When Bernie Parent entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1984,
the selection could not be argued or doubted. Parent starred in the NHL
from 1965-66 until an eye injury prematurely ended his career during the
1978-79 National Hockey League season.
With the Boston Bruins owning his rights, Parent played
his junior hockey for the Boston sponsored Niagara Falls Flyers of the Ontario Hockey Association.
That version of the Flyers is now the Sudbury Wolves of the Ontario Hockey League. He was nearly unbeatable between the pipes for Niagara Falls in 1964-65 as he
led the team to a Robertson Cup victory as OHA champions and a Memorial Cup
victory as Canadian major junior champs.
Parent played his first two seasons of professional hockey
split between the Bruins and the CPHL’s Oklahoma City Blazers. The Blazers and Bruins were amazingly full of strong youth in net with Bernie, Gerry Cheevers and Doug Favell. He played
39 games with the Bruins in his rookie season, 1965-66, but that number
fell to 18 the following season.
The Philadelphia Flyers joined the NHL for the 1967-68
season, along with five other teams, doubling the size of the league from six
to twelve teams. The Flyers selected Bernie in the expansion draft and he
played most of the rest of his career with the club.
It wasn’t until the following year that players from the six
expansion teams were featured on hockey cards. The Bernie
Parent rookie card is without a doubt the first highly valued impact card
showing a player from one of the new teams. The card appears as number 89 in
both the 1968-69 O-Pee-Chee and 1968-69 Topps sets and is the highest valued
rookie card in that year.
In 1970-71, Bernie Parent was traded to the Toronto Maple
Leafs mid-season. He played the rest of that season and the next with the
Leafs. In a long string of big mistakes by Toronto, Parent’s services were not
retained and he jumped to the World Hockey Association for the 1972-73 season.
Bernie played 63 games for the WHA’s Philadelphia Blazers in
the league’s first year of existence. The team was unstable, beginning life as
the Miami Screaming Eagles but moving to Philadelphia before a single game was
played in Florida. Two professional teams proved too much for Philadelphia and
the team moved to Vancouver the following season. Bernie didn’t follow the
team, staying in Philadelphia and rejoining the Flyers.
Parent’s return to the NHL was nothing short of magical.
Bernie won 47 of the 73 games he played in 1973-74, a record for most wins by a
goaltender that has since been surpassed by Martin Brodeur. The Flyers won the
Stanley Cup in both 1973-74 and 1974-75 with Parent being awarded the Conn
Smythe Trophy both years. Both years also saw him win the Vezina Trophy.
The year following his exit from the NHL, Philadelphia
retired his number 1. As mentioned above, Bernie Parent became an honoured
member of the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1984 after a stellar career with the Broad
Street Bullies.
