WHERE ARE THEY NOW: Derlago’s legacy endures on ice, map

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This article was published 21/11/2017 (3096 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bill Derlago couldn’t resist a chance to drive over and visit Derlago Drive in Brandon’s southwest corner.

“Me and my brother (Steve) took a drive by (on Thursday),” he said. “It was nice to drive on Derlago and (Glen) Hanlon and (Bill) Fairbairn are there. It’s very special. It will always be there so that all of the grandkids can see it. It’s fantastic.”

Now 59, Derlago was in the city last week to help the Toronto Maple Leafs unveil a banner for Brandon-born Turk Broda in Westman Place on Sunday. The trip to see the streets that city council named after him and his fellow Wheat King icons in 2016 was a reminder that he certainly will never be forgotten in the Wheat City.

Few players have had more of an impact in the Western Hockey League — which was then called the Western Canadian Hockey League — than Derlago.

In 209 regular-season games, he scored 234 goals and added 203 assists, and in 34 playoff games, he piled on 60 more points. To put his best season in context, his 96 goals in 1976-77 would have won him the team’s overall points title in 20 of the team’s 50 seasons in the league.

Born in Birtle, Derlago grew up just 18 kilometres south in tiny Beulah. His father Tony sold their farm and moved his wife Lillian and five children into town after he took a job with CN caring for the Miniota line.

Derlago grew up spending his winters on an outdoor sheet of ice, putting in long hours there with a handful of other local kids his age. A single strand of lights hung above each blue-line, with every puck marked so that the kids could claim them in the spring when the snow melted.

He played his first organized hockey in Birtle, and since there wasn’t a midget team in the area, joined the senior hockey McAuley Tigers at age 14 with his older brother Steve.

The Tigers won the Manitoba provincial C title that year, with Derlago finishing third in scoring. He also played in a few midget tournaments that season with a regional all-star team and was listed by the Wheat Kings.

“I was invited to camp and I thought I was going to be gone the next day, but I kept staying and staying,” Derlago said. “I made the Travellers.”

Derlago spent part of the 1974-75 season with the Manitoba Junior Hockey League club, which served as a de facto farm team for the Wheat Kings. He remembers one thing that happened very clearly: The Wheat Kings bought him some blades.

“It was the first time I had my own pair of skates,” Derlago said with a chuckle. “I wore my brother’s, and his were size 10. When I got my first pair, they were size eight-and-a-half. What a big difference that was.”

In 45 games, Derlago scored 38 goals and added 21 assists with the Travellers before spending the final 17 games with the Wheat Kings. In that time, he managed just four assists in 17 games.

“I was young and guys were 20,” he said. “The draft was 20 back then and guys were five years older than me. I was in awe playing in front of the big crowds.”

The chance to get acclimatized paid off in a big way a year later in his 17-year-old season in 1975-76. Derlago scored 49 goals and added 54 assists in 68 games, finishing tied for third in team scoring with Dan Bonar, behind Dale McMullin and Mike Bradbury.

He credits head coach Dunc McCallum with helping to develop his game.

“I didn’t have a real practice session until I got to the Wheat Kings,” Derlago said. “All we did was play shinny. Dunc was good at teaching some structure in my game. We practised like pros, because he was a pro guy. Our practices were fast like professional practices, so the jump when I turned pro was no big deal.”

His parents and little sister Tracy would come to all the Wheat King games and sit in the same spot.

The 1976-77 season proved to be Derlago’s finest. Along with the 96 goals, he added 82 assists on a team that included Bonar, Brian Propp, Ray Allison, Brad McCrimmon, Wayne Ramsey and Dave Semenko.

“They had lots of skill,” Derlago said of his teammates. “They could make plays. We weren’t the type of team that would dump it in a lot. We kept control of the puck. Our game was more puck control.”

Despite being in the rough-and-tumble Broad Street Bullies era of hockey in the 1970s, Semenko’s presence — along with Tim Lockridge and Gord Kaluzniak — meant that Derlago wasn’t bothered much, except in the playoffs when the game got more physical.

In fact, he remembers times when the opposing team would run out of pucks during warmup because they wouldn’t cross centre ice to retrieve them.

He said his breakout year had a lot to do with timing.

“I got some confidence from the year before,” Derlago said. “Dunc put me in situations with lots of ice time. You need ice time and confidence, and Propp was a good player and Allison was a good player and Brad McCrimmon was outstanding on the blue-line. We moved the puck around pretty good.”

Derlago said Winnipeg Jets star forward Bobby Hull came to Brandon and tried to sign the whole line to a World Hockey Association deal, which they turned down on McCallum’s advice that they would make more by waiting to play in the National Hockey League.

In the 1977-78 season, his last in the league, Derlago took his game to another level again. In just 52 games, he scored 89 goals and had 63 assists, averaging nearly three points a game. He was on pace for 123 goals and 210 points in a 72-game season.

He was injured during an exhibition game the night before joining Canada’s world junior hockey team in Montreal. Derlago chuckles that in his place the team added a young player out of Brantford, Ont., Wayne Gretzky.

The high-flying Wheat Kings were ousted in the playoffs when they went 4-4 in the old round-robin format, which was abandoned three years later. While the team success never materialized until the year after Derlago turned pro, his memories of Brandon are warm.

“The town was fantastic,” Derlago said of his Wheat King days. “Everywhere we went they knew the guys. The fans were good. And the numbers that we put up, Propp and Allison and myself, we dominated. It was unbelievable.”

Derlago was drafted fourth overall by the Vancouver Canucks in 1978, and rewarded them by scoring four goals and earning four assists in his first nine NHL games. His 1978-79 season ended abruptly on what he calls a questionable hit by Denis Potvin of the New York Islanders.

“It was an offside play with a late whistle,” Derlago said. “The whistle blew and then he hit me two seconds later.”

The hit from the side, after Derlago had relaxed, buckled his knee, requiring season-ending surgery.

After playing 54 games with Vancouver in the 1979-80 season, the Canucks would make a trade on Feb. 18, 1980 they would come to regret, sending Derlago and Rick Vaive to the Toronto Maple Leafs for Jerry Butler and Tiger Williams.

Finally healthy, Derlago would blossom into an NHL star on a line with Vaive and John Anderson.

In that partial year and five full seasons, Derlago would register 334 points, including 50 assists in 1981-82 and 40 goals in 1983-84.

He played during the era of the infamous Harold Ballard, the quick-tempered and pugnacious Leafs owner.

“He treated me good,” Derlago said. “I signed a couple of contracts there and had no problem. I think we had a good relationship, but some guys, if Harold didn’t like you, you better watch your step. If I saw him coming down the aisleway at Maple Leaf Gardens, I’d go the other way sometimes because you never knew what would happen. I would make a quick right and avoid the situation, but one on one he treated me good.”

The end of Derlago’s NHL career came quickly. After a 31-goal and 31-assist season in 62 games with the Leafs in 1984-85, he was dealt to the Boston Bruins and subsequently made pitstops with the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques.

He headed to Europe to play with HC Ambrì-Piotta in Switzerland for the 1987-88 season, piling up 14 goals and eight assists in 16 games, and he had opportunities to return to the NHL.

Instead, he chose to retire.

“I have no regrets at all,” Derlago said. “If I couldn’t play regular, I didn’t want to play at all. I couldn’t sit on the bench and watch. I got offered a contract to play but I knew. I always played on a one-way ticket and these were starting to be two-way tickets. I didn’t want to start riding the bus across the States. That was it for me.”

Derlago admits that ending his 10-year professional hockey career wasn’t easy, although the decision was partially based on getting his daughters Amanda and Brittanee into a permanent school in Toronto. In fact, the transition to life outside the game proved rather difficult.

“It’s not a fun thing” he said. “You’re still young and have no education. It wasn’t compulsory when I played for the Wheat Kings. You had to go to school or they would find you a job, and the job was that you worked for the city. That transition is really hard. A lot of guys get screwed up. It’s tough.”

He finally found his way when former Leafs Brad Selwood and Norm Ullman invited him to join them at their car dealership. He would spend the next two decades in the industry and still works part time.

Derlago stayed in shape, finally hanging up his skates for good after last season. The knee feels fine now, and although he said he woke up in the dressing room more than once after suffering concussions, he has had no problems there either.

“If the coach said ‘Are you good,’ you said ‘Ya, I’m good,’” he remembered of his NHL days. “You didn’t want somebody to get called up and they score three goals and you lose your job. We were terrified of losing our jobs … A lot of guys would play hurt, broken fingers, sore ankles. It’s different today for sure.”

Derlago still has links to Westman. His mother Lillian passed away in July, but his brother Steve — the father of former Wheat Kings forward Mark Derlago — and his family live in Brandon. His sister Donna is in McAuley and another sister, Cheryl, is in Beulah. On top of that, his daughter Brittanee married a soldier and lives in Shilo.

The grandfather of three has certainly been well-honoured for his hockey exploits in recent years.

He was named the 18th-best player in WHL history and a first-line forward on Brandon’s all-time WHL team.

“I like it because my mom liked it and my family lives in Manitoba,” he said. “I liked that part of it.”

He was also named the 75th-best player in Maple Leafs history, putting a ribbon on his nine-season, 555-game NHL career.

“I was surprised with that one because there were a lot of good players there,” he said. “It was good, I went to a lot of special events to promote the 100th anniversary (of the team). There are some good players on there for sure.”

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