Stanley Cup

Tripping in hockey is an infraction of the rules that calls for a two-minute penalty. Faced with the choice of a two-minute penalty or a goal for his opponents, a shrewd hockey player will often chance the penalty, and this was exactly what Forward Herb Lewis of the Detroit Red Wings did last week when it looked as though Neil Colville of the New York Rangers had a clear shot at the Detroit goal. What happened in the next split second caused the liveliest controversy of the 1937 hockey season, probably settled its most important series.

Despite Lewis' interference, Colville got the puck away. It hit the broad stick of Detroit's Goalie Earl Robertson, bounced off onto the stick of Ranger Babe Pratt, who sent it into the Detroit net. To the crowd it looked like a goal. Referee Mickey Ion ruled that, since he had blown his whistle to stop play before the puck went in, the goal did not count. A goal for the Rangers would have tied the score, 1-all, in the second period of the deciding game of the final series for the Stanley Cup, hockey's world championship. Referee Ion's decision, accepted after a five-minute altercation, meant instead that the Rangers had to take increasingly dangerous risks to tie the score. While they tried to do so, Detroit had and took opportunities to score twice more, once in the second period, again in the third, to clinch the game (3-to-0) and series.

If Referee Ion's decision had been a lucky break for the Red Wings, they deserved it because: 1) it was the first break they had had since the playoffs started, and 2) they were the better team. League leaders through the regular season, the Red Wings reached the playoffs handicapped by injuries to three of their best players, sustained two more in the playoffs when their star defenseman, Ebbie Goodfellow, and star goalie, Norman Smith, both went on the sidelines (TIME, April 5). A rookie team which nosed out the feeble Chicago Blackhawks for third place, the Rangers did not reach maximum efficiency until, when the season was over, they won four games in a row in two preliminary playoff series. Against the Red Wings, the Rangers stretched their string to five, lost the second game, won the third. Red Wing heroes of the last two games in addition to Lewis, onetime Red Wing captain, were Marty Barry, fuse of Detroit's famed "dynamite line," who scored the goal that won the fourth game, 1-to-0, and the first and third goals in the fifth; and Goalie Earl Robertson who, recruited from a minor-league team to replace Smith, got major credit for the Red Wings' two successive shutouts. Red Wings' reward: $1,400 for each player, to $800 each for the Rangers.

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