Alan Bass and I have known each other since 2007, when we both started writing for a sports website called Bleacher Report. We quickly became friends, though the relationship was, and still is, a severe case of love-hate, considering he is a die-hard fan of the Philadelphia Flyers, while I root for the New York Rangers. In the summer of 2008, that intensity led us to create an online hockey radio show for the Youcastr Network, which has since dropped its programming of all individual shows. From July to November of that year, we broadcasted weekly, interviewing a wide array of people such as New York Rangers radio announcer Kenny Albert, Tampa Bay Lightning radio announcer Dave Mishkin, Toronto Maple Leafs television announcer John Bowen, and members of the Philadelphia Flyers broadcast team for both television and radio, Jim Jackson and Keith Jones, as well as their pre-game anthem singer Lauren Hart. We were also able to land interviews with then-current Rangers goaltender Steve Valiquette, and later, Colin Wilson, future center of the Nashville Predators. In retrospect, it is hard to believe how much time we actually spent doing these shows, even though they were only around an hour long each, and working on individual episodes, which were difficult in themselves to produce, because we had to talk through Skype, since we live almost two hours apart from one another.
When the radio show ended, Alan continued to write for Bleacher Report for a few more years, and I moved around to other blogs, before finally settling in on this one. He then got himself an internship with The Hockey News, and from there, the creativity kept on blossoming. It was in early 2010 when he first told me his initial idea to write a book on the 1967 NHL Expansion, and I offered my encouragement and said I would help him if he needed it. The topic was definitely an interesting one, as it was never written about previously. Little did I know, those early drafts and revisions that I got a chance to read through would actually turn into a finished product that would be published in 2011, titled, The Great Expansion: The Ultimate Risk that Changed the NHL Forever. This book, as I can personally attest to, was meticulously researched and mapped out, and will prove to be the definitive work on this great, important, and now, almost forgotten era of hockey history. Brad Kurtzberg, author of Shorthanded: The Untold Story of the Seals, said the following about the book, “Alan Bass has captured the history of the biggest turning point in NHL history. [He] brings both the highlights on the ice and all the important maneuvers behind the scenes to fans, including what happened and why. Full of in-depth analysis and interesting and never before heard stories, this book is a must for any hockey fan.” Below is our interview:
