First NHL team pillaged

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/10/2011 (5111 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

These are the days that have energized so many, from those that busted open piggy banks in vain 15 years ago to the thousands who cried tears of joy on announcement day in late May.

It’s about a rebirth, a city getting its mojo back and a historic moment in this province’s sporting history.

But it’s also got a real deja-vu vibe to it.

Yes, before Big Buff and Captain Ladd, before Chevy and Zinger, there was another crew that went through all this some 31 years ago — albeit with some rather significant differences to the storyline. Before Jets 2.0, there were the original NHL Jets of 1979-80 — Jets 1.0, if you will — a collection of fading stars, wannabes and never-weres pieced together by John Ferguson and somehow made occasionally competitive by Tom McVie.

But it was also a squad simply trying to exist in the expansive shadow of past World Hockey Association glories. It was a squad that would finish 20th of 21 teams in its inaugural NHL season, scoring little, giving up lots — for some — spoiling the memories of what had been a dominant and trend-setting outfit that featured legends like Bobby Hull, Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson, won three championships from 1972-79 and, among other notable achievements, became the first club team to beat the then eight-time world champion Soviet national team.

Summing up the mood of the time perfectly was Hal Sigurdson, then the columnist at the Free Press on the eve of the first NHL campaign:

‘It is not what they are that will bother Winnipeg hockey fans. It is what they were. And what they might have been…’

— — —

“Honestly, it was pretty disgusting what was done to us,” begins Morris Lukowich, who celebrated an Avco Cup championship in late May of 1979 and by October couldn’t recognize many of the faces in the dressing room. “We had a really great hockey team loaded with many good players. Take any team and take away the players that we lost — Terry Ruskowski, Rich Preston, Kent Nilsson, Barry Long, Paul MacKinnon… it really set Winnipeg back a number of years.

“We could have come in and been very, very competitive right off the bat. If you look at the Edmonton Oilers, they were able to keep players like Wayne Gretzky and with some good drafting within three years they had beaten the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs. And that was the team we just beat to win the Avco Cup.

“It took them, what, five years to win their first Stanley Cup? We would have been pretty close to right beside them.”

It’s true, the Jets of the final WHA season weren’t the same as the previous two championship teams. The flair of Anders and Ulf were gone, replaced by grittier elements with flashes of offensive skill from Lukowich, Preston and Ruskowski, all ex of a Houston Aeros franchise which had folded. But they were good enough to win the last Avco Cup over a first-place Edmonton Oilers squad that featured an 18-year-old Gretzky and vets like Ron Chipperfield, Bill Flett and Dave Dryden.

But not long after Lukowich & Co. hoisted the Avco Cup in late May the Jets were slowly dismantled. The deal with a reluctant NHL had been completed earlier in March — the front-page Free Press headline that day screamed ‘WHA agrees to merger under tough NHL terms’ — that allowed the new members from Winnipeg, Hartford, Edmonton and Quebec City to protect just two skaters and two goalies, all for an entrance fee of $6 million.

NHL teams quickly scooped up players on WHA teams they had drafted and Ferguson opted to protect Lukowich, the gifted goal scorer, and defenceman Scott Campbell, who had been compared to the Habs’ Larry Robinson but, alas, was out of the game by the 1982 season after suffering injuries and battling chronic asthma. The new clubs were also pushed to the back of the draft order (and, oops, the Jets selected Jimmy Mann 19th overall — just ahead of Michel Goulet and Kevin Lowe).

But the Chicago Black Hawks grabbed Ruskowski, the heart of the last Avco Cup championship, and Preston; the Atlanta Flames snatched Kent Nilsson — who had led the team in scoring with 107 points; solid defenceman Barry Long went back to the Detroit Red Wings and Paul MacKinnon to the Washington Capitals.

Lukowich looks at this way, all these years later:

“So you’ve got this team that has come in to Winnipeg from Atlanta right now. What would it look like if you took the top half dozen players from the Thrashers and gave them to somebody else? What would it do to that team? What would be left?”

Understandably, the ’79-80 team began with muted expectations. Actually, there were very little expectations at all. The Hockey News picked the Jets for last — prompting Ferguson, after spying a copy of the edition, to grab the thing and tear it in half.

The Jets would open the season with back-to-back losses on the road — a 4-2 loss to Pittburgh and a 4-0 defeat in Boston — before returning home to defeat Don Cherry’s Colorado Rockies 4-2.

There would be precious few other highlights, however, as the Jets — after a 12-18-4 start — won only eight of their final 46 games to finish 20-49-11.

“We had many guys who were playing who were basically American Hockey League players,” said Lukowich. “I feel we played exciting hockey and we had a good coach in Tom McVie. We worked extremely hard. But often it wasn’t enough. We had just lost too many good players.”

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And it would only get worse, not better. The 1980-81 Jets would finish an abysmal 9-57-14. But from those ashes rose a decent hockey team that, unfortunately was forever lost in another dynastic shadow — that of their WHA rival Oilers, who would win five Stanley Cups from 1983-84 to 1989-90.

Still, Lukowich — a two-time NHL all-star who now runs Max Goal Scoring Camps in Calgary — hardly spends his days lamenting what could have been. Instead, he’s ecstatic the Jets are back. And just like everyone else, he’s wrapped up in the feel-good story of the NHL’s return.

“The good thing this time is what happened to us in ’79-80 hasn’t happened again,” he said. “These Jets are coming in with their full squad and it looks like there are a number of guys who are just eager to play in front of 15,000 screaming crazy fans.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll be watching Sunday afternoon, Absolutely, I’ll be watching. I’m just really excited for the city.”

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @WFPEdTait