Again, him wearing a mask is meaningless.
What did he actually do to grow the game out west? That keeps coming up, but nothing to back it up.
Since I came up with this I guess I have to defend it
. What I have read suggests that the Stanley Cup match between the Winnipeg and Montreal Victoria’s were hyped immensely by the media in Winnipeg. In this era the mass dailies were the popular form of media and they promoted the games with certain style.
They spun the stories as; West vs East, Central Canada vs the Prairies, our community and lifestyle vs theirs etc. Obviously the media realized that people wanted to read about sports and something the news papers could make money from. The Stanley cup meant a lot to Winnipeg; they had a telegraph in Montreal and received play by play via Morris Code which was played (or decoded? haha) to a large audience in a downtown hotel. When Winnipeg won, the players were treated to a hero’s welcome with the first Stanley Cup parade.
Again back to the media, I wish I could find a direct quote, but it suggested that the win, promoted by the media, was an important factor in drawing more interest and players to the game of hockey in Winnipeg and the prairies. Dan Bain did not personally promote the game, but winning is important and he was the best player on that winning team. Hockey would have become popular in my opinion, but you don’t know for sure, and the winning is important to every sport. All one needs to do is see the Orr effect and all the great players that came out of New England after Orr, the Gretzky effect in California, and the most successful Sun Belt teams won the Stanley Cup and the ones that haven’t are in financial dire straits. Winnipeg winning the Stanley cup in my opinion moved hockey from a central Canadian pursuit to a more across Canada sport, even though people played it in Winnipeg and the prairies before, winning obviously made it more popular.
Again we need to err on the side of historical significance when it comes to these early era players, otherwise we are just going to elect most pre-ww1 guys as left over’s at the end. You stated in an earlier round that Mike Grant might be more "historically significant", perhaps you are correct and I think it is important for people to weigh historical significance in the early era and debate it. Many nineteenth century players are at a disadvantage because they never played many games and there is little statistical evidence to support them. Dan Bain and Mike Grant in my opinion are more important historically over players who some consider “better†due to more statistical evidence. I agree the way we judge players is generally correct, but any HOF is a museum meant to recognize important historical aspects of the sport. If you ignore historical significance, (at least in the early era section, after this it is
far less important), this project is just the top 100 or the all time draft in a different format and isn’t particularly unique.
I would have replied earlier but I have been looking for some of my hockey history stuff with little success. There is a minor mention of this in the book Lord of the Rinks (something along the lines of "the win promoted more interest in senior hockey"), but I thought I had a journal article about this somewhere, I know I was in a lecture about it.