Clark Gillies played left wing on the most productive line in hockey, the New York Islanders‘ Trio Grande, with Bryan Trottier at center and Mike Bossy on the right. His job was to win the puck in the corners, protect the two men who scored with it, and be the reason nobody touched them.
“He’s in the Hall of Fame for a reason, because he could score goals. He had an all-around game. He was the man,” Trottier said on the Ice Guardians podcast. “Scary. He was scary when he got mad.”
Bossy found that out one night. He came down the wing, went for the far corner, and missed the net entirely, then drifted into the corner rather than chasing it while his linemates were already backchecking.
Then he did it again.
“Clark came back and he goes, look, you shoot it wide again and fall into the corner, I’m going to take my stick and break it right over your f***ing head,” Trottier said.
Bossy turned to the man beside him for a second opinion.
“Mike looked at me and goes, is he serious? F***ing right he’s serious,” Trottier said. “Never missed the net again.”
Mike Bossy’s NHL career:
| Games | Goals | Points | Goals per game |
|---|---|---|---|
| 752 | 573 | 1,126 | .762 |
How many 50-goal seasons did Mike Bossy have?
Wayne Gretzky and Alex Ovechkin have each had nine of them, and so did Bossy. The difference is that his came one after another, in his first nine years in the league, which nobody else has ever managed. He also shares the record for 60-goal seasons with Gretzky at five, and his career rate of .762 goals per game remains the highest in NHL history.
He arrived in 1977 as the 15th pick, having been passed over by fourteen teams who had decided he wasn’t rugged enough and couldn’t defend. Al Arbour put him on a line with Trottier and Gillies at training camp, and he scored 53 as a rookie, a record that stood until Teemu Selanne broke it in 1993.
That line is the reason New York won four consecutive Stanley Cups between 1980 and 1983. Trottier ran the play, Bossy finished it, and Gillies made sure both of them had the room to work, finishing his own career with 319 goals and 1,023 penalty minutes across 958 games.
All three went into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Gillies died in January 2022 and Bossy three months later, both from cancer, which leaves Trottier as the only one left to tell these stories.
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