One Of A Kind Trade

How many NHL players come to mind who have played for three NHL teams that relocated? Not many come to mind for me, but one of the guys is the man to the left in Tom Martin. Martin played 92 games for the Winnipeg Jets, Minnesota North Stars, and the Hartford Whalers between 1984 and 1990 as one of the very few men who accomplished this feat. While that accomplishment is impressive on its own, that's not why we're talking about Tom Martin today, and this article won't even have anything to do with his NHL career. Instead, we're going to learn of a trade he was part of while playing in the WHL that likely will never be seen again simply due to what was involved in said trade! Buckle up because this story is crazy!

I was actually researching something else when I came across the newspaper clipping to the right that was posted by a Twitter account called the "Victoria Cougars Hockey Project". Full marks to the writer(s) of that account because I had never heard this story before seeing this newspaper article, but it seems that the information written in it not only happened, but has become a bit of folklore in the hockey world. The headline in the image may give away more than I wanted it to, but this story today involves a bus trade - something that will likely never be seen again.

According to this article written by Evan Weiner of NHL.com,

"On January 19, 1983, the Western Hockey League's Seattle Breakers dealt Martin to Victoria for a used bus and future considerations. Martin never played for the Breakers and decided to give the University of Denver a try instead. The left wing had played for the Kelowna Buckaroos of the British Columbia Junior Hockey League in 1980-81 and 1981-82 and ended up on the Breakers' reserve list. Martin decided he wanted to play hockey and get a college education at the same time so it was unlikely he would ever perform for Seattle. Breakers management was looking for a deal to get something of value for an asset it would never use.

"Seattle was also looking for a team bus, and Victoria had an extra one. The Cougars management bought the vehicle after the WHL's Spokane Flyers suspended operations after 26 games in the 1981-82 season, but the Cougars could not use the bus that was sitting in Spokane because team management did not want to pay the taxes and duties to register the vehicle in Canada.

"Each side got something they needed for unusable parts. Martin, a Victoria native, would play in Victoria in 1983-84, and Seattle got new wheels. Seattle needed the bus after its bus blew its engine on a trip to Kelowna".

How wild is that? Both teams moved pieces that were otherwise unusable to them - Martin never played for Seattle while Victoria never went to pick up the bus - and both teams got something in return that they could use. Martin, for the record, played 60 games for Victoria in 1983-84, scoring 30 goals and 45 assists after leaving the University of Denver where he played for one season. The bus, meanwhile, moved Seattle players around western Canada and northwestern US states.

When I first read about this story, I could have been convinced that this was a subplot in a movie like Slap Shot. Weiner spoke to Martin, though, who confirmed the entire thing, saying, "I was at the library that night, it was in the middle of the week and the season was going pretty good there in Denver. But I wanted to go back and play junior the next year. The team that had my rights, Seattle, they could not offer me any education. So I asked to be traded.

"You know Kevin (Dineen) was there, he was with me, we didn't think that much of it at first," he continued. "You know, I went to bed that night but the next morning, the phone started going crazy and it ended up being a bigger thing than I thought and I got a lot of media at the time, phone calls from all the papers around the county and a few TV things. It was a pretty funny thing, I guess."

According to the article in the Lethbridge Herald on January 15, 1983 to the left, Seattle Breakers owner John Hamilton called the trade in acquiring the bus from Victoria, "It might have been the best deal I ever made." While being entirely disrespectful to Martin's abilities in his comments, those words from Hamilton may have been eclipsed in 1985 when the Breakers were sold to new owners and renamed as the Thunderbirds. Whatever his point was in making the off-the-cuff remark, the Breakers had been operating without a team bus for approximately one month after it died in Kelowna, so Hamilton dealt Martin's rights to Victoria for a bus they simply couldn't afford to bring home.

"It was a natural," Hamilton told the newspaper. "Our old bus blew its engine on a road trip to Kelowna last month. Victoria had a bus they couldn't use and we had a player we couldn't use. Bingo."

Despite Hamilton's comments, it seems that Martin is taking this trade in stride as people look back on it. When asked about the bus for whom he was traded, Martin told Weiner, "Well, it was used, but it was a fairly recently used. It was a fairly new bus."

"I know it had bunks on it and it was definitely a team oriented bus. In the Western Hockey League they travel a lot and they need a good bus. Maybe it had better wheels than I did."

I doubt the bus ever got a shot playing under the bright lights in NHL arenas, though, and Tom "Bussey" Martin should be remembered for that. His 12 goals, 11 assists, and 249 penalty minutes all were better than the miles counted by the bus in the WHL. Martin was also a first team AHL All-Star in 1988 with the Binghamton Whalers as well in a season where he scored 28 goals and 61 assists in 71 games, so it's pretty clear that his hockey skills were pretty solid!

The moral of this story? The next time you hear about GMs "kicking tires" on trades, remember Tom Martin. He is, to date, the only player in hockey history that I know of that has been traded to a team that literally was kicking tires on a bus they needed.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!