Mike Palmateer spent four seasons in the Toronto Maple Leafs net with Borje Salming in front of him, which meant watching a man throw his head in front of pucks that nobody had asked him to stop.
The goaltender’s response was not gratitude.
“I’d have a good angle on a shot and Borje would go down to block the puck with his face. He’d be bleeding all over and I’d look at him and say, ‘get the f*** out of my way next time, I had the shot easily,'” Palmateer said.
He laughed telling it, because the point was never really about the save.
“But that was Borje. He would do anything to help our team win,” Palmateer said. “The fans saw it and still remember it. So do I, on lots of occasions.”
Borje Salming’s three best seasons in Toronto:
| Season | Goals | Assists | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1976-77 | 12 | 66 | 78 |
| 1977-78 | 16 | 60 | 76 |
| 1978-79 | 17 | 56 | 73 |
How many points did Borje Salming score?
He still holds the franchise record for assists by any Maple Leaf, along with the goals, assists and points records for a defenseman, and the best career plus-minus in club history at plus-155. The totals behind all that are 150 goals and 637 assists across 1,148 games, 1,099 of them in a Toronto shirt, which comes to 787 points.
The face-blocking was never only about hockey. When Salming arrived from Brynas in 1973, the accepted wisdom in North America was that Europeans couldn’t handle the physical side of the game, and Swedes in particular were dismissed as soft. He spent sixteen seasons disproving it in the most literal way available to him.
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Palmateer had a front-row seat for the cost of that.
“He set a terrific example with his competitive nature, which made it easy for me to play that way in net,” he said. “When I think of my years with the Leafs, I think of Borje and Ian in front of me. That’s the first thing that always comes to mind.”
Salming became the first Swede inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1996, and Toronto retired his No. 21 in 2016. He died in Stockholm in November 2022 at the age of 71, after being diagnosed with ALS earlier that year.
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