Joe Pavelski retired this summer. Actually, he seems to have done it about a half-dozen times, which is weird in its own right, but we’ll allow it. He had a great career, lasting 18 seasons, cracking the 1,000-point mark and representing Team USA internationally.
And while it may not have been quite as important as those accomplishments, Pavelski also did something else: He continued a long line of NHL stars named Joe. It’s been a classic NHL name since the league’s earliest days, when Phantom Joe Malone gave way to Bullet Joe Simpson, paving the way for modern era stars like Joe Sakic, Joe Nieuwendyk and Joe Thornton.
Joe is a great old-school hockey name. But these days, the emphasis is on the “old”, because it’s just not a name your hear much anymore. The popularity of first names will rise and fall over generations, after all, and the NHL is no different. And when Pavelski made his exit official, I’ll admit that one of my first thoughts was: Was that the last Joe we’ll ever see in the NHL?
Not quite, as it turns out. We still have Joe Veleno in Detroit, and if you also count guys named Joey, we’ve got Daccord and Anderson. Crisis averted. The legacy of Joe lives on, at least for a few more years.
But that got me wondering about some other classic hockey first names that haven’t been as lucky. In this new world of Brayden, Jayden and Kayden, a few names you might have come to associate with NHL greatness are now nowhere to be found in the league.
Is this all an incredibly thinly veiled excuse to Remember Some Guys? Of course it is, absolutely. Welcome to slow news summer. Let’s start our list with arguably the most famous hockey name ever.
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