DETROIT — Ted Lindsay, the Hall of Famer who provided muscle and meanness on the Detroit Red Wings’ mighty “Production Line” of the 1950s and helped pioneer the first NHL players’ union, died Monday. He was 93.

Lindsay died at his home in Michigan, said Lew LaPaugh, president of the Ted Lindsay Foundation, which raises money for autism research.

Known as “Terrible Ted,” Lindsay was one of the game’s best left wings, a nine-time All-Star who played on four Stanley Cup winners. Lindsay, Sid Abel and Gordie Howe formed an offensive juggernaut of a line that helped make Detroit one of the first of the NHL’s great postwar dynasties.

“The National Hockey League mourns the passing and celebrates the incomparable life of the legendary Ted Lindsay,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said. “One of the game’s fiercest competitors during his 17-season NHL career, he was among its most beloved ambassadors throughout the more than five decades of service to hockey that followed his retirement.”

The Hockey Hall of Fame waived its three-year waiting period when it inducted Lindsay in 1966. Nine years earlier, he had been elected president of the players’ union he helped organize — and was subsequently traded to Chicago.

“It didn’t matter that they traded me,” he said in 1995. “I have a Red Wing on my forehead and on my behind and on my heart. That will never change.”

He finished his NHL career with 379 goals and 472 assists in 1,068 games, spending 14 of his 17 seasons with Detroit. With Howe and Lindsay centered first by Abel and then by Al Delvecchio, the Red Wings won Stanley Cups in 1950, 1952, 1954 and 1955. The Red Wings retired his No. 7 in 1991.

Lindsay is credited in 1950 with beginning the ritual in which the championship team skates around rink with the Stanley Cup. Lindsay downplayed his role, saying he simply wanted to bring the Cup closer to the fans.

“I saw it sitting there, and I thought, `I’ll just pick it up and I’ll take it over.’ ... I just moved along the boards. I didn’t have it over my head. I had it so they could read it,” he said in 2013. “I wasn’t starting a tradition, I was just taking care of my fans that paid our salary.”

In 2010, the NHL Players’ Association renamed its version of the Most Outstanding Player award after Lindsay. The honor, which is chosen by an NHLPA vote, was previously called the Lester B. Pearson Award after the former Canadian prime minister.

“On the ice, Ted Lindsay was one of the best players to ever to put on a pair of skates,” NHLPA executive director Don Fehr said.