McClelland was a guy brought in to provide some grit up front, and he ended up with the game-winning goal. Teams love it when guys like that score big goals. (In fact, Kevin chipped in a lot that spring.) But Grant was the hero that night. He turned away thirty-four shots to become the first goalie since the great Frank McCool in 1945 to get a shutout in his first Stanley Cup final game. Grant would never complain about the fact that he was often left alone to fend for himself defensively. And yet without him we wouldn’t have won.
• • •
Because we’d shut out the Islanders in their own building, we had a lot of confidence. We thought, “Oh, things are going to be different this year.” And then they beat us 6–1 in Game Two. I sat next to Lee Fogolin for the five-hour flight back from Long Island that night and I don’t think we said two words to each other. We all had this “Oh man, it’s going to happen again” feeling of dread.
The next day we called a lunch at this little dive in downtown Edmonton called Swat Headquarters, where we all went for pickled eggs and draft beer and to shoot pool. You could feel the intensity level. Everyone had it in their eyes: we were not going to let them beat us like last year.
Mark Messier could lift the team up on his shoulders sometimes. In the second period of Game Three, Clark Gillies scored to put the Islanders ahead 2–1. Then came a turning point. Lee Fogolin was on the blue line when the puck floated back to him. Mess came back and circled, and Lee just pushed it to him. Mess spun around, headed down the boards, cut across, skated around their defenseman Gord Dineen, and then put it in on Billy Smith’s stick side.
It was a great goal. And not only did it regenerate our bench and our crowd, but it also seemed to deflate the Islanders. We ended up winning that game 7–2. In the dressing room afterward, Kenny Linseman said, “Once Mark smelled victory, man, it was over.”
• • •
Near the end of Game Three, Grant got banged up in a collision with Pat LaFontaine outside the net. Back then the rule was “Hit the goalie, no big deal.” Grant had also been nursing a sore shoulder, and the hit made it a lot worse. Andy stepped in for the last eight minutes.
The next day when we headed to the rink, everyone was wondering, “Is Grant going to be healthy enough to play?” Once we got there it was pretty evident that he wasn’t, but we couldn’t let that information out to the Islanders, so we kept it quiet until game time.
Andy Moog didn’t like getting wound too tight. He thought his energy might take him all over the place, and then he’d overchallenge in the net or go way outside the crease and overhandle the puck. We knew he needed to relax and settle into his game, so we were pretty low-key with him. It was a “How do you feel? Are you ready to go? Let’s get it done” sort of thing. Very much “another day at the office” kind of attitude.
We took Game Four with the same score, 7–2. Andy was still in goal for Game Five. He was so steady and focused. You’ve got to have goaltending or you’re not going to lift the Stanley Cup.
No one was saying much once we got out on the ice for Game Five. Conversations were really brief. We had to stay in the moment because the Northlands was coming unglued. But when we scored an empty-netter with only a few seconds left on the clock to make it 5–2, I started looking around and seeing the faces, and that’s when I realized it was real. It was going to happen. That may be my best Stanley Cup memory. That feeling of, I don’t want to call it relief, but joy and pride. It’s a great trophy. For years, out of all the major championships in North America, it was the only trophy that was presented to the players themselves. When a trophy was won in other sports, it was handed to the owner. But when the Stanley Cup is won, it’s handed to the players, and it’s always been that way.
I picked it up and hoisted it. I didn’t realize how heavy it was and it started to roll forward, but the guys had my back.
• • •
We made it our goal at the start of the 1984–85 season to win the Cup again—and to prove that beating the Islanders hadn’t been a fluke. And it wasn’t. We were on a roll. We swept the Kings and the Jets, and closed out the Black Hawks in six. We met the Flyers in the final.
Philadelphia was a great team, full of guys who just didn’t give up. Brian Propp was one of their top scorers. Brian and I are good friends today, but back then he’d just started this thing called the “guffaw,” which he’d learned from watching comic Howie Mandel. After a goal, Brian would go down on one knee, take his glove off, and flip his hand in the air. It drove us nuts. We wanted to chop his hand off every time he did it.
They also had the Sutter brothers, Richie and his twin, Ronnie, along with Dave Poulin, Mark Howe, Derrick Smith, Brad Marsh, Dave Brown, Tim Kerr, Peter Zezel, Brad McCrimmon, and a great young Swedish goalie named Pelle Lindbergh.
The Flyers dictated the first game and beat us 4–1. Glen Sather was so steamed by the way we played that he burned the game tapes after he watched them. We got the message and took the next three games. In Game Five, we were ready to bring the series to an end.
Grant Fuhr played phenomenally well. He’d kept us in through the first round against L.A., and in the finals against Philadelphia he made some critical saves. Paul Coffey had an incredible series too. In the final game he scored back-to-back goals, which took us into the second period with a huge advantage, up 4–1. What most people didn’t know was that Paul had injured his foot and his hip in the division finals against Winnipeg. And yet he wound up with twelve goals (thirty-seven points) in the playoffs, breaking Bobby Orr’s and Brad Park’s records of nine playoff goals for a defenseman, along with Denis Potvin’s record of twenty-five points. I won the Conn Smythe, but both Paul and Grant could have easily been picked instead. I remember Peter Pocklington saying that winning the Cup again was like having a second child.
• • •
We didn’t make it to the final the next year, though. Calgary had our number, and went on to meet Montreal in the final. The Habs rode a young Patrick Roy to victory in the first all-Canadian Stanley Cup matchup since the 1967 expansion. We came back in 1986–87 determined to bring the Cup home to Edmonton.
We ran into the Flyers in the final, and that meant a showdown with a hot—and hotheaded—goalie. Ron Hextall was standing on his head in his rookie season. Sadly, the reason Hextall really got the opportunity to play in Philadelphia was that in November the season before, goalie Pelle Lindbergh died in a car crash. Philadelphia’s young team was just devastated by his death. It took them a year to recover. Hextall’s outstanding performance was part of that.
He was a big guy—6’3”—and he was an outstanding puck-handler. In fact, he became just the second NHL goalie ever to score a goal. But it was Hextall’s intensity that really carried the Flyers. He was the first goalie to rack up more than 100 penalty minutes in a season.
The thing is, his chippiness also helped us. I can’t say we went into the finals complacent, but we were a little laid-back, and it was Ron’s fire that made us hate them and get us into the series. Hate can be a great motivator. For example, in Game Four we were ahead 4–1. Glenn Anderson used his stick on Ron’s pad to free up a puck, and seconds later, when Kent Nilsson skated by the net, Ron got him in the back of the leg with a two-hander that cost him eight games at the start of the next season. Ron’s fiery temper helped the Flyers overachieve and take us to seven games. But we used it to win the Cup.
Hextall won the Conn Smythe that year. Not to take anything away from him—he played tremendously and kept them in the series—but when the losing goalie wins the MVP, it tells you that his team was pretty badly outplayed. That was something people never said about Grant Fuhr. He was incredible in net. To me, Grant was the greatest goalie who ever played.
• • •
But in 1987, something that seems to happen to all dynasties began happening to us. We started losing players. When Paul Coffey and Glen couldn’t come to terms
on a new contract, Paul sat out for the first twenty-one games of the season and was traded to Pittsburgh.
We also lost Andy Moog. Andy was tired of being Grant Fuhr’s automatic backup. He wanted to play. He decided to sit out, and took the opportunity to play for the Canadian Olympic team. He eventually played five seasons for Boston and four for Dallas and a final season with Montreal.
We’d come off three Cups in four years. We knew we were a good team. Meanwhile, Boston was coming off a very good series, having beaten the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in forty-five years. The Canadiens won eighteen straight series between 1946 and 1987. To me, that’s still one of the most shocking stats in the history of hockey. I mean, think of the great teams with Milt Schmidt and Johnny Bucyk, and then of course with Esposito and Orr.
We had fully expected to meet either Boston or Montreal in the final. The good news was that we knew our experience would be a big advantage—the Bruins were going to be in the same situation we were in ’83 against the Islanders. The bad news was that our record as a team and as individuals was just absolutely horrible in the Boston Garden.
Look at our stats. From ’79 to ’88, we had only two wins over a nine-year period. Part of that was the effect of the small ice surface there—we were a skating team, and the Bruins were experts at using their rink to take away time and space. But the other thing to keep in mind was that every time we played Boston during the season, we’d be on the tail end of a five- or six-game road trip. We might play Buffalo Thursday night, Philly Saturday, and Boston Sunday. We were professionals, so we couldn’t make excuses. But it was a factor.
So we were thinking, “Hey, they haven’t seen the real Edmonton Oilers. We’re gonna play the first two games at home and then fly to Boston, where we’re going to have a nice skate and a practice. We’ll be comfortable and rested and ready to play.” Not that we took them lightly. They had Ray Bourque, Craig Janney, and Cam Neely, who was a lot like Clark Gillies. And speaking of guys who were no fun to play against, Ken Linseman was now with the Bruins. And in net for the Bruins? Andy Moog.
We played really well in the first two games in Edmonton. The hockey world had anticipated that Boston would be better than us at defense—it was their strength, after all—and so everyone was surprised at how strong we were in our own end. In Game One we held them to fourteen shots and won 2–1. Game Two we held them to twelve shots and won 4–2.
Now we were heading to Boston for Game Three, and because of our record there, everyone figured that the tide would turn. What people didn’t know was that Glen and John Muckler had us watching videos of their games so we could see what we needed to do on a smaller ice surface—how we were going to break out of a smaller neutral zone, how the wingers had to be more tentative and stay back instead of getting ahead of the play. In those days, you couldn’t make a two-line pass out of your zone, so the Garden’s small neutral zone meant that we had to be more patient as a group and come up together. But the biggest factor was what to do with Ray Bourque.
Ray Bourque was the key on defense. Everybody in the National Hockey League said one thing: “When you play Boston, don’t dump it to Ray Bourque. Keep the puck away from Ray Bourque.” Glen and John said, “Let’s do the opposite. Go ahead and dump the puck to Ray Bourque, because he’s going to move it to his partner and we can get on that guy.”
So for five days, at every practice one of our young defensemen would come out in a number 7 jersey (someone even put it on his helmet), and we’d practice dumping the puck to Ray. We had it down to a science.
We went into Game Three and started working our strategy—and I think it caught them off guard. For years and years teams had dumped the puck to the other corner, and now all of a sudden they had to figure out how to handle our new system. Physically, our guys simply wore Ray down. They just dumped it into his corner and pounded him—and we had a big team. Meanwhile, we played Steve Smith against Cam Neely—every shift. Cam was becoming the best player in the Eastern Conference. A bull. He was fearless and could score sixty goals. But Steve Smith was a big strong guy too. Steve and Cam battled toe to toe for four and a half games. Steve did a great job on him.
• • •
My good friend Ace Bailey had a buddy who owned a restaurant bar in Boston called Three Cheers. I said, “Ace, let’s set up a party after Game Four. Food, hors d’oeuvres, champagne. We’ve got about eighty people.” (During the playoffs, we’d normally have a team meal back at the hotel, where they’d set up a buffet. Our families would be there because, as I’ve said, Glen was really good about that. Looking back, I understand why he did it. It put the players at ease. When you play and your family comes out, you can’t help worrying, “Okay, where’s my mom and dad gonna go eat tonight? Where are we going to go after the game?” Glen took away that worry.)
In Game Four, with about three and a half minutes left in the second period, Craig Simpson scored to tie it 3–3. And then all the lights went out.
It was pitch black on the ice. After about ten minutes one of the older guys, I can’t remember who, said, “Power isn’t coming back on. This game is over.”
I thought, “Over? How can it be over?”
We went back to the locker room, and everyone was quiet. When we got on the bus I said, “Well, we have to go to Three Cheers. We’ve got all this stuff!” And so the whole team went over to Congress Street by Boston Harbor. We were still in disbelief. We ate the Buffalo wings and onion rings and potato skins and everyone had a few beers and some wine, but no one was celebrating. It wasn’t as if we’d lost, so no one was upset. It was more like, “Okay, now what?”
I’ve been through a lot of things in professional sports and amateur sports, and I’ve never seen anything like it. What was even more amazing was that while we were still sitting in the locker room wondering what to do, we watched NHL president John Ziegler on CBC. He was standing in a corner of Boston Garden holding the rule book. There were a ton of reporters surrounding him. Ziegler had found a bylaw on the books from the 1920s that said if the lights go off and they can’t come back on, the game will be replayed in its entirety. There was to be a Game Five, Six, Seven, and Eight if necessary. And all the individual statistics from the game would count. It was all mapped out.
I turned to Mark and said, “Is this really happening? They kept that rule in for all these years?” Here’s the funny thing about it. Somebody said, “Well, what would Glen Sather have done?”
I said “Glen wants to win.” If there was no rule and they said “We’re starting at 3–3,” Glen would have said “We’re starting over.” If they’d said “We’re starting over,” Glen would have said “We’re starting at 3–3!” He’d look for any advantage he could get.
• • •
The next morning we flew to Edmonton at nine a.m. We had a great practice. In the locker room our attitude was, “Okay, we got one more game. Let’s win.”
We took the game 6–3, but it turned out to be a wild one. The Bruins had no intention of rolling over, and they scored first. But once we had fought our way back into it, the fight started to leave them. I knew what that felt like. By the end, Andy Moog was left alone a little. The lopsided score wasn’t his fault. It just goes to show how important desire and the will to win are to the game of hockey. If you come to the conclusion that you can’t win, it’s game over. In the end, we became the only team in NHL history to accomplish a four-game sweep in five games.
When we won the first Cup in ’84 it was chaotic. People were jumping on the ice, you couldn’t move, it was out of control. By the fourth one, the fans wanted to sit back and take it all in. In those days, when you got the Cup you skated around the ice in a group. We didn’t do what they do today—give it to one guy who skates up and down and then passes it to the next guy. We just sort of passed it to each other in a pile.
So when we were done skating with it, I lo
oked around and saw that no one was left on the ice except the people from our team, the PR guys, the scouts, the extra players, the trainers, and the coaches. I thought, “Wow, we gotta get a picture.”
We pulled everyone together and I said, “Do you remember in the 60s when the Leafs and the Canadiens won the Cup and they got a picture on the ice?” And everyone said, “Yeah, yeah! We gotta do this picture!”
The fans were great: they stayed in the stands cheering and taking pictures while we piled together on the ice and got a team picture. It’s become a bit of a tradition. Every team that wins a Cup now does a team picture on the ice. It’s a pretty special picture for me, as it was my last time in an Oilers sweater.
• • •
People always say the same thing: “Oh, you had it planned. You knew you were getting traded.” I had no idea. My dad did, but he didn’t tell me until later that night when he said, “You know what, you’re gonna get traded.”
I was traded to the L.A. Kings that August, but Edmonton still had a strong core of players led by Mess and Kevin Lowe. Your best players, the core group, usually sort of carry the load. Normally the core group is at their best somewhere between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-nine. In 1988, Mark was twenty-seven and Kevin was twenty-nine. Edmonton was on top for a twelve-year stretch because over that period Glen would tinker, as did Serge Savard or Scotty Bowman, with a couple of players to incorporate some new energy, new blood, and new excitement—but you can’t switch up all your core players. Look at the success of, say, the Flyers or the Canadiens in the 70s—they didn’t really mess with the core. Gordie Howe’s GM in Detroit, Jack Adams, always said that a team can stay on top in hockey for five years and then things fall apart. I don’t agree. I believe that you can go a good, solid ten years with a core group of players.
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