Roger Lafreniere

Roger Lafreniere played on the Memorial Cup winning 1962 Red Wings. Courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator.

Memorial Cup Red Wings defenseman had short career in the NHL

One of the players of the 1962 Memorial Cup-winning Hamilton Red Wings, Roger Lafreniere, was certain at one time he would not make the OHA club.

“I didn’t expect to make the Hamilton club after they cut me in Saint Catharines,” he said in a May 1962 interview with the Hamilton Spectator. “I came to Hamilton for a last try after attending the pro club workouts at North Bay. But I hadn’t been on the ice for a week when I arrived here and I wasn’t in shape.”

Well, Red Wings Coach Eddie Bush must have thought something of the Montreal-born Lafreniere, who lived in Mattawa, and played with the North Bay Trappers and then in the intermediate league of the NOHA.

Born in 1942, Lafreniere missed qualifying for another year of junior hockey by seven days. To play in the next following season, a player must not be 20 by the end of July.
So he reported to the Red Wings’ camp in October of 1961, got a pair of goals in an exhibition game with Niagara Falls, and Coach Bush assigned him defenseman duties on the ice.

Lafreniere enjoyed the season with the Red Wings, capping off his one and only year in Junior hockey with a championship team playing with the likes of Bob Wall, Pit Martin, and Paul Henderson.

Lafreniere did go to the big show, playing three games for Detroit in the 1962-63 season before settling down to a decade in the minors, including the AHL clubs of Buffalo and Providence, and Denver of the WHL. But he did have another session in the NHL, playing in 10 games with the Saint Louis Blues in the 1972-73 season. He played a couple more years in the minors before retiring in 1975.

BACK

HOME