The following is an excerpt from “Black Aces: Essential Stories from Hockey’s Black Trailblazers” by The Athletic’s Julian McKenzie, copyright @2026 and reprinted with permission from Triumph Books. All rights reserved. The book is available for purchase here.

Daniel Walcott’s phone rang the night before history was made. The Quebecer was enjoying his day off in Florida, one day before the Tampa Bay Lightning were supposed to close out their season with a matchup against the rival Florida Panthers.

It would cap off one of the strangest years in NHL history, as the league managed to play through a worldwide pandemic by forcing its teams to only play opponents in rearranged divisions. The schedule was baseball-esque, with teams playing consecutive games in cities to limit travel.

The Lightning and Panthers had played the first of two games the previous day. Florida was about to defeat its rival when then-Panthers defenseman Brandon Montour speared then-Lightning forward Pat Maroon in the groin. Despite a linesman trying to separate Maroon from Montour, the man known as the “Big Rig” dropped his gloves and fought the Panthers defenseman. Maroon was assessed a one-game suspension and would miss the regular-season finale against Florida.

Walcott was on the Lightning’s taxi squad. That season, NHL teams were allowed to carry up to six players they could use if they found themselves in need due to injury or “pandemic-related issues.” That’s what led to the phone call from Lightning head coach Jon Cooper.

“Wally, hope you didn’t spend your day at the pool bar,” Walcott remembered Cooper saying. “Because with what happened, there’s a chance you’re going to play tomorrow.”

To that point, Walcott was an American Hockey League lifer. Walcott joined the Lightning’s minor-league affiliate after being traded by the New York Rangers for a seventh-round pick in 2015. The former defenseman turned forward played 249 games in the AHL before he received that phone call from Cooper.

Making his NHL debut would have been special enough for Walcott. Then, Cooper said, “Also, I’m thinking of potentially playing you with Smitty and Jo.”

Smitty is Gemel Smith, and Jo is Mathieu Joseph, two of Walcott’s best friends in the Lightning organization. Two players who have spent time with Walcott with the Syracuse Crunch. All three men are Black. Not only was Walcott about to make his NHL debut, but he’d be able to play with some of the closest hockey friends he’s made along the way.

The following night, at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla., all three men took their spots on the ice ahead of the opening faceoff. The trio is believed to be the NHL’s first-ever all-Black line, coming decades after Herb Carnegie lit the lamp alongside his brother, Ossie, and Manny McIntyre as “Black Aces” in the Quebec Provincial Hockey League.

“It’s important to show it and make a big deal out of it, because it should be a normality, but it isn’t,” Walcott said. “The fact that it isn’t a normality, the fact that there aren’t a lot of Black guys playing or even on the same team, that’s a big deal.”

Decades before the Lightning iced an all-Black line of their own, Willie O’Ree made history as the NHL’s first Black player. He was also part of an all-Black line with the Quebec Aces during the 1958-59 season, playing alongside John Utendale and Stan Maxwell one season after O’Ree made his NHL debut with the Boston Bruins.

Other NHL teams have had a handful of Black NHLers, including the 2011 Atlanta Thrashers, who had Dustin Byfuglien, Anthony Stewart, Evander Kane and Johnny Oduya. The 1999-2000 Calgary Flames had an all-Black goalie tandem of Fred Brathwaite and Grant Fuhr, in addition to forward Jarome Iginla. The following season, the Edmonton Oilers boasted a roster with Georges Laraque, Mike Grier, Sean Brown, Joaquin Gage and Anson Carter.

But there is no record of any NHL team playing an all-Black line until the Tampa Bay Lightning did on May 10, 2021. To make matters more special for Walcott, then-Panthers forward and fellow Black Quebecois Anthony Duclair started the game for the opposition.

“It was like a reuniting of all my buddies,” Walcott said. “(It) so happens that we’re all Black players. It was fun. In the moment, I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is such an awesome experience.’ I was just going out there with my buddies in my first NHL game, and I was comfortable around the people I was (with).”

“As we move forward as a league, you hope this isn’t a story,” Cooper told Joe Smith of The Athletic after the game. “Maybe it’s a story today. But as the league gets more diverse, you hope it’s not going to be a story. You hope it’s going to be the norm, that it is a league for everybody.”