Danny Grant



Daniel Frederick "Danny" Grant (February 21, 1946 – October 14, 2019) is a retired Canadian left winger, who played in the National Hockey League for parts of fourteen seasons.

After a fine junior career with the Peterborough Petes and a season and a half in the minor leagues with the Houston Apollos, Grant made the NHL with the Montreal Canadiens in 1968, playing 22 regular season games and 10 playoffs games. Grant helped Montreal win the Stanley Cup in 1968.

He was then acquired by the Minnesota North Stars, and in his 1969 rookie season with the club, he won the NHL's Calder Memorial Trophy as the league's most outstanding rookie player. Grant was one of only 4 players who won the Stanley Cup one year, Calder Trophy the Next (Gaye Stewart, Tony Esposito, and Ken Dryden were the others). He would become Minnesota's most consistent star, scoring nearly thirty goals a season for six seasons in all for the Green and Gold.

Despite this, Grant was traded in the 1974–75 NHL season in a surprising deal for defensive forward Henry Boucha (whose attraction to the franchise may have been that he was a Minnesota native), and the trade backfired badly: Grant had his best season that season, scoring 50 goals for the Detroit Red Wings while on a line with superstar centre Marcel Dionne, and becoming only the 12th player in NHL history to accomplish that feat. However, Grant was plagued by injuries from that point on, and only played partial seasons at best thereafter. He retired after the 1979 season to coach a Tier II junior team.

In his career, Grant notched 263 goals and 535 points while playing for the Montreal Canadiens, Minnesota North Stars, Detroit Red Wings and the Los Angeles Kings, and played in three All-Star Games (1969, 1970, 1971).

In 1985, he was inducted into the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame.

Grant went on to coach the University of New Brunswick hockey team in 1995 and 1996, and the Halifax Mooseheads Quebec league junior team in 1998. Grant has been an assistant coach for the St. Thomas Tommies men's hockey team since the 2002–2003 season.