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MONTREAL -- The milestone 75 years ago was greeted without mention in the morning’s newspapers, the NHL’s quiet record-keeping of the day surely more the reason than an indifference to the summit reached the night before.

On Jan. 19, 1950, Dick Irvin became the first to coach 1,000 regular-season games in the NHL, reaching the plateau in a 4-2 loss by his Montreal Canadiens on home ice at the Forum.

Then 57, Irvin was just two-thirds of the way through his 1,448-game NHL coaching career, a journey that would see him win a Stanley Cup championship with the 1932 Toronto Maple Leafs, and three with the Canadiens (1944, 1946, 1953).

Today, Irvin ranks 13th all-time among NHL coaches for regular-season games coached, a category led by Scotty Bowman (2,141).

Four active coaches rank ahead of Irvin on the all-time list: Paul Maurice of the Florida Panthers (1,895); Lindy Ruff of the Buffalo Sabres (1,819); John Tortorella of the Philadelphia Flyers (1,594); and Peter Laviolette of the New York Rangers (1,557).

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1952-53 Stanley Cup-champion Montreal Canadiens. Front row, from left: Jacques Plante, Maurice Richard, Elmer Lach, Bert Olmstead, coach Dick Irvin, GM Frank Selke, Bernie Geoffrion, Billy Reay, Paul Meger, Gerry McNeil. Middle row: PR director Camil Desroches, Calum Mackay, Dickie Moore, Dick Gamble, Ken Mosdell, Floyd Curry, Lorne Davis, Paul Masnick, PR assistant Frank Selke Jr. Back row: trainer Hec Dubois, Doug Harvey, Johnny McCormack, Eddie Mazur, Bud MacPherson, Butch Bouchard, Tom Johnson, Dollard St. Laurent, trainer Gaston Bettez.

If Irvin’s milestone 1,000th game garnered not a single word of mention, the coach’s experiment a night earlier in Toronto was in the news. A handful of Canadiens players used bright red tape on their stick blades during their 1-0 win at Maple Leaf Gardens.

“My idea is that a distinctive color on the stick makes it easier for players to spot their teammates in power power-plays,” Irvin told reporters. “The fellows don’t have to look up.”

In the end, the tape proved too slippery, and the Canadiens were back to using black friction tape before game’s end. General manager Frank Selke Sr. immediately went to work with a Montreal chemist to design red, white and blue tape to match the team’s sweaters, but that didn’t work out, either.

Irvin’s son, Dick Jr., an author and retired broadcaster who for decades was a familiar voice on Montreal radio and a host and analyst on Hockey Night in Canada telecasts, says he’s not surprised that his father’s 1,000-game milestone didn’t make newspaper headlines. In fact, it wasn’t even a topic of conversation in the Irvin household halfway across the country.

“I was in my first year of college in Regina (Saskatchewan), so I wasn’t near it, part of it or even knew about it,” Irvin Jr. told NHL.com in conversation.

Indeed, the Irvin family would only move east the following summer to join the patriarch.

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Dick Irvin Sr. at Maple Leaf Gardens. As coach, Irvin led the Toronto Maple Leafs to a Stanley Cup championship in 1932, and then with the Montreal Canadiens in 1944, 1946 and 1953.

Irvin Sr. first made his name in hockey as a player, a center with the Chicago Black Hawks (then two words) from 1926-29 who was a gifted stick-handler and playmaker. He had been a fine junior and senior amateur player in Winnipeg before turning pro to play in the west of Canada and the U.S.

Irvin arrived with the NHL’s expansion Black Hawks in 1926-27 at age 34, named the team’s first captain and finishing second in NHL scoring that season with 36 points (18 goals, 18 assists) in 43 games.

Injury ultimately forced his retirement as a player in 1929 after just three seasons, though his impact on the game was such that he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame as a player in 1958.

But Irvin’s coaching would become his more famous vocation, beginning with two-plus seasons in Chicago in the late 1920s into the early 1930s. He would be fired by Black Hawks founder Fredric McLaughlin after having brought the team to within one win of the 1931 championship, but then would exact a measure of what his son remembers as sweet revenge the following season.

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Toronto Maple Leafs with the 1932 Stanley Cup prior to the start of the 1932-33 season. Bottom row, from left: Charlie Conacher, Joe Primeau, King Clancy, assistant manager Frank Selke Sr., managing director Conn Smythe, coach Dick Irvin Sr., Hap Day, Ace Bailey, Busher Jackson. Back row: Harold Darragh, trainer Tim Daly, Alex Levinsky, Red Horner, Andy Blair, Lorne Chabot, Harold Cotton, Bob Gracie, Ken Doraty.

Hired by the Maple Leafs by Conn Smythe, Irvin’s new team bounced McLaughlin’s Black Hawks in the first round of the 1932 Stanley Cup Playoffs, then swept the New York Rangers in the best-of-5 Final of what’s known as the “tennis series,” Toronto winning games with scores of 6-4, 6-2 and 6-4.

Irvin would enjoy another highlight, his son says, in 1953, his fourth and final Stanley Cup win.

“My dad made a lot of lineup changes in Game 6 (of the first round) against Chicago,” says Irvin Jr., who still follows the game keenly at age 92.

Most prominent among them was replacing veteran goalie Gerry McNeil with Jacques Plante, who’d played just three NHL games ever and none in the playoffs; Plante was so nervous before the game that he needed the trainer to lace his skates.

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A very young Dick Irvin with his father, Dick Sr., and during the unveiling of the head coaches’ section of Builders Row at Montreal’s Bell Centre on Oct. 28, 2008.

“That must have given the players a lot of confidence, seeing that,” Irvin Jr. said. “My dad told Plante in the Chicago hotel lobby that morning, ‘You’re playing tonight, and you’ll get a shutout.’ Which he did, 3-0. And my dad was certain that if that switch hadn’t paid off, he’d have been fired.”

The Canadiens won Game 7 back in Montreal, then defeated the Boston Bruins in a five-game Final, the only time Irvin Jr. was in the building when his father’s team won a Stanley Cup title.

It’s safe to say that game, the victory earned on Elmer Lach’s historic overtime goal and celebrated famously rink-side by Irvin, Lach and Canadiens star Rocket Richard, earned the coach more headlines than had his 1,000th career game in the same arena three years earlier.

Irvin would retire from coaching after one final season with Chicago in 1955-56, where his NHL career had begun as both a player and coach, one year before his death at age 64.

Top photo: Montreal Canadiens coach Dick Irvin Sr. in his team’s Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room during the 1946-47 season with (from left) Maurice Richard, goalie Bill Durnan, named captain following an injury to Toe Blake, and Butch Bouchard.