Rick Ley

Richard Norman Ley, born November 2, 1948, is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player who competed in both the National Hockey League and the World Hockey Association. The Toronto Maple Leafs selected him in the third round, sixteenth overall, of the 1966 NHL Amateur Draft. He spent four seasons with Toronto in the NHL, from 1968–69 through 1971–72, before departing for the New England Whalers of the WHA, a move driven largely by money: by his own account he earned $18,000 in his final year with the Maple Leafs and $78,000 in his first season with New England. Ley remained with the Whalers' organization in the WHA until that league folded in 1979, after which the franchise was among the teams absorbed into the NHL. He later spoke favorably of the WHA's legacy, observing that the league had been dismissed by critics but that, five to seven years after the merger, half of the NHL's top ten scorers were former WHA players. He credited the WHA with driving the first significant increases in professional hockey wages, noting that present-day players, many born after the league's demise, owed much of the modern game's economics to that era.