RW wrote:
Great coach and a great hockey innovator. RIP Coach.
Here's a photo of Al Arbour in his rookie year in Detroit.
Wow. I've never seen that one. He probably couldn't see the camera.
He wore his glasses on the ice while playing, and from what I've heard, was the last NHL player to do that.
Arbour's stats:
http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=97He won the Jack Adams once, and oddly it was the year before they won 4 straight Cups. I guess once they got rolling with Cups, everybody thought he'd already done a good enough job with the players that he didn't deserve as much credit.
I hope someone writes a book about him. He deserves one. Scotty Bowman said yesterday that he was so incredibly impressed with Arbour for being so successful with 1 team for so many years. Said it was a major accomplishment to keep the players listening to him for almost 2 decades.
One Islander fan on FB put it best: Now the Isles have a Hockey God up above to look over them. I dig it.