Clint “Snuffy” Smith signed with the Rangers in 1932 as an 18 year-old kid but had to wait nearly five years to finally crack the big-league roster for a cup of coffee in 1936-37. He then became a stalwart in the lineup for the next six seasons. The start of Smith’s Rangers playing career barely overlapped with the end of Frank Boucher’s, after whom Smith modeled his game. Boucher famously played at an extremely high level while staying out of the penalty box and won the Lady Byng trophy seven times, but compared to Smith’s penalty minutes, Boucher looks like a goon. Smith did not take a penalty until his eightieth game in the NHL. All told, he collected just six penalties, all minors, in 281 games with the Blueshirts, or one every 47 games. “I never got into much trouble because I wasn’t big enough,” Smith said.1
Smith never approached the playmaking talents of Boucher, but the diminutive Smith (5′ 8″, 165) was a key cog in the Rangers offense. In Smith’s first full season, he was one of several forwards that paced a dominating Rangers offense. Smith later said of his rookie year, “I went between Lynn Patrick and Cecil Dillon…We all went together like ham and eggs. We had a heck of a line there.”2
The next season, 1938-39, Smith burst out with 40 adjusted goals and was the top producer among an extremely deep forward corps that had another massively successful offensive season. Smith capped off the year with his first Lady Byng trophy. Those first two years both ended in disappointing first-round playoff exits.
For the 1939-40 season, Boucher became the team’s coach. Smith’s offense dipped a bit that year and never got back to the heights reached in his first two years until he moved to a different team. Bryan Hextall was surging into his prime and leading the offense, and Boucher employed Smith in more of a third line checking role. He centered Dutch Hiller and Alf Pike, and they became one of the fastest skating and best defensive lines in the league. Boucher said of Smith, “Snuffy was a small fellow but exceedingly clever. He was hard to hit and was an expert on faceoffs and digging the puck from the corners.”3
The 1939-40 team had a great regular season and made it to the Cup finals against Toronto. Smith recalled getting a lot of ice time in the finals, and even though he collected just one point in the series, he came up huge in the Cup-winning game six. The Rangers found themselves down 0-2 with 12 minutes left in the game when Neil Colville got them on the board. Two minutes later, Smith fed a pass to Pike who buried it to even the score. Just two minutes into overtime, Smith won a faceoff to begin a Rangers possession that ended with the Cup-winning goal by Hextall that stunned the Leafs and their fans. “I remember you could have heard a pin drop when we scored,” Smith recalled. “It got awfully quiet.”4
Smith played three more fine seasons in New York. His last year with the Blueshirts, 1942-43, was the beginning of the club’s collapse brought on by World War II and GM Lester Patrick’s bungled response to the roster problems it created. Smith and Patrick had always butted heads when it came time to talk contract, and the tension reached a breaking point in the 1943 offseason. “Lester and I had a pretty good argument and he ended up selling me to Chicago,” Smith said. “We ended up bitter.”5 (Soon after, Patrick was whining to the press, “We still haven’t any hockey players. Of all the teams in the NHL, the Rangers have been hit (by the war) most of all.”6 Patrick made matters much worse by giving away Smith and Babe Pratt.)
The Black Hawks installed Smith on their top line and Smith’s offense roared back to life for three big years with Chicago. After his NHL days, he spent many more years as a player and a coach in the minors before retiring to the Vancouver area. He stayed active playing in an “old-timers” league and as a service station businessman. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991 and passed away in 2009.
You can catch glimpses of Smith at the start of this video and at 2:05:
- Grimm, G. Undermanned but Undaunted. 2024. ↩︎
- Halligan, J. & Kreiser, J. Game of My Life: New York Rangers. Sports Publishing. 2006, 2012. ↩︎
- Boucher, F. & Frayne, T. When the Rangers Were Young. Dodd, Mead & Co. 1973. ↩︎
- Halligan, J. & Kreiser, J. Game of My Life: New York Rangers. Sports Publishing. 2006, 2012. ↩︎
- Grimm, G. Undermanned but Undaunted. 2024. ↩︎
- The New York Times.1943, October 15. ↩︎
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