Important dates in hockey history: 
1908 -- ECAHA becomes fully professional, signalling dawn of major-league pro hockey. 
1945 -- Rocket Richard becomes first major-league player to score 50 goals in a season. 
1986 -- publication of The Klein & Reif Hockey Compendium. 
2001 -- The Hockey Compendium returns in an all-new edition. 
         It seems a hundred years ago, but as recently as the 1980s hockey fans had access 
to few statistics beyond goals, assists, points, penalty minutes, and goals-against average.  
The Hockey Compendium revolutionized the analysis of team and player performance, 
providing hockey fans, for the first time, a full range of stats in dozens of categories, many 
of them completely original and never before published anywhere, all of them affording 
unprecedented insights into not only which teams and players were truly the best, but why 
they excelled.  And those stats were painstakingly devised to rate not only current players 
and teams, but to objectively and accurately rank team and individual performance throughout 
the entire history of major-league pro hockey, yielding the only exact, reliable comparisons 
of today's superstars to the greats of yesteryear.  

Best of all, The Hockey Compendium brought to life the teams and players of the game's dazzling past, celebrating the legends and heritage disdained by the NHL itself -- and did it from the viewpoint of veteran fans, with a hip, flip, beguiling sense of humour utterly unique in sportswriting. No soporific rehash of the same old stories and numbers this!
The Hockey Compendium returns in Fall 2001 with a totally new edition. Take a bracing skate through the complete history of the pro game -- its riotous beginnings in the NHA and the Pacific Coast league, the surly birth of the NHL, the greats of the Western Canada league -- the game's strange evolution through the years, from the days of seven-man hockey, of the Flying Frenchmen, of the Original Six, of expansion and the World Hockey Association, to the diluted, greed-driven Sun Belt hash of today's Bettman era -- from Lalonde to Lemieux, Shore to Orr, Sawchuk to Hasek -- ask, and learn: Was Gretzky the best of all time? Is Lemieux even better? Do either of them actually outshine Howe, or Hull, or the Rocket, or ancient immortals like Morenz, Malone, Conacher, Cook, or Lalonde? Where do the Avs, Wings, and other top teams of today rate, compared to the 1980s Oilers, the Canadiens of the '50s and '70s, or the Bruins and Senators of the 1920s? How do Hasek, Joseph, or Roy compare to Ken Dryden, Terry Sawchuk, Grant Fuhr, Gerry Cheevers, Jacques Plante, Bernie Parent, Johnny Bower, Billy Smith, or Glenn Hall? A half-century's worth of never-before-seen shot-and-save statistics tell the tale! What was remarkable about all-but-forgotten players like Marty Walsh, Goldie Prodgers, Art Chapman, Duke Keats, Tommy Smith? What lessons of history did the NHL ignore in order to produce the increasingly lousy hockey we see today? Which now-popular stats are really meaningless and which overlooked numbers speak volumes?
Thousands of answers, thousands of stats, thousands of players from Cyclone Taylor to the Kid Line, to Espo and Orr, to Hedberg and Nilsson, to Jagr, Bure, Sakic, Selanne, Lindros and more -- all of them present and rated, all of their stories narrated in the savvy, snarky, literate style that's won acclaim from critics and fans alike, all of it coming your way for Fall 2001 in The New Hockey Compendium.

"No one equals Klein & Reif's creativity with stats and few write with as much wit and intelligence" -- Stu Hackel, The Hockey News
picture credits: Lalonde, Imperial Tobacco Co. / SIR; Richard and Hasek, IcePix

__________________________________________________________

THE ALL-NEW HOCKEY COMPENDIUM
by JEFF Z. KLEIN and KARL-ERIC REIF
with a foreword by Dave Bidini
Tropic of Hockey, On a Cold Road

published by McClelland & Stewart
available at Chapters, Indigo, and fine booksellers throughout Canada
and on-line from Amazon and Chapters/Indigo

chapters....................................................	indigo......................................................
buy it here!	buy it there!

buy it over there!

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The All-New Hockey Compendium published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. (C) Jeff Z. Klein & Karl-Eric Reif 2001 all rights reserved

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