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Home > Hockey > Hockey Hall of Famers > Cecil Henry (Babe) Dye
Cecil Henry (Babe) Dye
Cecil Henry Babe Dye was born on 13th may 1898 and died on 2nd January 1962. He was a halfback for the Toronto Argonauts His real career was in professional hockey. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1970. He played 11 NHL, National Hockey League seasons from 1919 to 1931. In his first six seasons, Dye scored a remarkable 176 goals in just 170 games, a pace that wasn't equaled until Wayne Gretzky came along in the 1980s and rewrote the NHL record book.
Dye joined the Toronto Saint Pats in 1918 when the team was still a senior OHA, Ontario Hockey Association operation and led them to the championship. Dye went on to play with the NHL St. Pats in 1919-20 on a line with Reg Noble and Jack Adams. Dye was short at five foot eight inches and slight at just 150 pounds, and his strengths and weaknesses as a player were quickly exposed. On the downside, his skating ability was behind other NHLers, but because of his brilliant stickhandling and hard shot he made an impressive contribution to the team, scoring 11 goals in just twice as many games during his first season.
Three times between 1920 and 1925 Dye led the league in scoring. He twice scored goals in 11 consecutive games and in the 1924-25 season he counted 38, a Toronto record that stood for 35 years, until Frank Mahovlich entered the NHL. In his first six seasons, Dye scored a remarkable 176 goals in just 170 games, a pace that wasn't equaled until Wayne Gretzky came along in the 1980s and rewrote the NHL record book. Because of his weak skating combined with his high scoring, Dye always had an unbalanced goals to assists ratio. During his career, he scored 202 goals but made only 41 assists.
Ironically, Dye's departure from Toronto to Chicago contributed to Conn Smythe, who was then general manager of the New York Rangers, becoming owner of the Toronto franchise and later renaming the team the Maple Leafs. At the start of the 1926-27 seasons, the St. Pats sold Dye to Chicago. When Rangers owner Colonel Hammond discovered that Smythe hadn't expressed an interest in Dye, Hammond fired him.
He is considered the pre-eminent power forward of his era. It was talent and dogged determination that set the competitor above his peers and earned a spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
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