TORONTO — Dick Irvin Sr. stood in a Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room on Oct. 13, 1947, a few minutes before the NHL’s first All-Star Game, and considered what he should say to the players he was about to coach.
Not finding a single word, he simply said nothing.
“My father told me it was the greatest team he ever had,” legendary broadcaster Dick Irvin Jr. says today, Irvin Sr. having coached the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Stanley Cup in 1932 and the Montreal Canadiens to championships in 1944 and 1946, with another to come in 1953.
Fifteen of the 17 players on Irvin’s team, 4-3 winners against the 1947 Stanley Cup champion Maple Leafs in the League’s historic first All-Star Game, were headed for induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, as was Irvin himself.
The 1947 NHL All-Star team. Bottom row, from left: Bill Quackenbush, Bill Mosienko, Bobby Bauer, Ted Lindsay, Edgar Laprade. Middle row: Milt Schmidt, Tony Leswick, Max Bentley, Grant Warwick, Maurice Richard, Doug Bentley. Top row: Frank Brimsek, Woody Dumart, coach Dick Irvin Sr., Butch Bouchard, Ken Reardon, NHL President Clarence Campbell, Jack “Black Jack” Stewart, Bill Durnan, trainer Ernie Cook. Leswick and Warwick are the only two players in this photo not enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
The 2024 Honda (U.S.)/Rogers (Canada) NHL All-Star Game now comes to Toronto on Saturday (3 p.m. ET; SN, CBC, TVA Sports, ABC, ESPN+) for the ninth time, the first in this city since 2000 and the 68th in the event’s history.
The first two played in Toronto, in 1947 and 1949, put the Maple Leafs, the defending Stanley Cup champions, against a team of stars drawn from the League’s other teams; the third, in 1951, saw First and Second All-Star teams square off before the original format returned for the next four, 1962-64 and 1968.
The eighth and most recent event in Toronto saw the World All-Stars take on their counterparts from North America, that event highlighted by a No. 99 banner being pulled to arena rafters, Wayne Gretzky’s number forever retired League-wide.
In reverse chronological order, a look back at the NHL All-Star Game in Toronto through the decades, eight games having drawn 116,734 fans. Credit to hockey historian Andrew Podnieks, some of the facts and anecdotes here drawn from his 2000 book “The NHL All-Star Game: Fifty Years of the Great Tradition.”
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced before Gretzky’s final game for the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden on April 18, 1999, that The Great One’s No. 99 was to be retired League-wide. In a ceremony at Air Canada Centre, a “GRETZKY 99” banner was raised to the arena rafters to honor hockey’s most prolific scorer.
