Greatest Goalies of the NHL: Stories of the Legendary Players.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

These four hockey books are basically regurgitations of statistics and reporting taken from standard sources, from newspapers, from websites, and from other books. Poulton writes histories of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Ottawa Senators, while Boer details the story of the Calgary Flames. Poulton also contributes Greatest Goalies of the NHL. Overtime Books is an imprint of Montréal’s Editions de la Montaigne Vertex, specializing in this sort of compilation. Poulton follows the Leafs and the Senators from their earliest years (1893 for Ottawa, 1917 for the Leafs), explaining how they began in earlier incarnations of the NHL, with various early nicknames. Boer does the same for the Flames, a team migrating from Atlanta to “Cowtown” in time for the 1972–73 seasons. All three team histories are cut from the same cloth. There is a chronology, introductions to significant players and their skills, praise and condemnation for team executives. Poulton, for example, has only contempt for long-time Toronto owner Harold Ballard. “Ballard used the company,” he says, “to fund his own excesses, buying his son a motorcycle in 1965 and charging it to the Toronto farm team account, pretending the money was used to buy hockey sticks.” Coaches come and go, frequently leaving one team and almost immediately being hired by another. Poulton and Boer both pile on the details, year after year, until one year seems pretty much like the next, the only differences being success or failure in the playoffs in the run to the Holy Grail, the Stanley Cup. All three team histories conclude with pages of tabulated statistics.

The fourth book in this group, Greatest Goalies of the NHL, presents no less than 34 goalies, each given a few pages of summation. There are five chapters: “The Early Years,” “The Original Six,” “The Modern Era,” “Playoff Heroes,” and a final chapter called “Goaltending Fact Check.” Statistics are taken from the usual sources. Taken as a group, these books will be useful for argument solving among diehard fans, but bring little that is new to hockey reportage.