1948–49 NHL season
sports season
The 1948–49 NHL season was the 32nd season of the National Hockey League. Six teams played 60 games each. In a rematch of the previous season, Toronto defeated Detroit in the Stanley Cup Finals to win the championship.
League business
Rule changes
A new rule, often called the "Durnan Rule", was introduced for the start of the season stating that goalies cannot be the captain or an alternate captain and wear the "C" or "A". Specifically, NHL Rule 14-D (today's rule 6.1) read: No playing Coach or playing Manager or goalkeeper shall be permitted to act as Captain or Alternate Captain.
This rule was introduced because Bill Durnan, Montreal Canadiens goalie and captain, would frequently leave his crease to dispute calls with the referees. Opposing teams claimed that this would give the Canadiens unscheduled timeouts during strategic points in games. It would be another sixty years before another goalie would be captain. From 2008 until 2010, the Vancouver Canucks had Roberto Luongo as their captain, the seventh goalie to serve as a captain in the NHL. The rule remained in place, however, and Luongo could not 'act' as captain during games.
Regular season
Don Gallinger of the Boston Bruins, hopeful he could win an appeal of his suspension in the gambling scandal, finally admitted to gambling and was expelled from the NHL for life in September.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1557797. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2008 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “1948–49 NHL season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.