Bobby Hull died Monday.
A player in the World Hockey Association from the circuit's start to its finish, he was the league's first MVP in its first season, scoring 51 goals and making 52 assists. In goals, he did two better in the '73-74 season.
Having been shut out from playing at the first Summit Series two years prior, and famously so, Hull was the first selection for the WHA's delegation, and he scored six goals while in Canada for the first four games. Despite his injured left knee, he was reportedly the one to beat.
"Never been so tight a game before in my life," Hull told Brodie Snyder of the Montreal Gazette after the first game in Quebec City, "not even a 7th game of a Stanley Cup final."
The Golden Jet scored two in that opening contest, and he concluded the Canadian portion with a hat trick against legendary goaltender Vladislav Tretyak in Vancouver.
"I just shot them as they came," he said. "I blasted away."
The first and fourth games were both ties, and the Canadians and Soviets traded wins in between (Canada being victorious in Toronto and the USSR taking the game in Winnipeg).
Moscow, however, was a different story.
Along with three losses in the capital, Canada managed a tie against the USSR, one that would have been a win if not for a Hull goal that was disallowed.
"It went right through Tretiak," Hull said. "I looked up and I thought I saw the light flash."
In the next game, the eighth and final tilt against the Soviets, Hull lit the red lamp a second time in Moscow, and this time it counted.
"We showed those people who said we couldn't play with the Russians that we could," he said of at least the Canadian half of the series. "We outplayed them in three of the four games in Canada, but we were not all together here, for sure."
The Golden Jet didn't spend the entirety of '74-75 as player-coach, unlike the last two seasons, but then again, the Winnipeg Jets failed to make the playoffs that time. Getting the puck in the net 77 times in 78 games is one reason he again won the Gary L. Davidson Award, which by the end of the WHA's time would be renamed the Gordie Howe Trophy after the '73-74 MVP. Only Marc Tardif of the Quebec Nordiques would join Bobby Hull in winning that prize twice.
In the NHL, Hull was also a two-time MVP, being awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy twice back-to-back starting in '64-65. He starred for the Jets in two Avco Cup championship seasons and helped the Chicago Black Hawks win the Stanley Cup in 1961, the last time in 52 years.
Stats and other data from Hockey Reference
