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MONTREAL — It’s not as if any great injustice was done, but Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice (Rocket) Richard is getting an assist added to his prodigious NHL scoring totals.

Six years of poring over scoresheets and summaries of games between 1917 and 1987 by an NHL statistics team has found and fixed more than 6,000 bits of information that were overlooked or mis-registered in the league’s early eras.

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Among the finds was an assist on a Toe Blake goal at 10:15 of the second period of a 6-5 Boston Bruins victory over Montreal on Nov. 4, 1945, during a time when the Punch Line of Richard, Blake and Elmer Lach was terrorizing the league.

The scoresheet that night, in handwriting akin to hen scratching, correctly had Richard with the lone assist. But when it was transcribed into the league’s official ledger, it was given to Emile (Butch) Bouchard — an understandable mistake.

Photo by Handout / National Hockey League via CP

The restored assist gives the Rocket 422 in an 18-year career that ended in 1960. His points total climbs to 966. For the 1945-46 season, one year after he made history as the first to score 50 goals in a season, he now has 27 goals and 22 assists. The new totals are already entered in Richard’s stats on NHL.com.