Sweet Hockey Card of the Week

In the course of my recent move, I uncovered a great many possessions that had not seen the light of day for years. Amongst these were a few old hockey cards, some of which are pretty cool. So, just for kicks, I thought I would start a little feature in which I share one a week.

And the very first Team Teal in the Twin Towns sweet hockey card is...




Rick Kehoe, Pittsburgh Penguins, 1975

Rick Kehoe played fourteen seasons in the NHL. Most of these were spent with the Penguins, although he broke in with Toronto. According to the Pittsburgh Penguins Official Site, he ranks fourth all-time in games played in a Penguin sweater (722), and is the third-highest scoring Penguin of all time (312 goals and 324 assists for 636 points), trailing only Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr. That's some good company, eh?

The really remarkable statistic when it comes to Rick Kehoe, however, is his mere 120 penalty minutes over an NHL career spanning a total of 906 regular-season games. That's about one minor penalty every fifteen games. In the 1980-81 season, Kehoe played 80 games and recorded only six minutes in penalties. In the 1979-80 season, he played 79 games and took only four minutes in penalties. All of this while playing through the worst of the "Broadstreet Bully" era of the league--in 1973-74, when the Flyers won the Stanley Cup following a season in which they piled up 1,750 penalty minutes, Kehoe recorded eight minutes of penalties in sixty-nine games as a Maple Leaf.

By the way, all of the statistics I've quoted are from my copy of The Complete Encyclopedia of Hockey, Fourth Edition, 1993. (Probably time for me to get a new one, huh?) If you don't feel like hunting down dusty books to get your hockey statistics, check out this awesome site.

Okay, that's all for now. New sweet hockey card next week!