7. The Gord Stellick Years and the Belleville Bulls Draft

Scott Thornton has just finished pulling a delivery van out of the ditch in front of his home on the outskirts of Collingwood, Ontario, when he steps inside and fields a phone call. He’s out of breath and panting, his hands covered in grease from the chain he’d attached to the back of his truck, when the voice on the other end of the line speaks.

“How on earth did it happen?” he’s asked, knowing exactly what it is.

“There were rumours that there was a good bar in Belleville that they all just got stuck at,” Thornton answers, chuckling. “But having played in Belleville for three years, I don’t recall any good bars there, so that can’t have been a true story.”

Later that afternoon, Steve Bancroft answers the phone from his home in Madoc, Ontario. He tells a different story.

“The joke was that the scouting staff for the Leafs was on a limited budget and could only get as far as Belleville,” he says, laughing.

A day after that, Danny Flynn picks up a phone from his home in Greater Lakeburn, New Brunswick, explaining that he remembers seeing then Leafs scouts George Armstrong and Doug Woods around Belleville’s Yardmen Arena a lot because his Bulls were one of the only teams in the OHL that played on Wednesdays, and there was nowhere else for them to be.

After Bancroft, Thornton, and Flynn, a fourth person fields the same question, this time from Toronto. His name is Gord Stellick, and he was the general manager in charge of the Leafs’ 1989 NHL draft. He’s the guy who made the final call, infamously using a trio of first-round picks to select three players—Thornton, Bancroft, and Rob Pearson—from the same team—the Belleville Bulls, who were coached and managed by Flynn. Stellick can’t help but laugh either, confessing that bits and pieces of the folklore are all true in their own ways.

“Harold Ballard had a very lean front office, to say the least,” he says.

* * *

Stellick was promoted to Leafs general manager a year and a half before he picked the three Bulls in April 1988 at the age of 30, becoming the youngest GM in NHL history. Before that, he’d filled in wherever he was asked in the smallest front office in the league. He was the mail boy. Then he was an executive assistant. Then he became the assistant to the general manager. Then assistant general manager. Throughout, he was the club’s administrator and its travel agent.

“I did pretty well everything,” Stellick said.

So by the time he was thrust into the GM job just a couple of months before the 1988 NHL Draft, Stellick had attended the league’s eight previous drafts, sitting next to general manager Punch Imlach at his first two and general manager Gerry McNamara after that. He’d been there when the Leafs picked Bob McGill in 1980, Jim Benning in 1981 (though Benning, he recalls, wasn’t in the building), the Ihnacak brothers in 1982, Russ Courtnall in 1983, Al Iafrate in 1984, Wendel Clark in 1985, Vincent Damphousse in 1986, and Luke Richardson in 1987.

When he took over, Stellick also had full confidence that his head scout, Floyd Smith, was a “really, really good head scout” in a thin scouting department because, a year earlier, Smith had argued hard for a kid out of the Swift Current Broncos by the name of Joe Sakic (who was taken 15th, later became a regular season and playoff MVP, and is now in the Hockey Hall of Fame) when the Leafs drafted Richardson seventh overall.

“That would have been a ballsy pick, a real ballsy pick, so I really respected Floyd Smith a lot,” Stellick said of Smith’s push to have McNamara nearly draft Sakic.

In the lead-up to his first draft as GM in 1988, with the Leafs set to pick sixth, Stellick tried to familiarize himself with the options available in the first round but left most of the rest up to his scouts. He knew that Mike Modano and Trevor Linden would go one-two, and that the draft really started with the Quebec Nordiques, who owned the third and fifth picks, which they used on defenceman Curtis Leschyshyn and right wing Daniel Dore. At fourth overall, with the pick between Quebec’s, the Penguins selected Darrin Shannon, a left wing with the Windsor Spitfires on whom the Leafs had keyed in. With Shannon off the board, Stellick and his staff debated between physical Kingston Canadians left wing Scott Pearson (who they picked and went on to amass 615 penalty minutes and 98 points in 292 games) and Hull Olympiques star Martin Gelinas (who was picked immediately after by the Kings and went on to register 660 points across 1,273 games). Gelinas wasn’t the only player the Leafs missed on with their Pearson selection, either. Three of the generation’s best players were chosen after Pearson and Gelinas in quick succession, with one of the greatest American-born players in league history, Jeremy Roenick, going eighth out of Thayer Academy to the Blackhawks, future Selke Trophy winner and Hurricanes captain Rod Brind’Amour going ninth to the Blues, and the legendary Teemu Selanne going 10th to the Jets.

“At that point, we didn’t scout them enough,” Stellick conceded. “We weren’t really looking, or able to look, at high schools and the American side, or Finland, like we should have been. That’s where not having a deep scouting department hurt us. And John Brophy was the coach, and he wanted a more physical team and Scott seemed to bring that and the skill part with decent offensive stats.”

In the second round, with the Leafs’ 27th overall pick, Stellick took a flier on Peterborough Petes tough guy Tie Domi, who wasn’t ranked in the top three rounds by NHL Central Scouting.

“For a guy who was just a one-dimensional tough guy, his skating never ended up being the greatest, but he really improved his skating and he really improved his skill and more and more he really impressed us. We had traded our third-round pick to the Rangers so it was kind of all or nothing, and if you want the guy, you’ve got to get the guy. So Tie was who we targeted,” Stellick said. “And his family was watching the draft and just after we took Tie the draft coverage ended, so his family got to see him get drafted by the Maple Leafs, which he always tells me when he sees me.”

When it was over, the Leafs had selected six future NHL players in 1988, having also drafted goalie Peter Ing, a teammate of Shannon’s; defencemen Ted Crowley and Len Esau; and centre David Sacco. With their last pick in the draft’s 12th round, they also selected Peter DeBoer, a third player they liked from that Spitfires team, who never played an NHL game but went on to become a head coach in the league with the Panthers, Devils, Sharks, and Golden Knights.

“It’s funny because we traded and got a guy named Paul Lawless from Vancouver and I made the trade with Pat Quinn and then he got back to me and said, ‘The guy we like is Peter DeBoer,’ so we traded Pete to Vancouver before he even became a Leaf,” Stellick said. “And back then you couldn’t get a hold of people because there were no cell phones, so I wasn’t able to get in touch with him and then Floyd connected with him. So Pete kids with me that I drafted him and traded him and we never got to know each other.”

* * *

The Leafs arrived at the 1989 NHL draft in Bloomington, Minnesota, after a 10th consecutive season with a losing record (28–46–6), finishing last in the 10-team Campbell Conference and one point up on last in the league. Stellick arrived feeling more prepared than the first time around because he’d had a full season to oversee the operation, though they were still a bare-bones group. His Leafs held the third pick and had acquired the 12th and 21st selections (via the Flames) from the Flyers that March in exchange for goalie Ken Wregget at the trade deadline. Stellick knew it wasn’t a strong draft and that the only way he was able to acquire two firsts for Wregget, who’d started the bulk of the Leafs’ games over the previous three seasons, was because Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke likely felt the same way.

Heading in, the Leafs knew that the Nordiques, who held the first overall pick, were going to use it on Swedish sensation Mats Sundin, making him the first European player selected atop the NHL draft. Stellick’s first target was WHL star Dave Chyzowski, who he’d made two trips to Kamloops to watch play and who went on to captain Canada to gold at the world juniors and win a Memorial Cup the next season before injuries derailed his promising career.

The night before the draft, Oilers general manager and head coach Glen Sather called Stellick in his hotel room to share info, wanting the Leafs to pick the best player at third overall so that the division rival Jets, who held the fourth overall pick, would lose out. After telling Sather he wanted Chyzowski, they eventually got to discussing backup plans, knowing there was a chance Chyzowski would be taken second by the Islanders.

If they didn’t get Chyzowski, Stellick told Sather that they were debating between Thornton, a scrappy centre who’d just finished a 62-point, 59-game sophomore season in Belleville, and Stu Barnes, who’d just won the WHL’s player of the year award with 141 points in 70 games with the Tri-City Americans.

“Hold on, I’ll get our book here,” Sather said, dropping the phone to look over the Oilers’ draft list.

“We have Thornton ahead of Barnes,” Sather added after picking the phone back up.

On draft day, when the Islanders picked Chyzowski and the Leafs’ draft table debate continued as the clock counted down, Stellick’s conversation with Sather was one of the things that tipped the scale toward Thornton. Then the Jets took Barnes, who played 16 years and 1,136 NHL games, posting 597 points.

In the Met Center, Thornton and Bancroft, who’d become fast friends in Belleville, sat next to each other in the crowd with their families and shared agent, Harry Francis. Thornton had no idea that the Leafs would pick him, let alone what would come next. He’d interviewed with several teams at his hotel in Bloomington, but the conversations were informal and none of Stellick, Floyd, Armstrong, or Woods ever tipped his hand.

While Thornton mingled with brass on the draft floor and conducted his round of media interviews, Bancroft and his family (who’d loaded up into a giant, fully loaded van to drive down to meet him at the draft after he’d flown in with Thornton and Francis) waited for his name to be called as the Leafs prepared to pick for a second time.

When they said “from the Belleville Bulls,” his heart dropped.

When it wasn’t his name who they called, announcing Pearson’s instead, his heart sank further.

The Pearson pick was a peculiar one because he’d been limited to just 26 games in his draft year after breaking his scaphoid (a bone in his wrist). On top of that, while Thornton and Bancroft had been the Bulls’ two top picks in the 1987 OHL draft, meaning they had two years of junior under their belts by the time draft day arrived, Pearson had stayed in Midget for a year longer. So his draft year was his rookie season, and his 26 games were his only sample of play.

Flynn, who watched it play out on TV from his place in Belleville, was a big backer of Pearson’s (who posted 20 points in those 26 games as a rookie), though.

“I knew that Rob Pearson would be a really interesting pick, and I knew that scouts really liked his first 26 games, so it made sense that a team like Toronto that had an extra first could take a chance on him and still get a Scott Thornton early,” Flynn said. “He showed lots of promise, both with his offensive instincts and his feistiness. And it was a different era at that time, but you could tell that he was going to be a hard-nosed, Rick Tocchet–type winger that could score. In those days, offensive wingers with jam were coveted players.”

Thornton, too, remembers the fist pump he gave when Pearson was selected by the Leafs, because he’d developed a huge respect for his teammate in that single season.

“Rob Pearson was a hell of a hockey player,” Thornton said.

Despite his more limited exposure, Pearson was actually the only one the Leafs had gone into the draft intent on targeting. When the Flyers went on a late-season tear and their pick kept falling in the draft as they rose in the standings, Stellick worried that Pearson wouldn’t be available with their second pick.

“We really liked Rob Pearson a lot,” Stellick said. “We were thrilled when we got Rob Pearson, we really were.”

Bancroft, who had also drawn interest from the Hartford Whalers (who passed on him to select Bobby Holik with their first-round pick at 10th overall), came with some injury concerns of his own as well, having battled shoulder issues throughout his draft year.

As the Leafs’ turn approached for a third time, Bancroft sat in the crowd awaiting his call while Stellick and his staff kicked around more names on the draft floor. Their primary target with the 21st overall selection was Kitchener Rangers right wing Steven Rice. But the New York Rangers snatched Rice a pick before theirs, taking him 20th overall.

“Ah, damnit,” Stellick half-shouted, banging the palm of his hand on the table.

With Rice off the board, the Leafs’ top-ranked forward was Cornell University commit Kent Manderville, and their top-ranked defencemen were Bancroft and another Cornell commit, Dan Ratushny. After briefly discussing the merits of taking Manderville, they decided they’d be better off taking a defenceman because they’d already drafted two forwards with their previous picks. Woods, who loved Bancroft, tipped the scales this time, completing the trifecta to take Bancroft, who’d posted 37 points in 66 games from Belleville’s blue line, with the final pick of the first round.

The rest of the Leafs’ 1989 draft has understandably been forgotten. Shortly after taking Bancroft, Stellick felt comfortable using some of his extra draft capital to try to upgrade his fledgling roster, dealing the team’s second-round pick to the Flames (which they coincidentally used to select Manderville) in exchange for defenceman Rob Ramage, who’d play two productive seasons as an anchor of the Leafs’ blue line (a trade Stellick remains proud of). With the team’s fourth-round selection, he also chose University of Maine commit Matt Martin, who went on to play parts of four seasons as a depth defenceman with the Leafs.

But Stellick—and everyone else involved in that day—knows they’re part of draft infamy and that the 1989 Leafs class will only be remembered for one thing.

At the time, it was a thrill for the three Bulls, who never imagined what did happen would happen. That night, the Thorntons, the Pearsons, and the Bancrofts gathered in one of their hotel rooms to celebrate.

“It was pretty shocking” Thornton said, “but it was a big deal to us.”

The following season, the three of them got to attend their first NHL training camp together before they were each returned to Belleville for a final hurrah in the OHL, with Pearson scoring a team-high 48 goals in just 58 games, Thornton registering 49 points in 47 games, and Bancroft adding 43 points in 53 games from the blue line.

“It was exciting for us to go into our first training camp with some friends and someone to talk to and go to dinner with,” Thornton said.

Fate, however, eventually pulled them in different directions.

In 1990, Thornton bounced between the Leafs, their AHL affiliate in Newmarket, and the Bulls in his first season of professional hockey. He spent his first six months with the team living out of a hotel in the back alley at Maple Leaf Gardens until he moved into Francis’ apartment. The team, which was in the midst of another rebuild, cycled through two head coaches, with Doug Carpenter replacing Tom Watt late in the year and finishing 1–9–1 down the stretch. There were a lot of lonely nights in the press box and three meals a day sitting by himself in restaurants. Though he credits teammates like Ramage, Brad Marsh, and Dave Hannan for their guidance, the odd invitation to their homes for dinner, and post-practice drills they’d run him through, Thornton found life as a 19-year-old in the NHL to be daunting.

“I wouldn’t say it was a lot of fun my first year. It was really tough to try and figure things out. It was quite a different era in the sense that you’re kind of left to fend for yourself. The whole time you’re trying to figure out the professional side, which is, ‘How do I play at this level?’ and compete and become a man instantly,” Thornton said. “It was a big struggle for me. It was a lot to handle.”

After getting into just 33 games with the Leafs as a rookie, Thornton was then traded in his third training camp to Edmonton in a package that brought aging stars Grant Fuhr and Glenn Anderson to Toronto. Thronton went on to play 941 NHL games, picking up 285 points and 1,459 penalty minutes along the way, but his rocky start in Toronto followed him.

“I didn’t really have time to mature and develop as a Leaf, and then it took me a few years to recover and bring myself back,” he said.

Bancroft, who was born in Toronto but raised in Madoc, 30 minutes north of Belleville, never played a game for his childhood team. A little more than a year after the draft, Bancroft was dealt in November 1990 to the Bruins for Rob Cimetta, a 1988 first-round pick who went on to play parts of two seasons with the Leafs in his short-lived NHL career.

A couple of years after that, in 1993, he was part of another draft experience when the newly minted Florida Panthers took him in the expansion draft.

He was driving back home to Madoc from therapy in Peterborough when he stopped in at a friend’s place and he was told the news. But his new opportunity with the Panthers didn’t last long.

“When Florida picked me, according to Bobby Clarke, they were going to offer me a termination contact but they didn’t know that my contract was up. So I went from getting picked, pretty excited, I’d had a decent year with more than 60 points playing in the IHL and the AHL, and then within a few days I found out that they weren’t going to sign me. I went from being happy to being thrown to the side,” Bancroft said.

Bancroft spent 16 years as a top defenceman in the AHL and IHL. He became a second bit of hockey trivia when his only two stints in the NHL came a decade apart (he played a lone game for the Blackhawks in October 1992 and five more with the San Jose Sharks in January 2002). In 1999, he won a Calder Cup with the Providence Bruins. In 2001, he led all AHL defencemen in points with 73 and was named to the league’s first All-Star team. He retired in 2006 at the age of 36 with more than 1,000 professional games and nearly 2,000 penalty minutes.

Stellick’s gamble on Pearson’s limited experience actually ended up paying off when he was the only one of the three who stuck around in Toronto, playing three seasons for the Leafs before finishing his NHL career in Washington and St. Louis for another three years.

All these years later, Thornton and Bancroft remain like brothers. Bancroft was the best man at Thornton’s wedding and the two still spend their summers (and winters) fishing and hunting together. Throughout their careers, Bancroft made frequent trips to Thornton’s cottage on Crow Lake in Havelock, Ontario, a half hour west of Madoc, to train with his old friend.

In retirement, Thornton settled just outside of Collingwood, where he built his home, started a gym, briefly ran a CrossFit event company, and invested in a spa in the nearby Blue Mountain area called Scandinave, which remains a staple of the community and a destination for getaways in the province. He has raised his two kids in the area.

“I’ve dabbled a lot since I’ve retired. I don’t sit around too much. I stay busy,” Thornton said, laughing. “It’s a really nice community up here.”

When Bancroft retired, he moved back to Madoc and became a local real estate agent after having taken courses throughout his playing career. In doing so, he took up the family business from his father, Bob.

“My body told me that it was time to retire, then a week later I was selling homes. There was no lag time. I was ready to go. I knew that year was going to be my last and as a 36-year-old when you’re not making millions of dollars, it’s not worth it anymore to battle through it. I jumped right into this, and I haven’t looked back in 15 years,” Bancroft said.

From Madoc, Bancroft also got into coaching minor hockey, leading his son Dalton’s 2001 age group’s AAA team, the Quinte Red Devils. Ten of his players were drafted into the OHL and one, Zach Uens, went on to become an NHL draft pick of the Florida Panthers in the 2020 NHL Draft’s fourth round.

In recent years, Bancroft has also done some public speaking. He always tries to stump people with his two bits of hockey trivia. He laughs about how in his new life in real estate in the Bellville area he gets more “Hey, you played for the Bulls” comments than Leafs recognition.

Thornton and Bancroft still keep in touch with Pearson from time to time, too. Thornton and Pearson got together to play golf one recent summer and picked up right where they left off. Bancroft bumped into Pearson frequently around Ontario’s rinks when they both coached their sons and eventually when Pearson became the head coach and general manager of the Junior A Pickering Panthers, who often played Dalton’s Trenton Golden Hawks.

“The hockey world’s a small world,” Bancroft said. “You don’t know who you’re going to run in to.”

A few years back, Stellick also bumped into Thornton in the Blue Mountain village.

The first thing Thronton said was, “Man, the three Bulls thing gets brought up all the time.”

Each of Thornton, Bancroft, and Flynn still says there was nothing to it, and Stellick’s version of events says so too.

“We had no clue,” Bancroft said. “It’s something that has never happened before and will likely never happen again.”

Flynn, who was fired by the Bulls at the end of the 1989–90 season, went on to coach the OHL’s Soo Greyhounds, Canadian university hockey’s St. Francis Xavier University, the QMJHL’s Moncton Wildcats and Saint John Sea Dogs, the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, and the WHL’s Portland Winterhawks before landing with the Columbus Blue Jackets as an amateur scout in 2018. He, too, regularly bumps into Pearson and Bancroft at OJHL games and tournaments. And now that he’s been on the other side of the sport as a scout, he can’t believe an NHL team ever used three first-round picks on three players from the same team. One day, before a meeting with the Blue Jackets, he regaled the rest of the team’s scouts with the story, and they couldn’t believe it either.

“They were amazed that that could happen. I don’t know if we’re ever going to see that again in our lifetime,” he said. “It was a remarkable story at that time, especially to have three kids go to a team two hours from Belleville and one of the most high-profile teams in the NHL. To have that happen again, boy, the stars would have to line up.”

He doesn’t think Stellick got them wrong, though. Scouting is much more wide-ranging today, he’ll tell you, pointing to changes in the way teams background check players and conduct interviews, the combine’s fitness testing, and the global reach of departments and the internet. He does think each would be first-round picks today regardless.

“Those three kids, based off of the years they had and the skill level those players had, they were all legitimate first-round picks, no question about that,” Flynn said. “So Toronto picked the right guys; it’s just amazing that they ended up all being on the same team.”

Stellick only ever ran the two drafts for the Leafs. He never got to oversee the development of the three Bulls as a result. In August 1989, a couple of months after the draft, he quit.

“I was not able to name my next head coach. Harold was like 87 and he would die eight months later and it was getting bad. I realized that something drastic had to happen and he was insistent that, God rest his soul, George Armstrong stay on as coach. And it was just different,” Stellick said of the times. “It was tough to leave. You go through life without any regrets but that one has just always been tough. There was just a lot of stuff playing with a very unique owner in the office.”

Rangers general manager Neil Smith had also done some, according to Stellick, “good old-fashioned tampering” while Stellick was still with the Leafs, quickly hiring him to become the assistant general manager in New York. After two seasons with the Rangers, Stellick returned to Toronto, where he become the a radio broadcaster with The Fan 590 and later Sportsnet. In his absence, the team he’d helped build broke .500 in 1989–90, finishing 38–38–4 for sixth place in the Campbell Conference to return to the playoffs.

“I’m pleased that ’89–90 team was still my team that I’d sculpted. It had all kinds of offence, it was tough. We had to work on defence, which hurt them a year or two later, but it was a lot of fun,” Stellick said.

He knows the way the three Bulls picks look but says he didn’t clue in until moments after they’d made their third pick.

“It kind of hit us at that point that, ‘Jeez, we took three guys from the same team; that’s kind of cool,’” Stellick said. “But we had not even thought about it.”

The Bulls picks aren’t the only ones of the 1989 draft that people give him a hard time about these days. After the Leafs took Thornton third, he knows he missed on another American when the Devils took future star and two-time Stanley Cup winner Bill Guerin fifth. Immediately after the Bancroft pick, the Nordiques also took Adam Foote, who became the defender Stellick was looking for with that pick and a captain of the Blue Jackets and Avalanche.

“People always say, ‘You took Bancroft ahead of Adam Foote!?’ and I always go, ‘Bancroft wasn’t even the best defencemen named Adam drafted at the time. Adam Bennett went earlier,’” Stellick said.

He still defends his picks.

“There have been some horseshit first-round picks after that by the Leafs. And really, Thornton had a decent NHL career and Rob Pearson, if he hadn’t got hurt, I think he would have…” Stellick said, pausing as if not to get carried away. “Anyways…”