Rayner was towering presence with Rangers

TORONTO -- Henrik Lundqvist sat beaming at the front of the Esso Great Hall this month, wearing the new ring that officially welcomed him to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Behind him, a few stick lengths to his right, was the backlit induction plaque of Claude Earl “Chuck” Rayner, the late Brooklyn Americans and New York Rangers goalie who had been enshrined 50 years ago this fall.

Their careers were separated by decades, but "King Henrik" and "Bonnie Prince Charlie" were Rangers stablemates, two of the 91 men who have played goal on Broadway. The bond is strong enough, in fact, that Lundqvist enthusiastically posed beneath Rayner’s plaque, his own having just been installed nearby among the six other inductees of the Class of 2023.

Lundqvist is the Rangers all-time lead in a number of statistical categories, including games played, games started, wins and shutouts, but Rayner isn't far off, ranking sixth in games played and started, seventh in wins, and tied for fifth in shutouts. From vastly different eras, their goals-against averages are separated by a little more than half a goal per game, with Rayner at 2.98 and Lundqvist at 2.43.

Henrik Lundqvist in front of the 1973 Hall of Fame induction plaque of fellow New York Rangers goalie Chuck Rayner in Toronto on Nov. 10, 2023.

Neither won the Stanley Cup, though Rayner came heartbreakingly close in 1950, when the Rangers lost 4-3 in double overtime to the Detroit Red Wings in Game 7 of the Final.

Both won individual awards, with Lundqvist winning the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goalie in 2011-12, and Rayner winning the Hart Trophy as the League’s most valuable player in 1949-50, becoming the first goalie to win the award since the Roy “Shrimp” Worters in 1928-29.

Rayner, a native of Sutherland, Saskatchewan, caught the eye in the late 1930s of Red Dutton, the NHL’s second president from 1943-46 and onetime owner of the New York/Brooklyn Americans, who signed the goalie to his first pro contract.

“I was watching a kid’s game here in Montreal and I saw Rayner take on Kenny Reardon, a pretty tough fellow who played for the Canadiens,” Dutton said. “Chuck beat the [heck] out of Reardon and I said on the spot, ‘That’s the kind of guy I want playing for me!’ So I signed him and sent him to (GM and coach) Eddie Shore in Springfield of the AHL. He wasn’t there very long when I brought him up to the Americans.”

Chuck Rayner in action against the Montreal Canadiens at Madison Square Garden in the mid 1940s, framed by Maurice Richard (9) and Elmer Lach, taking a gloved fist behind the net.

Rayner had enjoyed a fine career on his road to the NHL, leading the Manitoba Junior Hockey League in wins and shutouts in 1939-40 and the American Hockey League in shutouts (six) and GAA (2.29) in 1940-41.

He played 12 NHL games for Brooklyn in 1940-41, then 36 more the following season before leaving the game because of his enlistment in the Royal Canadian Navy, which he served through the end of World War II. The Americans folded at the end of the 1941-42 season, leaving the NHL’s six remaining teams to pluck bodies from the roster.

At the Hall of Fame induction luncheon in Montreal in June 1973, St. Louis Blues vice president Lynn Patrick recalled how Rayner’s rights were claimed by the Rangers.

“My father, Lester, pulled Chuck’s name out of the hat,” said Patrick, who coached Rayner and the Rangers for part of the 1948-49 season and all of 1949-50.

“I remember a game in Detroit when Chuck shut them out 1-0 (on Dec. 10, 1949). I don’t think we were in the Red Wings' end of the ice more than twice in the game. Edgar Laprade scored the goal, and Chuck must have stopped 50-60 shots.”

An Associated Press report that night said that Rayner had made 28 saves, shots on goal an unofficial statistic in the day, but that’s probably just a detail.

New York Rangers teammates Chuck Rayner (left) and "Sugar" Jim Henry in their team’s dressing room at Maple Leaf Gardens on Nov. 2, 1945.

In 10 NHL seasons with the Americans and Rangers, Rayner never enjoyed a winning year, and when a knee injury ended his career in 1953, he had a record 138-207 with 78 ties, a 3.03 GAA and 25 shutouts. He was an even 9-9 in two trips to the postseason (1948, 1950).

But at 5-foot-11 and 190 pounds, a large goalie at the time, Rayner was a towering presence in net and in New York, where he was a beloved, charismatic figure on more than one sad-sack Rangers team.

It was Rayner, not Jacques Plante as widely believed, who might have been the NHL’s first roaming goalie, with no rule in place at the time to keep a netminder on his own side of center ice.

Chuck Rayner, who served with the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II, receives a poppy from Kathleen Wheeler at Maple Leaf Gardens on Nov. 8, 1946.

“Don’t you believe it,” Rangers GM Emile Francis sniffed of Plante being the rushing pioneer while speaking at Rayner’s enshrinement. “Chuck was so tall and such a fine skater that when we had a man-advantage, he’d be up at their blue line, playing the point.”

Indeed, during the war, Rayner scored what is believed to be the first goal credited to a netminder when he skated the length of the rink in a Halifax exhibition game and scored on Alex Jones, his counterpart on the Canadian Army team.

With the Navy, stationed in Newfoundland, Rayner was assigned as a call sentry, guarding sailors who were in detention for various reasons. However, he already was looking ahead to a return to the NHL, having qualified as an armed forces physical training instructor after spending nine months on a west coast patrol vessel and six months aboard a frigate in the North Atlantic.

“I’m only 24,” he said. “I figure I’ve still some good hockey in me.”

Rayner would become a trailblazer upon his return to the NHL in 1945-46. Using an early system of platooning goalies, Rangers coach Frank Boucher rotated Rayner with "Sugar" Jim Henry in 1945-46, on occasion using the pair almost on shifts in a single game.

Chuck Rayner in a 1940s portrait, and his 1973 Hockey Hall of Fame induction plaque.

The following year, Rayner led the NHL in shutouts with five, and his excellent skating was rewarded on Feb. 1, 1947, when during a late power play in Montreal he was used for about a minute as a forward -- in full goaltending equipment -- with the Rangers pressing in vain to tie it.

“The final minute of play was the most spectacular 60 seconds of the local hockey season with beetle-browed Chuck Rayner, Ranger goaler, providing the excitement,” wrote Montreal Gazette columnist Dink Carroll. “The spectacle of Rayner, bulky in his big pads, battle for the puck with a couple of Habitants was one for the books.”

Rayner died at home in Langley, British Columbia, on Oct. 6, 2002, at the age of 82, having been enshrined 20 years after his final game. Fittingly, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s last game was a victory, 5-2, on home ice against the Boston Bruins and his old friend, Sugar Jim Henry.

His NHL career finished by strained knee ligaments, Rayner was replaced by a call-up from Saskatoon of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. From the minors and into retirement, he would watch as future Hall of Famer Gump Worsley stepped in and became the Rangers’ next great goalie.

Top photo: Chuck Rayner in a mid-1940s portrait taken at Maple Leaf Gardens, wearing primitive shoulder and arm pads.