Mike Bossy
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Mike Bossy (born in Montreal, Quebec, on January 22, 1957) was an ice hockey player who played for the New York Islanders during their four-year reign as Stanley Cup champions in the early 1980s. Known for his powerful shot, he was among the league's goal scoring leaders. His career was cut short by injuries.
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Bossy scored a then record 53 goals as a rookie, won the Calder Trophy for rookie of the year, and was named a Second Team All-Star. He is the only player to have scored 50 or more goals for nine consecutive seasons, and only Wayne Gretzky has also scored 50 or more goals in as many as nine seasons. Additionally, he and Gretzky are the only players ever to have scored 60 or more goals in as many as six seasons. Unlike Gretzky, however, who played 20 seasons, Bossy was healthy enough only for 10, of which only the first nine were full.
As he never played long enough for his skills to diminish, his scoring averages remain quite high. Bossy averaged .762 goals per game in the regular season and .659 in the playoffs, averages surpassed by only Mario Lemieux, .768 and .710 respectively. Comparatively, Gretzky scored .601 in the regular season and .587 in the playoffs; Brett Hull, .586 and .510; Phil Esposito, .559 and .469; Maurice Richard, .556 and .617; Bobby Hull, .547 and .521; Marcel Dionne, .542 and .429; Guy Lafleur, .497 and .453; Mike Gartner, .494 and .352. Many thus regard Bossy along with Lemieux (as well as Bobby Hull and Richard) as the purest natural scorers ever to play the game.
In 1980-81, he scored 50 goals in 50 games, the first to do so since than the great Maurice Richard thirty-six years earlier. Bossy was also known for being able to score goals in remarkable fashion, the most incredible, perhaps, in the 1982 Stanley Cup finals when, up-ended by a check and several feet in the air, parallel to the ice, Bossy nonetheless managed to hook the puck with his stick and score.
Bossy was noted for his clean play, almost never resorted to fighting, and won the Lady Byng Trophy for gentlemanly play three times: 1983, 1984, and 1986. He earned the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP in 1982, and scored 17 goals in three straight playoffs -- 1981, 1982, and 1983 -- the only player ever to do so. In reaching the Stanley Cup Finals five times, between 1980 and 1984, Bossy scored 69 goals. By contrast, in Gretzky's five Stanley Cup Finals playoffs during his peak years with the Edmonton Oilers, he scored 59 goals.
Bossy earned 5 First Team All-Star selections, one of only four right wings ever to do so, again a notable achievement considering that the other three had much longer careers (Gordie Howe - 26 years; Maurice Richard - 18 years; Guy Lafleur - 17 years).