....Perhaps because they were owned by the biggest bootlegger of his time, the New York Americans were the most marvellously awful team in National Hockey League history.
The trouble with the Americans, they were, well, preoccupied. Hockey was not always their first passion. In New York, Prohibition was in full flower and many of the players did not wish to miss its full bloom. Even half a century after he played goal for them, Jumpin Jakie Forbes frequently shook his head in wonder, recalling some of their exploits.
Once, a dozen years ago, Jake told of his team's arrival in New York. "The first thing I did when I saw the bright lights of Broadway was I noticed the lovely underwear," he remembered, his face alight, eyebrows arched. "Mine was long in the sleeves and legs and woolen and I got into the short silk ones straightaway."
This was in the autumn of 1925. In the spring that year, the players had worn the yellow and black of the Hamilton Tigers. They had finished first in the six-team NHL and they wanted added money for the playoffs. It was refused. They went on strike, were suspended and the Canadiens and Toronto played for the NHL title.
The Hamilton stalemate was broken when a tall, red-faced quiet fellow named Big Bill Dwyer, New York's wealthiest bootlegger, bought them for $80,000, moved them into the new Madison Square Garden at 49th Street and 8th Avenue, decked them in red-white-and-blue star- spangled uniforms and called them the New York Americans.
Dwyer's headquarters was a hotel he owned called the Forrest, half a block from the Garden. Several players were billeted there (this was Dwyer's second mistake), sharing the place with such renowned gang bosses as Dutch Shultz, Legs Diamond and Owney Madden, and with their guys and dolls.
"That's where Damon Runyon got stuff for his columns and books about the mob," Jake recounted once. "He lived at the Forrest with this bosomly blonde who made him walk her little yappy pooch every evening. We used to sit in the lobby and snicker."
Jake thought this attitude was one reason Runyan rarely wrote kindly about hockey. Once, after a game between the Amerks and the Montreal Maroons, he wrote that "the business left me palled." There was applause of a sort for Jake and Montreal's Clint Benedict. "Neither team scored while I was in the building, largely because of the agility of the two goaltenders, who were padded like stuffed sausages."
The inaugural NHL game in New York was played just more than 60 years ago - on Dec. 15, 1925, Jake and the Amerks against Georges Vezina and the Canadiens. A man wrote in the New York Sun: "Montreal's strong and flashy forward line of Howie Morenz, Aurel Joliat and Billy Boucher furnished a combination play that New York's high- priced sextet led by Billy Burch and Bullet Joe Simpson could not solve, and but for the sterling network of Vernon (Jakie) Forbes in the home citadel, Canadiens' winning margin of 3 to 1 might easily have been increased."
Jake's name was Vernor, though it always came out Vernon in the newspapers. He was a stocky chirpy fellow of 5-foot-5 who stayed in hockey perhaps longer than he planned. He told me once of his off- season job as a salesman on commission for a fine-china wholesaler in Toronto.
"I told my boss, a man named McKay, 'If you'll give me $50 a week I'll sign for 10 years.' I was thinking of settling down but he helped me make up my mind in a hurry. 'Are you insane?' he snapped at me. 'The bank manager next door isn't making that kind of money.'" So Jake went back to the Americans, though it was a hard life for their goaltender. "The front office used to announce injuries a lot, but the players were seldom hurt," he recalled. "They'd be drunk for days on end, having a fine old time in speakeasies with dwyer's fellahs and girls and his booze."
The Amazing Amerks are remembered as a team that was more consistent on the road than at home. Under the circumstances, who's amazed?
thank you! awesome!! ... what detail!
such exact kind of goals in one NHL season alone: 
