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Q: Has a team ever won a Stanley Cup without a player being named captain?

Matthew Downey, Mt. Vernon, Ohio

MOLINARI: Yes, and it has happened more recently than some might realize. Boston did not designate a captain from 1967-73, and won Cups twice during that span (1970 and 1972).

The really peculiar thing about that is that John Bucyk, the Bruins' Hall of Fame left winger, was the team's captain immediately before and after the period when the team did not designate someone to fill that role.

Q: There obviously has been a great influx of European players in the past 20 years and a greater presence of American-born players, too. But I remember that when I lived near Pittsburgh (I left in 1983) and had season tickets, there was an enormous amount of French-Canadian players. I suppose there are still a lot of them, and Canada certainly has hockey as every boy's dream, but where are all those classic surnames like you could find on the Montreal clubs of the 1970s?

David Farone, Bear, Del.

MOLINARI: Players born in the United States or Europe were novelties when the NHL expanded from six to 12 teams in 1967, at which point virtually everyone in the league came from Canada. A healthy percentage of those guys hailed from the province of Quebec, where French is the dominant language.

It's worth noting, though, that while the Montreal dynasty of the late 1970s featured more than a few French-Canadians -- Yvan Cournoyer, Guy Lafleur, Pierre Mondou, Jacques Lemaire, Serge Savard and Guy Lapointe, among others -- it also had some prominent members who grew up speaking English. Guys like Bob Gainey, Steve Shutt, Ken Dryden and Larry Robinson.

The kind of lyrical French names to which you refer still can be found -- how about Marc-Andre Fleury, Patrice Bergeron and Guillaume Latendresse, for starters? -- but you're almost as likely to find a Miikka Kiprusoff as a Martin Brodeur on an NHL roster these days, and the game is better for it.

When the U.S. began mass-producing NHL-caliber players and countries such as Sweden, Russia, the Czech Republic, Finland and Slovakia routinely sent their top performers to North America, the expanded talent pool helped to elevate the caliber of player and offset some of the problems associated with growing from six teams to 30.

Q: When a player is caught with an illegal stick, do the refs confiscate the stick or do they give it back to the player and/or bench and just assume he won't use it again? If it's the former, how do they eventually dispose of the stick?

Trent Baur, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

MOLINARI: When a player's stick is determined to be illegal, it is taken to the penalty box. After the game, it is forward to the league's Hockey Operations staff (do you think the NHL also has, say, a department of Football Operations, too?) for further investigation. Whether the confiscated stick ends up in a storage area or someone's game room after that isn't clear.

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