If Bill Riley’s NHL career had been limited to the one game he played in Washington’s inaugural season of 1974-75 – on Dec. 26, 1974 – it would have been a remarkable story. But perseverance was a Riley trademark, and he made sure the story kept unfolding for years after his historic debut more than half a century ago.
Shortly after their team plane touched down at Dulles on Sunday afternoon, the Caps learned they’d lost Riley, an alum from the very first season in franchise history, after a bout with cancer. Riley passed away Sunday, March 29 at his home in Amherst, Nova Scotia, which was also his birthplace.
The third Black player in NHL history, Riley played 125 of his 139 NHL games with the Caps, where he spent parts of four seasons from 1974-79. When he debuted that night in 1974, it was an historical moment in NHL history. Riley became the third Black player in NHL history, following in the skate-steps of Willie O’Ree and Mike Marson.
Marson was a rookie with the Caps that season, so the night that Riley debuted also marked the first time in League history that two Black teammates took to the ice together.
Like many of his peers from his playing days, Riley grew up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, with an undying love for the game.
“I watched Hockey Night in Canada,” he told me in a podcast interview just over four years ago. “The whole family did; we never missed it. It was a six-team League back in the day, and I knew the names of every player on every team. And of course, when you’re out playing road hockey or you’re on the pond, you were Frank Mahovlich or Gordie Howe or Jean Beliveau or The Rocket. But I never played organized hockey; it was always the ponds or the streets.”
If you look at Bill Riley’s page on hockeydb.com, you’ll see the first year listed is 1974-75, with Riley playing that one game for the Caps the day after Christmas in 1974, and spending the rest of the season – the first of three seasons he’d spend in Ohio – with the Dayton Gems of the now-defunct International Hockey League.
Whatever hockey Bill Riley played between his childhood and his first season as a pro – he described it as “bottom level midget junior hockey” – escaped the watchful eye of hockeydb.com.
And yes, in 1974, a 24-year-old National Hockey League player made it to the peak of his profession without playing major junior hockey, without being drafted and without even having reached the midpoint of his first season as a professional hockey player.
These days, who even dreams of starting a pro hockey career at 24? When Riley’s junior hockey days ended, he moved west to Kitimat, British Columbia.
“When I left junior hockey, I wasn't ready to play it at a professional level anyways,” Riley remembered. “And I went to Kitimat because I went there to work, and the local senior team need a player, so they got me a job in the aluminum smelter. And I worked in the smelter.
“I'm trying to remember if I was there three years, three, four years, and played senior hockey. I'm not sure if we practiced once a week or twice a week – I can't remember – but we played every weekend. And I just tore the league up.”
“I won the scoring race three years in a row, and I set scoring records in the Pacific Northwest Hockey League. And professional hockey players would come in to teach hockey schools in the summer. And then we would have a Pro-Am game, and it was the pros against the amateurs.
“And of course, I was still an amateur at that point. And anyways, I played with them. And of course, when the game was over, I had three, four goals, whatever.
“And you're sitting down, you're having a couple of pops with these guys and talking to them. And I asked them, I said, ‘Do you think that I could play professional hockey?’ And they said, ‘You could play professional hockey easy,’ right?
“And so, I started writing letters, and Tommy McVie answered the bell for me; I love the guy. And I went to that first training camp in London, Ontario. And I believe we might have had 60 guys.”
Riley’s hockeydb.com page may have left off his PNHL exploits, but a search of that site by league unearths his legend. He led the League with 74 goals (second place was 52) and 119 points, and McVie, who was finishing his own playing career as a player-coach with Dayton, signed Riley after the winger reached out by snail mail.
Riley joined a burgeoning group of dozens of hopefuls at Washington’s first-ever training camp in London, Ont. in Sept. of 1974.
Months later, he was in the Caps’ starting lineup against Philadelphia, which would go on to win the Stanley Cup at the end of that ’74-75 NHL season.
“What I remember about that night was like the first NHL game I've ever saw in my life; I was playing in it,” Riley reflected. “And they put me on the starting lineup, and I was standing on the blueline, and I was shaking so bad that I was trying to hold my legs.
