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Morning skates on game days are a longtime tradition in the NHL, but who first started them?

There’s a belief in hockey circles that the first coach to introduce the morning skate was either Fred Shero with the Philadelphia Flyers or Scotty Bowman with the Canadiens.

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Bowman says it wasn’t him or Shero.

“The first person that ever started the morning skates was around 1960 or ’61 and it was Rudy Pilous,” Bowman said over the phone Thursday afternoon from his home in Sarasota, Fla. “He was the coach of the Blackhawks when they won the Cup in ’61. All the teams used to have their meetings at 11 o’clock on the day of a game, but they never went on the ice.”

Bowman said Pilous changed that and it was only so his players could test their skates.

“I remember the Blackhawks players going on the ice and they just wore their skates with their (dress) pants and shirt … they didn’t even put a sweater on,” recalled Bowman, the winningest coach in NHL history with nine Stanley Cups. “(Stan) Mikita and those guys would just make a couple of little turns to see if the skates were OK. It’s not like today … if the skates weren’t right back then, they had to put them in a machine (to be sharpened ) … now it’s all automated. The Hawks were on the ice not long, five minutes maybe to skate around and make sure their skates were ready for the game at night.”