot higher and harder. Soon after, Mikita and his teammate Hull were terrifying opposing goalies with shots propelled by huge “banana blade” curves. So dangerous were these shots that the stick blade’s curve is now limited to a half inch. Many hockey historians currently believe, however, that right winger Andy Bathgate, one of the first NHL players to employ the slap shot, was the first to tinker with curving his sticks even before he got to the big league. Bathgate, who played many of his best years with the New York Rangers in the 1950s and early 1960s, told a reporter once: “I would heat up the blades with hot water, then I would bend them. I would put them in the toilet-stall door jamb and leave them overnight. The next day they would have a hook in them.” To prevent his sticks from straightening out, Bathgate added fibreglass to his blades, likely the first player to do so.