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One Fine Goodfellow - Sept. 25 2017 - Collector's Edition - Ken Campbell

(LE STUDIO DU HOCKEY/HHOF IMAGES)

WHEN THE DETROIT Red Wings retired Nicklas Lidstrom’s No. 5 three years ago, they ensured no player would ever wear that digit on the back of their sweater while wearing the winged wheel on the front. But there are some who insist Lidstrom shouldn’t have been wearing that number in the first place.

That’s because it once belonged to a player by the name of Ebbie Goodfellow, the forgotten superstar in a pantheon of alltime Red Wings greats. Before there was Steve Yzerman and Pavel Datsyuk, or even Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay, there was Goodfellow, who not only starred for Detroit but did so at two positions. In fact, Goodfellow goes back so far with the franchise that he played in the last season that the team was known as the Cougars and the two seasons it went by the Falcons.

Goodfellow was a big, scoring center for the Red Wings who led the Canadian Professional League (the precursor to the AHL) in scoring in 1928-29. Two years later, he finished second in NHL scoring to Montreal superstar Howie Morenz. But when Wings GM Jack Adams asked him to move back to defense in the middle of 1934-35, Goodfellow did so without complaint and without missing a beat. As a defenseman, he helped Detroit to back-to-back Cups in 1936 and ’37 and was a first-team allstar twice, including in 1939-40 when he became the first Wings player to win the Hart Trophy. “He wasn’t a really flashy player,” said hockey historian Bob Duff, author of several books on the Red Wings. “It was the same with guys like Alex Delvecchio and Marcel Pronovost and even Red Kelly, who didn’t get the same kind of recognition Howe, Lindsay and (Terry) Sawchuk got.”

Goodfellow put up some impressive offensive numbers on a weak team through the first five seasons of his career, but Adams noticed he was beginning to slow down. The Wings already had some homegrown scoring stars in Larry Aurie and Herbie Lewis and had added established NHL marksmen when they acquired Cooney Weiland in 1933-34 and Syd Howe the following season. With plenty of firepower already up front, Adams approached Goodfellow with the idea of moving to the blueline. “I once read the newspaper story about the game when he moved back to defense, and they just talked about how seamless it was,” Duff said. “He went back there and played like he had been doing it for years. And he was one of those guys who didn’t get a lot of attention. It was almost like Lidstrom. He didn’t get a lot of attention for the first half of his career because he was a guy who went out there and played really steady and never made any mistakes.”

HE WENT BACK THERE AND PLAYED LIKE HE’D BEEN DOING IT FOR YEARS – Bob Duff, hockey historian

The character and sacrifice Goodfellow showed in the move to the blueline convinced Adams of his leadership qualities and he was named the Wings captain.

In his final NHL season, Goodfellow served as a player-coach for the team and became the last player-coach to win the Stanley Cup when the Red Wings captured it in 1943. Reports at the time indicated that it was assumed Goodfellow would take over as the Wings coach, but that never materialized. Instead, he went on to coach the AHL’s St. Louis Flyers for three-plus seasons in the late 1940s before taking over the Chicago Black Hawks for two moribund seasons in the early 1950s.

Lest you think him too good a fellow, it should be noted Goodfellow was once fined $100 by referee Bill Stewart. The first $50 was for “calling (Stewart) a bald-headed so-and-so and then emphasizing it by calling him a such-and-such,” according to newspaper reports of the day. The other half of the fine was levied for sticking his tongue out at the referee. “That’s $50 more,” Stewart reportedly told Goodfellow. “Nobody can stick their tongue out at me.”

For his part, Goodfellow was quoted as saying, “That’s the way it is with referees. When they can’t think of an answer, they fine you.”

Goodfellow was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1963. He died in 1985 at age 78. Sportswriter Baz O’Meara had this to say about his nomination: “Ebbie was a fine good-looking fellow, a hard checker, a clean player and a fine ice general. He could be classified as a gentlemanly type though he was no namby-pamby hockey player. He was a beautiful skater and a fine stickhandler. As a center he rated right up with the top talent, and he was a standout defenseman.”

A Goodfellow and a great player, to be sure.

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Before Lidstrom, No. 5 Belonged to Detroit’s Forgotten Legend: Ebbie Goodfellow