The Windsor Star's Bob Duff found out that Colorado Avalanche winger Ben Guide does in fact have some Detroit connections:
April 26, Windsor Star: Earlier this season, Colorado Avalanche right-winger Ben Guite was thrilled to suit up for his first game at Edmonton's Rexall Place, the same arena where his father Pierre Guite was a teammate with a rookie named Wayne Gretzky on the 1978-79 Edmonton Oilers during the final season of existence in World Hockey Association history.
While he's in Detroit, Guite doesn't imagine he'll make the stroll up the street from Joe Louis Arena to Cobo Arena, where during the 1974-75 season his dad played 13 games for the WHA's ill-fated Michigan Stags. "Probably not," Guite said. "He probably had better memories in his other WHA stops than he had from Michigan. There's a little more history with the Oilers organization than with the Stags."
Such as his dad's history with the Quebec Nordiques, the franchise that relocated to Denver to become the Avalanche in 1995. Quebec joined the NHL in 1979, but was an original WHA franchise in 1972 and Pierre Guite, a junior teammate of Marcel Dionne's with the St. Catharines Black Hawks, spurned the Red Wings, who selected him 26th overall in the 1972 National Hockey League amateur draft - he was actually their top pick, the Wings having dealt their first-round choice to the New York Rangers - to sign with the Nords. "That was the first year where the WHA was throwing a little more money to everybody really, so he thought it would be a better move to play in Quebec," Ben Guite said.
Now a real estate agent in Fernandina Beach, Fla., Pierre Guite also played as a teammate of Wings general manager Ken Holland with the American Hockey League's Binghamton Dusters in 1978-79.
Ben Guite isn't surprised. "The hockey world is so small," he said. "I always say - you know that game with Kevin Bacon, the six degrees of separation? - hockey's like two degrees of separation. You play with one team, you play with everybody."
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