Walter “Babe” Pratt totaled a whopping 27 goals and 97 assists in his six-plus years with the Rangers. Believe it or not, those numbers qualify Pratt as one of the best offensive d-men of the time. Of course, during Pratt’s Rangers tenure NHL teams played just 48 games a season and scored less than 2.5 goals per game. And defensemen were expected to do nothing but defend, especially on Lester Patrick and Frank Boucher’s Rangers. So his raw numbers get a substantial boost from my adjustments, though even his adjusted numbers don’t leap off the page—his 52 adjusted goals are the fewest of anyone on this list. But Pratt consistently set up plays that ended in goals for a lot of years for the Rangers. Pratt’s Hall of Fame bio praises him as “a defenseman who kept the puck deep in the other team’s zone.”
It was only after Pratt was traded to Toronto that the true, eye-popping extent of his offensive talents were revealed. According to Stan Fischler, while with the Rangers Babe “sacrificed his individual scoring numbers to fit in with…’The Rangers Machine.’ In fact, whenever Pratt rushed the puck over the blue line and tried to score on his own, his teammates would playfully rib him, saying, ‘For crying out loud, stay back and don’t be messing up our forward lines!'” On one hand, it is hard to understand the Rangers relative reining in of Pratt’s offense, but it is also hard to argue with the results: Pratt’s six full seasons with the team make up one of the best sustained offensive stretches in team history (equaled only by the Gilbert/Ratelle/Park teams of the early ’70s).
As a youngster, Pratt was playing baseball when someone commented, “He’s a regular Babe Ruth,” and the nickname stuck. Pratt seemed to like it, saying “I think it’s better than Walter!” He came to the Rangers as a 20 year-old kid, and said that veteran defenseman Ching Johnson was “one of the finest players when it came to working with rookies. Ching was from Winnipeg too, and he sort of took me under his wing.”1 Pratt and Johnson’s careers did not overlap for long, but there was no shortage of great Rangers teammates for Pratt. He was joined on the blueline by Art Coulter and Ott Heller, and they had a plethora of spectacularly talented forwards to set up, starting with the tail end of the Bun Cook-Frank Boucher-Bill Cook years, and continuing with the next wave that included Lynn Patrick, Bryan Hextall, and Neil Colville as the most frequent recipients of Pratt assists. Pratt remembered Colville as one of the best puck carriers he ever saw.2
Frank Boucher, who was first Pratt’s teammate and then his coach, remembered Pratt as “a fellow who almost defies description, a laughing man of six-feet-four who was a wonderful puck carrier and excellent passer. He didn’t hit hard but he had an unusual knack of sticking out his rear end, sort of sideways, and tipping the attacking player off his feet. Babe was a big drinker as well as night owl, and he was endlessly in hot water with Lester. But he only grinned, made quips, and kept right on burning his candle in all directions.”3
Pratt’s time with the Rangers was highlighted by the powerhouse 1939-40 championship team, which Boucher and Conn Smythe both called the best they ever saw. Just four defensemen played for the Rangers the entire season: Pratt paired with another gifted two-way man in Heller, and Coulter paired with Muzz Patrick. Those four plus Dave Kerr in net combined for the best defensive team in Rangers history. In the 1940 semi-finals, Pratt scored the lone goal in game five to give the Rangers a 3-2 lead in the series.
The Rangers Machine kept trucking through 1941-42 with the best record in the league and Pratt putting together another typically excellent year. But then World War II wreaked havoc on NHL rosters. Lester Patrick was even convinced the NHL would not operate in 1942-43. But the war did not directly cause the end of Pratt’s time with New York. He was one of the few returning regulars when the puck dropped on the 1942-43 season, but suffered what ended up being a minor injury in the sixth game of the year. For reasons that are unclear to me, Lester Patrick then traded Babe to Toronto in exchange for Hank Goldup and Red Garrett. Stan Fischler says the trade was made because the Rangers “needed bodies” to fill out the lineup, which would make more sense to me if more than two players headed to Broadway. There are also suggestions that Patrick reached the end of his rope putting up with Pratt’s big personality and drinking, though he had put up with it all just fine for a long time. Pratt himself did say, “I think Lester got a bit disturbed at some of my extracurricular activities.”4
This is purely speculation, but I wonder if Patrick was already seeing the writing on the wall that the disastrous 1942-43 club was not going to be competitive, so he entered rebuilding mode and acquired two younger players. I am not sure how highly rated Goldup and Garrett were at the time. Goldup was not particularly young at 24 and had been a fairly average offensive forward for a couple of years. Garrett the 18 year-old defenseman was the baby of the trade and had no NHL experience. Who knows what all was going on in the chaos at the time—perhaps Lester thought Pratt would be enlisting and just tried to get something in return. From my view 82 years later, the trade does not make much sense, and the woeful war years for the Rangers might have been slightly less bleak with Pratt still in the mix. Goldup ended up playing 102 decent games for the Rangers. Garrett only skated in 23 before joining the Canadian forces. He was killed in battle in November, 1942 when a German sub sank his boat off the shores of Newfoundland. The AHL rookie-of-the-year award has been named in Garrett’s honor since 1947-48.
The trade immediately unlocked new levels of offense for Pratt. Toronto coach Hap Day gave him a blinding green light unlike anything he’d had in New York. It should be noted the overall level of talent in the league was suddenly dramatically lower and scoring went through the roof, but Pratt’s offensive explosion in Toronto is still mighty impressive. Here are my adjusted numbers for him with the Maple Leafs:
Pratt set a new record for points by a defenseman and won the Hart Trophy in 1943-44, and scored the game-winner in the seventh game of the 1945 Stanley Cup finals. He recorded a six assist game in 1944, the first defenseman to do so. Six d-men have equaled the feat since, but it has never been surpassed.
After his playing days, Pratt worked in the lumber industry in British Columbia. In 1970, he became the first employee of the Vancouver Canucks and was a goodwill ambassador for the team until his death in 1988.5
Watch Pratt score the game’s only goal in a playoff game against the Montreal Maroons on April 1, 1937 at the very end of this short clip:
click here for the list of the Rangers Top 60 Producers of Offense
and an explanation of my adjusted stats and ranking method
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