NHL

The presence of Nikolai Khabibulin (aka the Bulin Wall) in Calgary on Wednesday night got me thinking about one marketing opportunity that the new National Hockey League is missing out on — that is, capitalizing on the colorful nickname.

Face it: Nowadays, in the NHL, player nicknames lack originality. Gary Roberts is Robs. Joe Nieuwendyk is Nieuwy. Jarome Iginla is Iggy. And so on and so forth. There isn't anything descriptive in them. There isn't anything interesting in them.

Khabibulin's nickname is one of the few in today's NHL that could stand up to the great nicknames of a bygone era — Punch Imlach, King Clancy, Rocket Richard and of course, maybe the best of all time, Max Bentley, the Dipsy Doodle Dandy from Deslisle. Decades ago, even journeymen players received nicknames, such as Claire (The Milkman) Alexander or Wayne (Swoop) Carleton.

Nowadays, of course, the notion of hanging a nickname on a player just isn't done anymore — and part of the fault lies with the press, who generally came up with these nicknames in the good old days.

I take credit for nicknaming only one NHL player in 26 years and it happened in my first three weeks on the job of covering the Calgary Flames.

That year, I was assigned by the Calgary Sun to "try out" for the team and then write a series of articles on the experience. It involved a two-day on-ice stint to the first-ever Flames' training camp in 1980 and one time, I found myself lined behind Kent Nilsson in a drill. Up to that point, it had been a "so far, so good" experience — or until I had to follow Nilsson up the ice on a rush. The way he exploded out of a standing start, the way he accelerated, the way he shot the puck left me in awe — and feeling hopelessly, woefully out of place.

A few days later, driving down to Lethbridge with a colleague, Steve Simmons, and being young sports writers, we got to talking about how we might dub a player with a nickname.

For Nilsson, I suggested 'The Magic Man' because of his exceptional skills — like nothing I'd ever seen before. It probably shouldn't have come as that much of a surprise to us because, the year before, as an NHL rookie, he scored 93 points in 80 games (and would go on to score 131 that first year in Calgary, which is still a team record). Steve liked the idea and from that day forward, every time we made a reference to Nilsson, we put 'Magic Man' in brackets — and once radio and television announcers picked up on it and started using it too, the name stuck.

Eventually, it came to take on an unintended second meaning as well — because Nilsson had the tendency to "disappear" in certain games, usually against a physically intimidating opponent. Eventually, it was that inconsistency that convinced coach Bob Johnson to get rid of him (GM Cliff Fletcher traded Nilsson for two draft picks, one of which they used to select Nieuwendyk. Nieuwendyk was then later traded for Iginla, so even after all these years, Nilsson just keeps giving back to the Flames).

In any event, we never tried to do it again — for reasons that I cannot explain in any rational way. In a year when there are so many good young players are coming into the league — from Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin to Dion (The Hammer?) Phaneuf and Jeff Carter - maybe it's time that the era of the colorful nickname return.

Suggestions?