Player, innovator and administrator - all roles that Emile Francis played during his long hockey career. The North Battleford, Saskatchewan native spent his entire working life in the game he loved and was rewarded for his many contributions with enshrinement in the Hockey Hall of Fame, not as a player since his NHL career consisted of only 95 regular season games spread over a half dozen seasons, but as a builder.

At 5-foot-6 and tipping the scales at 145 pounds, he became a goaltender, default position for most undersized players. Young Emile Francis had remarkably quick reflexes and quickly picked up the nickname, “The Cat”. A standout junior, he saw a bit of pro action as a 17-year-old with the AHL’s Hershey Bears and with the Eastern Hockey League’s Washington Lions at 18 before finishing his junior career closer to home.

At 20, after serving briefly in the Canadian military towards the end of World war II, Francis was playing his first NHL games with the Chicago Blackhawks. He appeared in 19 games in 1946-47 and became the teams principal netminder the next season, appearing in 54 games. It would be his only full season in the NHL and he was sent to the New York Rangers. Headed to the Windy City was “Sugar” Jim Henry.

The Rangers already had a fellow by the name of Charlie Raynor, the guy who had made Jim Henry redundant so Francis saw very little NHL ice time as a Ranger. He spent the bulk of his time in the AHL, first in New Haven and later in Cincinnati.

Raynor only appeared in 30 games in 1952-53. Francis played in 70 but all were with the Vancouver Canucks, with whom he won both the Western Hockey League’s MVP and top goaltender awards. The Rangers went with rookie Lorne Worsley, who won that season’s Rookie of the Year honours.

By the time the next schedule started the Gumper was in Vancouver and the Rangers had traded Francis to the Cleveland Barons for a youngster named Bower. Francis spent two years in Cleveland and then spent the last six campaigns of his 14-year professional career in the WHL, hanging up his pads after the 1959-60 season ended.

Moving behind the bench, he spent a few years with the Guelph Storm of the OHA before being tapped to fill the GM’s seat with the Rangers in 1964-65. The Rangers were traditional NHL doormats but within a couple seasons, Francis, who took over coaching responsibilities as well a year into his management tenure, had them back in the playoffs.

No longer a guaranteed two points for their opposition, the Rangers became a team that came to play every night. In 1971-72 they reached the finals for the first time in over thirty years, losing to the Boston Bruins in six games.

In 1976 Francis joined the St. Louis Blues as VP, GM and coach. It was a franchise in deep financial trouble and Francis brought it back form the brink of bankruptcy, on more than one occasion dipping into his own pocket to cover team expenses.

By 1980-81 the team was more than respectable, both on the ice and at the box office, registering a then-team record 107 points.

The final stop in Francis’s NHL career was in Hartford where once again he wore multiple hats, this time those of GM and team president. The Whalers had the best season of their term in Connecticut in 1986-87, when they won the Adams Division, their 93 points one better than the defending Stanley Cup champs from Montreal.

While his main focus for most of his hockey life was running NHL clubs, Francis was a driving force promoting hockey at every level wherever he happened to be based. Out for a stroll one day near Madison Square Garden he came across a number of kids playing on roller skates, something that prompted him to round up some gear, clear ice time and teach them the game the way it ought to be played. Out of that chance encounter came what became a major Gotham junior loop, one that sent a couple alumni on to the big time, a pair of Irish kids from Hell’s Kitchen by the name of Mullen.

Francis also set up a junior league in St Louis and was actively involved with both university and national hockey organizations in the US. In 1982, the same year he was enshrined in the hockey Hall of Fame, he was awarded the Lester Patrick Trophy for his contributions to hockey in America.

While most of the contributions Emile Francis made in the hockey world came away from or, at the very least, off the ice, perhaps his greatest claim to fame is evident every time a team takes to the ice, be it in a novice league or the NHL.

When he was a youngster Francis tended his net wearing the same gloves as did every other player on the ice, a matched pair of gauntlets designed to protect the back of their hands. An avid baseball enthusiast who played and managed for many summers in his home province, Francis modified a first baseman’s glove, adding a protective leather sleeve to cover the wrist and devising a glove designed to snare pucks out of the air, bringing the term “trapper” into winter use and revolutionizing the way goaltenders played the game.