The Toronto Maple Leafs are mourning one of their own, while joining the rest of rhe hockey world in remembering Barry Melrose.
The former defenceman from Kelvington, Sask., who later became the most recognizable hockey voice in the United States, died Wednesday at 70 after a three-year fight with Parkinson’s disease.
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The club issued a statement late Wednesday night calling him a “hard-nosed defenceman” who played 173 of his 300 NHL games in Toronto and later “informed and entertained hockey fans all over the world.”
Melrose arrived in Toronto mid-season in 1980-81 after a stop with the Winnipeg Jets. Over three seasons he piled up 420 penalty minutes in a Leafs sweater, skating alongside Börje Salming and Darryl Sittler early on and later under Punch Imlach
A decade later he came back to Maple Leaf Gardens as the enemy.
In his first season as an NHL head coach, the 36-year-old Melrose took Wayne Gretzky, Luc Robitaille and the Los Angeles Kings all the way to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final. First they had to get past Toronto. The Campbell Conference Final went seven games and remains one of the most crushing playoff defeats of the Leafs’ 1990s. After the teams split the first six, Gretzky scored the winner in Game 7 at the Gardens. An all-Canadian Final against Montreal vanished in a night. The series was defined by Marty McSorley’s hit on Doug Gilmour and the brawl that followed, a moment Melrose later said “won us the series.” For a generation of Leafs fans, that night still sits in the same drawer as 1993 itself. Los Angeles then fell to Patrick Roy and the Canadiens in five games.
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That was the last great chapter of Melrose the coach. The next one made him bigger than any team he ever ran.
From 1996 until his 2023 retirement, Melrose was ESPN’s hockey guy. He became the face of the sport for millions of American viewers who otherwise might never have found hockey. He worked All-Star Games, playoffs and Stanley Cup Finals. When ESPN did not hold NHL rights, he still showed up on SportsCenter and sold the game anyway.
Colleagues called him a hockey original. Gretzky said he was “bigger than any team.” Commissioner Gary Bettman noted that Melrose “cut an unmistakable figure” and spent decades making the sport bigger in the United States
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He left the studio briefly in 2008 for a 16-game stint behind the Tampa Bay Lightning bench, then returned. He stepped away for good after the Parkinson’s diagnosis, saying it was time to focus on his health and his family, wife Cindy and sons Tyrell and Adrien.
We at the The Hockey News pass along our condolences to the Melrose family.
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