by Al Strachan
“I don’t know individually if players felt that way or not, but just because we weren’t winning, it all kind of manifested itself and came to a big head.
“Bob Bourne actually called a private meeting with just the Oilers’ players and the Islanders’ players, and basically put it on the table. He said, ‘Listen, we were tremendous enemies when we played against each other, and that’s a good thing because we both want to win the Stanley Cup and that’s what makes us great. Now we’ve got to put our differences aside.’
“He said basically that we all had to get on the same page. Bob Bourne did that privately in the hotel. It was quite the meeting because I didn’t think there was tension, but obviously there was, and when you’re not winning, something’s wrong.
“Then, the next day, Larry stood up and made his speech. It was a great speech. Larry was the most respected guy ever to be a part of Team Canada. He was the kind of guy who didn’t say anything. He was friendly with each player. If you were a young guy, he made sure you felt comfortable. He kept everybody loose in the locker room.
“So when he stood up, we were all kind of in shock because Larry never did that. That wasn’t his field. And when he did and he made that incredible speech, everybody sort of went, ‘Whoa!’ ”
Buoyed by the easy win over the Czechs, Canada rolled into the next game against the Soviets in a confident mood. It was only a semifinal, but the hockey world perceived it as the final. These were the two clear tournament favourites, the world’s two hockey powerhouses, going head to head in a game that would see one of them eliminated.
The game lived up to its billing. Even the staid, detached members of the coaching staff got caught up in the emotion. “I sat up in the press box and kept track of the good scoring chances,” said Team Canada assistant coach Tom Watt. “They had the first four of the game, then we had the next four, and that was it for the first period, 4–4. In the second period, we had ten good chances to their two. After that, I was so excited, I couldn’t get them all down.”
Despite having been the dominant team, Team Canada had trailed 2–1 late in the third period. It was time for Gretzky to go to work.
“We were putting lots of pressure on them,” recalled Doug Wilson years later. “We came down, and Gretz had the puck in the far corner. It was one of those ones where we had all sorts of pressure on them for two or three minutes and we just couldn’t tie the game. Then, all of a sudden, Bob Bourne went to the front of the net and Gretz got it back to me and I fired it onto the net.”
Wilson was known for his blazing shots from the point into the upper corner, but this one was far from typical. It just trickled in.
“Bobby Bourne created all the traffic and was causing all kinds of trouble in front of the net,” said Wilson. “I wasn’t really at the point. I was at the top of the circle. It was a wrist shot. It hit the goalie and went through the goalie. It dropped into the crease and slid in.”
As if the game hadn’t been sufficiently exciting already, it now went into sudden-death overtime, where even a routine shot could end it. When the Soviets got a two-on-one break, Canadian hearts sank. The Canadians had rarely allowed an odd-man break all night because they knew from bitter experience that a short-term manpower disadvantage of that nature usually resulted in a Soviet goal.
The only Canadian back was Paul Coffey, a man much maligned—unfairly—for what were perceived to be defensive liabilities. But on this occasion, Coffey not only broke up the rush, he led the charge the other way and, after a stretch of exerted Canadian pressure, fired the shot from the point that Mike Bossy tipped into the net. Canada had won. And they had done it by outskating the Soviets, not by beating them into submission.
After that, a win over the Swedes in the final was anticlimactic and almost automatic.
The victory in Canada Cup 1984 marked the beginning of a stretch of Canadian dominance in the international game—and of a close friendship between two of its greatest stars, Gretzky and Igor Larionov.
Walter Gretzky, who spoke enough Russian to make himself understood, and his close friend Charlie Henry had managed to help Larionov and another player elude their KGB watchdogs after the semifinal game.
“They snuck down the back elevator, and Charlie Henry picked them up,” said Gretzky. “It was a six o’clock game, if I remember rightly, so it was about nine-thirty when we picked them up. Igor kept saying he had to be back by midnight.”
Everybody went to Calgary’s famed Electric Avenue, which, after the Canadian triumph, was living up to its name.
“There was Igor and another Russian player, and I don’t know his name,” recalled Gretzky in a 2005 interview. “There were two Russians, and the other one didn’t speak any English. He smoked more cigarettes and drank more than any of us. He was an unknown. I think he wore number 31 and he was a right-handed shot. That’s all I remember about him.”
By this point in his tale, Gretzky was laughing. “Igor got back by midnight. The other guy we lost. I don’t know if he ever got back. He might still be living in Calgary, for all I know. It’s funny now, but we were worried then.”
As for Larionov, “He was standing there talking to me,” Gretzky said, “and the whole time I’m thinking, ‘This guy is talking to me and whole time we were playing against him, I was thinking he didn’t understand a word I was saying.’
“I would talk to our guys and say, ‘Coff, you stand there and I’ll get the draw to you,’ or say to someone else, ‘You go over there and I’ll throw it to you up the middle.’
“The whole time, Igor knew exactly what I was saying. The first time I knew he spoke English was when we were standing there, having a beer. He started telling me, ‘We all want to play in the NHL, and maybe one day it will happen.’
“It was an incredible night because Charlie snuck him out past the KGB. Igor said he would like to defect, but the government wouldn’t allow it; but he said, ‘One day, we hope we can all play in the NHL.’ ”
Five years later, he did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It can be said of every sport: the truly great players don’t just rewrite the record book; they change the way the game is played.
In hockey, Bobby Orr changed the essence of the defenceman’s game. Wayne Gretzky changed the essence of the forward’s game.
Before Orr, defencemen stuck to defence. They rarely trespassed into the opposition’s zone except to join a brawl. Only the most daring—Montreal’s Doug Harvey, for example—would rush the puck. Carrying the puck up the ice was the forward’s job. A defenceman passed the puck.
Similarly, before Gretzky, a forward stayed in his lane. During one Toronto Maple Leafs training camp in the sixties, lines were even painted on the ice parallel to the boards and ten feet out from them. Wingers were not to cross those lines.
But Gretzky roamed all over the ice; so, naturally, his linemates did the same. With defenceman Paul Coffey utilizing all the offensive innovations that Orr had introduced to the game, the only Edmonton player not likely to be involved in the attack was the goaltender.
But Gretzky was instrumental in an even more significant change in the game. He was the first star to kill penalties on a regular basis and the first to turn a four-on-four situation into an offensive opportunity. Prior to that, the top coaches always sent out defensively oriented players in four-on-four situations. There were checking lines and there were scoring lines.
“It [the game] started to change with Wayne Gretzky,” explained Scott Bowman, arguably the greatest coach in the history of the NHL and a devoted student of the game. “I think that was the biggest thing. When Edmonton started to use Gretzky to kill a lot of penalties, they decided that they were going to get those guys playing more.”
At that point, in the early eighties, Bryan Trottier had done some penalty killing with the New York Islanders, and Bowman himself had occasionally used Jacques Lemaire in that capacity in Montreal, but those were exceptions.
“Most of the time
before that, you had enough guys that were specialty players that you either played offence or killed penalties,” Bowman said. “Guys like Jean Beliveau and Bernie Geoffrion never killed penalties.”
The new strategy, the brainchild of Glen Sather and his staff, was a crucial factor in the Oilers’ post-season successes. For one thing, it allowed Gretzky to get his usual ice time. In that era, the playoffs were often fight-filled and teams could spend a lot of time playing short-handed. At the same time, the playoffs had been steadily expanded (fifteen years earlier, a team needed only eight wins to earn the Stanley Cup) and had become a true marathon, a test of endurance, not only because of the extra games but also because of the extra travel. If you wasted players by leaving them languishing on the bench, you tired out others and flirted with disaster.
There was another way in which using Gretzky in what had formerly been a defensive situation was beneficial. If the opposition relied on a line that got a lot of ice time—the Triple Crown Line in Los Angeles, for example—and you designated one line of your own to check them, some of your players were going to get shortchanged on their ice time.
Again, that could tire out some players and waste others. But by using Gretzky and Jari Kurri to kill penalties or play four on four, ice time could be more balanced.
The biggest factor of all, of course, was that Gretzky and Kurri were so dangerous that they distracted the opponents who were either on a power play or in a four-on-four situation.
One NHL coach of that era, who can’t be identified because he would be admitting to a questionable tactic, told me that, one Saturday morning, he paid a youngster to ask Coffey for a stick. In the afternoon, he measured the stick and confirmed his suspicions: it was illegal. If the game was close, he planned to call for a stick measurement in the third period and get a power play.
But before he was able to put that plan into action, the Oilers took a penalty, and Gretzky scored shorthanded. Shortly afterwards, the Oilers took another penalty. This time, Gretzky set up Kurri for a shorthanded goal. The idea of a stick measurement was abandoned.
By the time the 1985 playoffs rolled around, Gretzky and Kurri had elevated the shorthanded attack to an art form. In 1983, the Oilers had set a record of ten shorthanded goals in the post-season, a record that still stands. In the 1983–84 season, Gretzky scored an NHL-record twelve shorthanded goals even though he played only seventy-four games.
The late Bob Johnson, coach of the Calgary Flames in the mid-1980s, wanted his team to be aware of Gretzky’s potential in short-handed situations and made the point as forcefully as he could to his players. “A lot of his short-handed goals start when he takes the puck from someone,” he told them. “The secret is not to play one on one with him. I don’t care who you are or how good you are, don’t test him. If you want to test him, make arrangements to go out there and try it in practice. Don’t go out there and do it during a game. He’ll beat you.”
At one point in their 1985 series against the Chicago Blackhawks, the Oilers had scored eleven goals during power plays—six on their own power play and five when the Hawks had the advantage.
“With the type of players we have,” explained Sather at the time, “we find that it’s better to be on offence than on defence at any point in the game.
“We feel that no matter how many men we’ve got on the ice, once we get the puck, we should always go on offence. It always seemed kind of strange to me to have guys like Wayne Gretzky and Jari Kurri, who can handle the puck so well, sitting on the bench when we were short-handed, when the kind of guy you want out there is a guy who can handle the puck well.
“You also want someone who can find the open spaces on the ice, and you’re never going to get someone who can get into the holes as well as Wayne.”
Naturally, the tactic needed some cooperation from the Edmonton defencemen.
“It’s not as if we’re looking for a goal every time we’re out there,” explained Coffey. “If a guy is on me when I get the puck, I don’t look. I just whack it around the glass as hard as I can. Your main concern is to make sure they don’t score.
“But if I have a second, I look for Wayne. Usually, I look right up the middle because as soon as he sees I’m going to get possession, he’ll break at full speed and he heads for the opening. The defencemen are most likely to be spread, so he usually has room up the middle.
“Jari plays a bit more defensively. He’ll stay back a bit longer, but once he sees the puck going to Wayne, he takes off as well and they’ll often trap a defenceman and get a two-on-one.”
Gretzky had no problem with the concept. “Coff was a great long passer,” he said. “He used to make a pass from behind our net to centre ice like it was a four-foot pass.”
Even when the other primary defensive pair of Lee Fogolin and Kevin Lowe came onto the ice, Gretzky continued to be a short-handed threat.
“Fogey and I look for him as well,” said Lowe, “but he’s usually closer to the boards when we’re out there because he knows that we’re more apt to bang it off the boards if we get a chance.
“Wayne is an intelligent player. He knows that the puck is more likely to come up the boards, so that’s where he goes.”
It didn’t take long for the Oilers’ coaching staff to realize that utilizing Gretzky during an opposition power play provided a number of benefits. If he got the puck, he was liable to get or create a decent scoring chance. Even if the chance was thwarted, he—and/or Kurri—had killed valuable seconds off the power play. Also, Gretzky’s presence allowed the Edmonton defencemen to become more involved in the attack.
“If he’s got the puck in their zone, you can afford to step up a couple of feet,” explained Lowe, “because you know that he’s not going to give the puck away and get you trapped. Fogey and I have killed penalties for a couple of years, and we’re confident when Wayne is out there. We know that it’s safe to move in and get a good shot.”
That was another key. On some teams, an offensive chance might occasionally be created on a short-handed situation, and the players would try to make the best of it. But with the Oilers, those breaks were part of the game plan. Every player knew how to respond.
“We know what we have to do in our own zone,” said Gretzky. “We play a very aggressive box. We like to close in on the puck in a hurry, and then, when we get the puck, we don’t like to just fire it down the ice.
“One of the major problems when you’re on the power play—and we’re guilty of this too sometimes—is that you get lackadaisical. You figure you’ve got the extra man, so you don’t have to work as hard. But really, when you’re on the power play, you have to work harder.”
And because the short-handed attack was part of the game plan, it had variations depending on who was on the ice, even if Mark Messier’s line was out. It’s no coincidence that the top three scorers of short-handed goals in NHL history are Messier, Gretzky and Kurri.
“When Coff is out there, I try to go up the middle,” said Gretzky. “He makes those long passes crisply and accurately, and as soon as I see the puck going over to him, I just take off. With the other guys, I go to the boards and come around from behind.”
While this was going on, Kurri would also be reading the play. “I break as soon as Wayne does,” he said, “but we both try to make a quick turn. That throws their guys off a bit, and it often means that one of their defencemen gets caught so we get a two-on-one.
“Usually I end up going down the left side because I can get a better shot from the left side. There’s more area for me to get the shot off. Wayne often slows down a bit because he knows I’m coming later, and then, if we’ve got a two-on-one, I just wait for one of those nice passes he makes.”
Coffey agreed with Gretzky’s approach. “On the power play, you have to work twice as hard,” he said. “There’s a tendency to let up because you’ve got the extra man. That’s Wayne’s philosophy. Sometimes you’re going to catch the other team sleeping.
“It’s not
great to get a short-handed goal scored against you. I don’t know if it’s the most demoralizing thing that can happen, but it sure doesn’t help. And the thing to remember is that it reflects on all five guys on the ice. It’s not just one guy.”
The Oilers’ short-handed feats got the most attention because the league kept separate statistics only for short-handed goals, not four on four. But when Edmonton played four on four, they used what was primarily the same approach—springing the forwards, especially Gretzky and Kurri, up the middle.
In many ways, the Oilers caused even more damage in four-on-four situations than they did short-handed. On the ice, there was nothing the other general managers could do about the Oilers’ short-handed game. Off the ice, they found a way. They changed the rules.
Until the end of the 1984–85 season, coincidental minor penalties produced a four-on-four situation. At their subsequent summer meeting, the GMs cited consistency as a reason for instituting a rule change, saying that since coincidental fighting majors did not make each team short-handed for five minutes, minors should not leave each team a man short for two minutes.
It was a rationalization, as everyone knew. Sather was livid. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “You’re taking away a great and exciting part of the game.” The GMs’ decision still needed approval from the governors. “Hopefully, they will look at it from the point of view of the overall good of the league,” Sather said.
They didn’t.
“I think the NHL is making a big mistake,” said Gretzky. “I think the NHL should be more concerned with butt-ending, spearing and three-hour hockey games than getting rid of four-on-four situations.”
In 1993, when the Edmonton dynasty had ended and the Gretzky-Kurri threat was no longer the scourge of the league, the rule was rescinded. Sheer coincidence, no doubt.