Bill Barilko was more than just a hard-hitting defenceman for the Toronto Maple Leafs who scored a famous overtime goal against the Montreal Canadiens in 1951 and who died in a plane crash that summer in Northern Ontario.
He and his family were in the TV, radio, record players, appliances, and sporting goods business in Toronto!
My thinking is, televisions were very new and very rare in and around 1950, and if they wouldn’t have been so rare, maybe Barilko would have made a million bucks selling them and retired from hockey before 1951 as a wealthy man instead of living on the five or six grand the Leafs were paying him, and the Canadiens might have won that series while he sat in his condo in Miami Beach, smoking cigars and watching the girls go by.