Bobby Sheehan, Canadiens' 1971 Cup winner, dies at 77
The Weymouth, Massachusetts native won it all with Montreal before a decade of hockey carried him through five more NHL stops and the WHA.
Bobby Sheehan never scored 50 points in a season. He never got a bio movie or a retired number. He's exactly the kind of player this sport quietly runs on: a third-round pick who turned himself into a 13-year pro by being useful wherever the game sent him.
He has a Stanley Cup ring to show for it. Sheehan died Saturday in his hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts, at 77.
That ring came in 1971, his second season in Montreal, when the Canadiens beat Chicago in seven games. He was a rookie center, drafted in the third round two years earlier. The Cup turned out to be the only one of his career, which is the normal outcome for almost everybody who plays this game, champions included.
He didn't stick around to cash in on it. Sheehan played parts of eight NHL seasons across six franchises: Montreal, the California Golden Seals, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Detroit Red Wings, the Colorado Rockies and the Los Angeles Kings. He finished with 48 goals and 111 points in 310 games.
His best hockey came in Oakland, not Montreal. The Golden Seals were one of the league's perpetual bottom-feeders in the early '70s, and Sheehan still put up a career-high 20 goals and 46 points there. That's the kind of number a good player posts on a bad team, and it's its own small distinction.
When the WHA opened up, he jumped. He played for five different clubs in that league between 1972 and 1978, including an Edmonton Oilers team years before anyone in that building had heard of Gretzky. He made the WHA All-Star Game twice.
He put the U.S. jersey on for the 1981 World Championship. He closed his career in the AHL with Binghamton in 1982-83, then went home and taught kids how to skate.
None of that is a Hall of Fame case, and nobody's pretending otherwise. It's a long career built on the stuff that doesn't make highlight reels: getting drafted, getting traded, getting claimed, winning a ring on a team that didn't need you to be its best player.
He was still finding ice time a decade later in a city that didn't have an NHL team yet. That's the ferda version of a hockey life, and it's worth a line when it ends.
Sheehan is survived by five children and two siblings. His cousin, Charlie Coyle, is in his 15th NHL season, currently with the Columbus Blue Jackets — a family still in the league Sheehan helped build out from the Original Six era into something national.
