by Grant Fuhr
While his off-ice troubles would be a distraction during the decade, Grant’s play would rarely waver after 1982–83. He gained confidence as he progressed during the following season, stepping once again toward respectability following that sophomore slump. And Grant’s road to reclaiming his status as a future goaltending great would coincide with a shift in the overall team mentality: everyone was looking to rebound from the jarring Cup final defeat at the hands of the Islanders. With eyes fixed on the No. 1 goalie position, Grant was swept up in the excitement of the Oilers’ new expectations—going for the trophy that owner Peter Pocklington had so boldly predicted would be in their grasp within five years of entering the NHL. There was just one place to start that process: a rematch with Billy Smith and the Islanders.
GAME 3
MAY 10, 1984
EDMONTON 1 NEW YORK ISLANDERS 0
Most champions can point to a crucial moment when potential turned to production, when riddles became titles. The Montreal Canadiens of the 1970s, arguably the greatest NHL teams of all time, point to a pre-season game against the defending Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers in 1975 when the Habs matched the Broad Street Bullies punch for punch, deflating forever the myth of the Flyers as all-conquering bullies. The Habs then reeled off four straight Cups, while the Flyers simply reeled away. Later, the New York Islanders slew the dragons of repeated playoff failures in the late 1970s when GM Bill Torrey dealt popular veteran Billy Harris (a former No. 1 overall pick) and Dave Lewis to acquire centre Butch Goring. With a legitimate No. 2 centre, the Isles then won 19 consecutive playoff series (unmatched in the history of professional sports) and four straight Cups themselves.
For Grant and the heralded young Oilers, their own playoff disappointment against those Islanders stung to the core in 1983. To make the humiliation worse, the defeated Oilers had been forced to file past the celebrating Islanders dressing room after the clinching Game 4. As they say in boxing, to become a champion you must beat a champion—and heading into the 1983–84 playoffs, the Isles were the heavyweight champs of the post–WHA merger NHL. The Long Island crew stood between the Oilers and their destiny.
The Isles had been working their mastery over Edmonton for a while. Not only had they beaten the Oilers in a brief 1981 quarterfinal and then the 1983 final sweep, but from December of ’81 through the 1984 regular season, the Islanders had also recorded an 11-game unbeaten streak against Edmonton. Even though the Oilers had topped the NHL’s overall standings with 119 points (14 more than the Bruins and Islanders, in second and third place respectively), they were just paper champions until they proved they could subdue Al Arbour’s team.
After a smooth passage though the first three rounds of the 1984 post-season, the Oilers’ chance for redemption came in the final. It was a match the entire league anticipated. Whatever the regular-season statistics, Gretzky, Mark Messier and Fuhr would still be playoff underdogs against Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, Denis Potvin and Billy Smith. As Grant and his teammates skated out to meet the Isles the night of Game 1, the pressure of being the NHL’s top team in the regular season also weighed heavily: only 9 regular season winners since 1983–84 have actually won the big prize. As he waited through the national anthems, Grant saw at the other end of the ice a champion team showing its age—but with plenty of veteran savvy left as well. The legendary Bill Torrey had augmented his veteran core of Trottier, Bossy and Potvin with young blood in the form of Pat LaFontaine, Pat Flatley and Gord Dineen. After narrowly escaping defeat in the opening round of the playoffs at the hands of the New York Rangers (who had upset them back in 1979), the Isles had steamrolled to a return date with the Oilers.
For Grant, there was a much riding on the showdown. With a clutch performance here in Game 1, Grant had the chance to supplant Andy Moog as Glen Sather’s go- to goalie in crucial post-season games. That would represent a singular turnaround from the previous spring, and few who’d seen the struggling Fuhr of 1982–83 would have guessed that the 21-year-old could come back from his sophomore blues to earn Sather’s trust once again. But a string of 17 starts in 21 games (going 14–6–2) from October to December of 1983 signalled the return of the workhorse from his slump. He and Moog fairly evenly split the workload during the regular season in 1983–84: Fuhr played in 45 games while Moog drew into 38, demonstrating the confidence the Oilers brass had with either option.
Their performances were nearly identical playing within the run-and-gun Oilers hockey system. Moog owned the superior GAA (3.77 to Grant’s 3.91) while Grant had a slightly higher save percentage (.882 to Moog’s .881). Both had put up sparkling win/loss records (30–10–4 for Grant, 28–7–1 for Moog) and finished Top 10 in the Vezina Trophy voting. During the regular season, Grant had also toppled the league record for assists by a goalie, posting 14 (six more than the previous mark set in 1980–81 by Mike Palmateer of Toronto). The Edmonton goalie tandem surrendered 314 goals—but that was still good enough for the 10th-fewest allowed in the scoring-mad 21-team league where Gretzky and friends pillaged defencemen and goalies with their wizardry.
Marty McSorley wasn’t to become an Oiler till 1985, and he well remembers his time in Pittsburgh, and the intimidation factor of facing Edmonton in those days. “They were so fast. Teams would ice the puck thinking they could get a rest and make a change. But Fuhrsie would race to the corner and one-touch the puck up again and be on them right away.” Playing with Grant was an entirely different story. “He was so consistent, so accountable, it was fun to play him in practice, because he would challenge you. Nowadays you look around and you can say that the best athlete is in net. Back then it wasn’t that way. But with Fuhrsie you had a really good athlete. He’d poke-check a guy lying on his belly and then be standing up and take the rebound in his chest. He was really athletic in a time when not all the goalies were.”
With their two goalies reliably minding the cage, Edmonton’s corsairs up front smashed their own scoring record, tallying 446 goals—a record surely never to be topped in the current defensive-minded NHL. All that was needed to cement their greatness was a Stanley Cup.
Grant:
We were a loaded team without realizing it, because everybody played and had fun every day. I mean, Gretzky was special—everyone saw that each night. And we got to see it in practice every morning: sometimes he was just as impressive in practice because he didn’t like to lose. But the rest of us were still a bunch of wide-eyed guys, like Mess. I used to practise with Mark’s team back as a kid, so I knew he was good. They brought in Glenn Anderson from the Olympic team: I played against him in the playoffs when I was in Victoria and he played for Seattle, so we knew Glenn was good. Paul Coffey had rave reviews in junior—obviously a first-round pick—so he can play. Jari Kurri was as good a two-way player as there was. He didn’t know it at that time, but he knew to shoot the puck and score. Lee Fogolin was a great leader on defence: he and Kevin Lowe kept it together back there. We had a bit of all the things you need to win.
Grant’s comeback was one of those things the Oilers needed in the successes of the 1983–84 season. His perseverance in recovering from the disastrous previous season had paid off quickly when he was selected to play in his second all-star game, held in February of 1984 at New Jersey’s Brendan Byrne Arena. A relieved Sather had noted the change in his former No. 1 draft pick. “Grant had an off-year last year,” Sather told reporters in something of an understatement. “This year he got off to a great start and played well all the way through.”
The psychological impact of Grant’s comeback was immediate on the young Oilers, freeing them to step up their game. As Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden wrote in The Game, “[A goalie’s] job is to stop pucks.… Well, yeah, that’s part of it. But you know what else it is? … You’re trying to deliver a message to your team that things are OK back here. This end of the ice is pretty well cared for. You take it now and go. Go! Feel the freedom you need in order to be that dynamic, creative, offensive player and go out and s
core.… That was my job. And it was to try to deliver a feeling.”
Edmonton’s 1983–84 campaign was the most successful regular season for any NHL club in seven years, and as the Oilers cruised to a record season, Grant also studied the artistry of the Great One on and off the ice. That season, Gretzky scored 87 goals with 205 points, just behind his best year in 1981–82 (92 goals and 212 points), but still a year unlikely to be matched in the modern NHL.
Grant:
We had the pleasure of watching Gretz from the beginning, so it was fun to see it all culminate. Everybody knew he’s the guy. You couldn’t ask for a nicer guy to be around. Every night there was a circus around him. You felt bad for him, because he never got a breather. But he did it all with a smile, and you’d just sit there in awe and watch him deal with it every single day. It literally was every day.
Everybody knows how great a hockey player he is. But people don’t realize what a great person he is. The young guys, when they first came in, Gretz had them stay with him instead of staying at a hotel. Take them for dinner, feed them, look after them. It was more about making the young guys feel like they were part of the team. They were comfortable, and it was part of what made us good. It could be a little bit intimidating for a new guy walking in to see Gretz and Coff and Mess, but everybody got made to feel like they were part of it right out of the gate. I think that’s what kept us at the top of everything: everybody felt like they fit right away, so there’s no transition period. Everybody that came in fit. If they didn’t fit, then we got rid of them.
It was like a big group of kids having fun. Most of us weren’t married by then [11, in fact], so we had a lot of time to hang out together.
Even when we weren’t playing well we were having more fun than everybody else. And Slats let us have fun. You had fun at practice, because he made practices fun, so the guys wanted to be there. We probably drove the trainers nuts, because the guys would stay on the ice and practise when they wanted to get everything packed up. Then the guys would want to go play ping-pong afterwards. So you’re there until three or four in the afternoon, and there’d be 10 or 12 guys still there.
We just assumed everywhere was like that. That was the biggest news: I just thought that’s the way that National Hockey League works. Then other teams would come in and they’d be like, “Woo! You’ve got a pretty good squad.” And we would say, “Yeah, I guess we do.”
But fun wasn’t enough, and Gretzky and the Oilers had the scars to prove that regular-season dominance does not guarantee playoff success. They would be defined by the Stanley Cups they won, and to achieve that goal they would need a stellar goalie who could last the heated four rounds needed to win them. Sather had his two viable options in net, but when the playoffs began, he handed the baton to Fuhr. Grant’s 11–4 mark with a .903 save percentage in the 1984 post-season was the start of his glorious run as a “money” goalie. Much like his Islanders counterpart Billy Smith—who routinely split regular-seas on games with Glenn “Chico” Resch and Rollie Melanson, but was irreplaceable come playoff time—Grant took the permanent job in the post-season and ran with it. After a relaxing three-game sweep of the Winnipeg Jets in the Smythe semis, Fuhr was singled out for praise in the 4–1 victory in Game 3. “The Jets made our team work for everything,” Sather told reporters. “If there was one difference in the series, it was Grant Fuhr. He made tremendous saves when we needed them.”
There were more pitfalls ahead, however. In the second installment of the Battle of Alberta, the stubborn Calgary Flames, led by Paul Reinhart, pushed the Oilers to seven games in the Smythe Division final. Grant and Moog actually shared the goaltending duties in Game 7 as Edmonton peppered 44 shots on Flames goalie Rejean Lemelin, but the Oilers still needed to score the final four goals (two in 58 seconds) to carve out the 7–4 win. Next, a bruised shoulder that Grant suffered in Game 2 of the Campbell finals against the North Stars led to Moog starting the 8–5 win in Game 3. But Grant was again back in the Oilers net for the clinching 3–1 Game 4 victory and another Campbell Bowl win for Edmonton as they swept the outmatched Minnesotans. Going into the Finals rematch with the Islanders, Grant seemed the natural choice for the Game 1 start. The thinking was that his first taste of the Cup pressure would give the Oilers extra energy—and perhaps give the Isles fits. Grant was ready.
Grant:
I’d been like a cheerleader the year before, when Andy played the final against the Islanders. It’s not what you want: you want to be the one playing. But that was the place I had drawn. That was my role. I’m not sure how ready I would have been to play in that atmosphere after the year I’d had in 1982–83. My confidence was shaky that season. You can’t win at that level of the playoffs if you’re not certain. Your teammates can see it—and the other team can see it, too.
But with his confidence restored in 1984 it was full steam ahead, and Grant happily anticipated the challenge of another showdown with Billy Smith, his hated rival in the Islanders net. As Game 1 dawned, however, there remained critics who pointed out flaws in the Oilers as a team, and in their acrobatic goalie. Conventional hockey wisdom had always held that defence wins championships; in 1983–84, the high-octane Oilers were seeking to prove that mantra a fallacy. Most of those critics assembled for Game 1 in Uniondale assumed that if the Oilers were to win over Al Arbour’s fanatically disciplined team, it could only be by using their vaunted scoring to overwhelm the Isles. After all, Glen Sather’s crew couldn’t play defence, and was totally dependent on Gretzky’s line to power the team. As proof, critics pointed to the five losses in a row the Oilers had racked up (including an 11–0 loss Grant suffered at the hands of the Hartford Whalers on February 12) when both Gretzky and Jari Kurri were out of the lineup.
There were also questions specifically about Grant, who was said to need the safety net of his team’s great offence to bolster him. He could give up soft goals and still win in the regular season, according to his critics, but what would happen in a low-scoring game when that safety net was pulled away and every goal mattered? As Kirk McLean, Vancouver’s star goalie of the 1990s, would later note, “It is pretty tough for a goalie when you look at it. You’re always the last line of defence. If you let a goal in, you can’t go to the bench and hide between the guys or anything.”
Grant was about to set all that thinking on its ear. The learning curve from his stumbles in 1982–83 was set to pay off as he nervously waited for the end of the national anthem before Game 1. Once the puck dropped, the New York Islanders saw a new man. Sather’s decision to go with No. 31 was rewarded with what is considered perhaps the most important Oiler victory ever—a tension-filled 1–0 road shutout before 15,861 at the Nassau County Coliseum, with the supposedly sieve-like Oilers winning in a most atypical fashion.
Grant:
That game was so much fun to play. We knew going into the Island that we had to be very good in Game 1. Especially on defence. We wanted to show them that we could play any style they wanted, and we’d still win. It was just one of those nights where you’re comfortable: the shots you don’t see hit you, and they hit the middle of your body, and you just know it’s going to be one of those nights. Between periods in the dressing room we knew we had a chance. We’d learned from the year before: they’d kind of run over us the year before, where we got a little caught up in the emotion. The next year, we just played.
I think that was the biggest difference. We saw how they dealt with it, and we figured if we did the same thing, then we had a good chance. Everything just happened to fall into place at one time. Once we had won that game we realized that we were good enough to play with them. Any style that we wanted to play we could play.
Kelly Hrudey, who was the Islanders’ third goalie, was left grudgingly admiring Grant’s performance. “He was spectacular,” says Hrudey. “Our guys had so many good chances that night and he just turned them all away.”
Grant’s many thieving saves on Islander forwards left reporters and fans grasping fo
r superlatives too. “One of those stops—a left-pad split save of a Bryan Trottier 15-footer from dead in front, followed by a stacked-pad smothering of Trottier’s rebound—was easily the best and most important of the series,” wrote Jack Falla in Sports Illustrated. “The key to the Islanders’ previous mastery of the Oilers had been New York’s ability to take a lead and then close the door.” An Associated Press game story described how Grant “orchestrated the victory with cat-like quickness.” Sather could only smile. “He was as good as Billy Smith tonight. If we get goaltending like that (the rest of the series), we’ll be in good shape.”
“What struck me was how relaxed he was,” said Smith, who’d go on to make the Hall of Fame 10 years before Grant. “He was very different than me. I showed up at the rink with a burr up my ass. We were very different personalities, but he was a helluva competitor.”
When the game ended it was the first time the Islanders had ever been shut out in the Stanley Cup Finals. Their nine-game Finals win streak was ended by Grant’s brilliant performance, and his mastery set the tone for the sea change to follow in the series. Considering how rare shutouts were in an era of all-out offence, many believe that, for all the great games to come, Game 1 was likely Grant’s definitive star performance. With a skeptical worldwide audience tuning in to see if Gretzky’s guys were all show and no go for a second consecutive year, the mental block lifted by that win was huge.