Veteran hockey writer Ed Willes takes an irreverent look back at the sometimes thrilling, often infuriating and always fascinating history of the Vancouver Canucks.Cheering for the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks over the last half century has required patience, commitment and a forgiving nature. It’s not that the Canucks have been uniformly awful or drearily predictable. Far from it (as this past season would attest). But every time they seemed close to...

The wildest seven years in the history of hockeyThe Rebel League celebrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of the fabled WHA. It is filled with hilarious anecdotes, behind the scenes dealing, and simply great hockey. It tells the story of Bobby Hull’ s astonishing million-dollar signing, which helped launch the league, and how he lost his toupee in an on-ice scrap. It explains how a team of naked Birmingham Bulls ended up in an arena concourse spoiling fo...

Gretzky, Lemieux, Messier, Coffey, Fuhr, all on the same team — in their prime. The greatest collection of hockey talent ever assembled, playing the games of their lives.Three epic 6-5 contests between Canada and the Soviet Union decided the ’87 Canada Cup.Canada evened the series, after the Soviets won Game 1, when Gretzky’s fifth assist of the game set up Lemieux’s hat trick, ending Game 2 in double overtime. Game 2 is widely considered one of the greatest hockey games ev...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “captivating” (People) true story of the Miracle on Ice and the last U.S. men’s hockey team to win gold, at the 1980 Winter Olympics—with a new afterword by Ken Morrow for the fortieth anniversary of the Miracle on Ice“A wonderfully detailed enrichment of the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century.”—Al MichaelsOnce upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olym...

Terry Ryan was poised to take the hockey world by storm when he was selected eighth overall by the Montreal Canadiens in the 1995 NHL draft, their highest draft pick in a decade. Expected to go on to become a hockey star, Ryan played a total of eight NHL games for the Canadiens, scoring no goals and no assists: not exactly the career he, or anyone else, was expecting.Though Terry’s NHL career wasn’t long, he experienced a lot and has no shortage of hilarious and fascinating revelat...

Every young hockey player dreams of one day playing in the NHL, of skating on a line with his hero and drinking champagne in the dressing room after winning the Stanley Cup. But kids should watch what they wish for. They may make it to the pros, like Sean Pronger, only to end up playing for sixteen teams over eleven seasons. They may end up on a team with a guy like the Great One, but skate on his line only in practice when the bona fide first-line centre has the flu. And they may end up d...

Hockey legend Gordie Howe once said there were two superstars in the Hull family: Bobby, the Golden Jet and one of the greatest players ever to tie up a pair of skates, and his brother Dennis, who had a solid career with the Chicago Blackhawks, and is now one of the most sought-after public speakers in North America. In The Third Best Hull. Dennis Hull outlines his life in hockey with humorous anecdotes, insights, and stories. Not just another sports autobiography, this book provides insig...

Whether he was scoring top-shelf goals or crushing an opponent into the boards, Jeremy Roenick—widely known as J.R.—was never shy about the way he played hockey. As much as he mixed it up in front of the net, J.R., an NHL veteran of twenty years with five different teams, often found himself in the middle of controversy off the ice as well. Above all else, J.R. was an entertainer, never afraid to dance on the blue line to liven up a game or to spend time with the fans. Now, as a hockey bro...

Sudden Death brings to life the incredible ongoing saga of the Swift Current Broncos hockey team. After a tragic game-day bus accident on December 30, 1986, left four of its star players dead, the first-year Western Hockey League team was faced with nearly insurmountable odds against not only its future success but its very survival. The heartbreaking story made headlines across North America, and the club garnered acclaim when it triumphantly rebounded and won the Canadian Hockey...

From one of Canada's top baseball writers and radio hosts: a retrospective of the Toronto Blue Jays on the 20th anniversary of Joe Carter's World Series-winning home run--and a look ahead to what promises to be their most successful season since. A must-have for all Blue Jays fans, and a great read for Toronto and Canadian sports fans in general.In Full Count, Jeff Blair takes us back to the days when the Toronto Blue Jays were "the Cadillac of franchises," and shows us ex...

A tribute to the larger than life story of a hockey icon and hero.The hockey world mourned when Pat Quinn died in November 2014.Tough guys sobbed. Networks carried montages of Quinn's rugged hits, his steely-eyed glare, and his famous victories. Quinn made a few enemies over the years, but there was no one who didn't respect the tough working-class kid who had fought his way to the very top of the hockey world.He had butted heads with superstars, with management, and w...

Derek Sanderson was a key player with the Big Bad Bruins in the 1970s. At one point the highest-paid athlete in the world, Sanderson played with and against the era’s legends, winning two Stanley Cups and assisting on Bobby Orr’s famous diving goal in 1970. Off the ice, “Turk” was one of a kind. He drove a burgundy Rolls-Royce, wore a fox coat and, when asked what winning the Stanley Cup meant to him said, “The difference in the money is whether I take a college chick to Cape Cod or a Play...