Champion Islander Teams Hall of Famer Mike Bossy dies at 65


Hockey Hall of Fame winger Mike Bossy, who played a key role in leading the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup titles in the early 1980s, has died. He was 65 years old.

islanders announced His death however did not give any further details. Bossy announced in October that he had lung cancer.

Founded in 1972 as the National Hockey League expansion team, the Islanders won just 12 games in their first season at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, and the following season didn’t get much better.

But under the General Manager, they began to qualify for the playoffs. Bill Torrey and Aries Al ArborBringing together teams with Bossy on the right and his supporters Bryan Trottier in the centre, Clark Gillies on the left, Denis Potvin on the defensive and Billy Smith at goal.

The Islanders defeated the Philadelphia Flyers, Minnesota North Stars, Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup championships that lasted from 1980 to 1983, then lost to the Oilers in the 1984 cup finals.

Canadian-born Bossy was among the fastest skaters in the NHL and had an uncanny ability to dodge wrist shots before rival goalkeepers had any idea the puck was coming their way.

“Mike has the fastest hands I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Arbour, a former defender who played with Gordie Howe for the Detroit Red Wings and Bobby Hull for the Chicago Black Hawks.

Bossy was a two-time NHL top scorer with 69 goals in the 1978-79 season and 68 goals in the 1980-81 season. He scored at least 51 goals in each of his first nine seasons, and a back injury limited him to 38 goals in his final season. His 85 goals in 129 playoff games was the most in NHL history at the time.

Bossy scored 573 goals and provided 553 assists in 752 regular season games over 10 NHL seasons, all with the Islanders.

he was chosen Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991.

A good player and somewhat built, Bossy survived difficult controls and refused to engage in close combat.

“Men knew he wasn’t going to fight,” Trottier told Sports Illustrated in 1999. “They would punch him, they would spears, it didn’t matter. He didn’t need much room. The man was so creative that he could do something special with just half an inch.”

In his memoir “Boss: The Mike Bossy Story” (1988, with Barry Meisel), Bossy wrote, “I probably developed what the scouts developed for quick hands and quick release more for self-defense than anything else.”. “The NHL was zoom, zoom, zoom compared to the juniors. Every time I picked up the puck, I learned to make quick passes and quick shots to avoid being beaten.”

the boss won Lady Byng Award in 1983, 1984 and 1986 for gentlemanly play. He was suspended for just 210 minutes.

Despite scoring outstanding goals in junior hockey, he was selected 15th overall by the Islanders in the 1977 NHL amateur draft, after being overtaken by teams that believed he lacked the controlling skills to survive in the NHL.

It didn’t take long for Bossy to prove otherwise. He won the Calder Memorial Trophy in 1977-78 as NHL rookie of the year and set a rookie record by scoring 53 goals over 15 years. he won Conn Smythe Cup as the most valuable player 1982 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Michael Bossy was born on January 22, 1957 in Montreal, one of 10 children to Borden and Dorothy Bossy. His father was of Ukrainian descent and his mother was English. Borden Bossy flooded the family’s apartment backyard to create an ice rink in the winter, and Mike learned to skate at age 3.

He dropped out of Laval Catholic High School to join the Laval National team of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League towards the end of the 1972–73 season, playing four full seasons for Laval and scoring 309 goals.

Then came the selection by the Islanders in the draft.

Bossy’s NHL career was cut short by a chronic injury. At the beginning of the islanders’ 1986 training camp, he suffered from backaches. He missed 17 games during the regular season and suffered a left knee injury in the playoffs, where the Flyers eliminated the Islanders in the qualifying round. Doctors eventually discovered that he had two injured discs that could not be repaired with surgery. He sat in the 1987-1988 season, then retired from hockey in October 1988.

The Islanders retired Bossy’s #22 jersey in March 1992, making him the second player after Potvin to receive the honor.

Bossy married Lucie Creamer and they had two daughters. Full information about the survivors was not immediately available.

Bilingual, Bossy continued his business ventures and publishing careers in Canada after his acting career ended. When she was found to have cancer, she left her job as a hockey analyst for the Montreal-based French channel TVA Sports.

Despite all that Bossy and the Stanley Cup-winning Islanders had accomplished, they lacked the charisma of his contemporary, Oilers’ Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky and Gretzky’s Edmonton teams that won four Stanley Cups in the 1980s.

“We never got a millionth of the recognition we should have,” Bossy once told Sports Illustrated. “We had a very low-key organization. They didn’t want the boys to do too much, as they thought hockey might get hurt. People don’t mention us on the first mention of big teams.”

“I guess as I got older I just got tired of telling people I scored 50+ points in a row. Everything I say sounds like pity to me but I’m not in any way. Only when you do something good like our team does, you want to be recognized for it.”

As for the comparisons to Gretzky, Bossy told The New York Times in January 1986, when he became the 11th player in NHL history to score 500 goals: “People call him the Great Gretzky. I can’t compete with that. I feel comfortable with the things I help my team achieve. Whether I think of Wayne Gretzky as the greatest thing after apple pie is another question.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *