by Al Strachan
But in the 1985 playoffs, the Oilers were still able to capitalize on their innovative approach, and Gretzky led them to their second successive Stanley Cup. He had thirty assists, an NHL record until he broke it three years later, and seventeen goals; and he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs. He had learned his Cup-final lessons against the Islanders. The Philadelphia Flyers, a different style of team altogether, were, like the rest of the hockey world, unable to contain him.
It would seem that Gretzky had nothing left to prove, and really, he didn’t. But being Gretzky, he kept on proving it anyway. He was at the peak of his career.
Posing for his portrait in his Hespeler minor novice team uniform, in 1974.
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Playing for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in 1978.
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Aged 17, with the Indianapolis Racers in the World Hockey Association. Gretzky was still too young to play in the NHL.
Gretzky gets ready to go back over the sign-free boards in 1980 as coach Glen “Slats” Sather watches the play.
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Gretzky vs. Vladislav Tretiak: In the final game of the 1981 Canada Cup, the Canadians started well but couldn’t beat Tretiak, whose play was magnificent. The Canadians lost to the Soviets 8–1.
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Fifty goals in thirty-nine games! Gretzky sets what he says is his favourite record of the 61 he held when he retired. Philadelphia winger Bill Barber, playing defence on this occasion, makes a futile dive to stop Gretzky putting the puck into an empty net.
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1984 Stanley Cup finals. The Oilers’ Glenn Anderson hopes to start a breakout past New York Islanders Hall of Fame defenceman Denis Potvin.
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Islanders forward Bob Nystrom moves in too late to stop a shot from Gretzky in the 1984 Stanley Cup final.
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The Islanders are in disarray as Gretzky scores to help the Oilers move towards their first Stanley Cup. Goalie Billy Smith is down and out; Denis Potvin is leaning on the crossbar; and Bryan Trottier is arriving too late.
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Before the deciding game of the 1984 Stanley Cup finals, Gretzky said that while he was happy to rack up records, they were not his goal. “I said the only thing that matters is the Stanley Cup. Nothing else.” The Cup was sweet vindication for Gretzky. The Oilers had just completed their fifth year in the NHL.
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CHAPTER NINE
As far as their supporters were concerned, the Edmonton Oilers of the Gretzky era were confident and self-assured. As far as their detractors were concerned, they were cocky and arrogant. It was hard to make a strong case against either stance because the Oilers always walked that line. Whichever point of view you espoused, there was plenty of evidence to prove your point.
Over the years, Sather and co-coach John Muckler shared the task of keeping the Oilers’ ebullience under control, of focusing the talent without letting the cockiness breed complacency. The more success the Oilers had, the more difficult that task became, and once the team had won back-to-back Stanley Cups, it bordered on the impossible.
In that era, it was the great misfortune of the Calgary Flames to be stuck in the Smythe Division with the Oilers. Throughout the Edmonton dynasty, the Flames were the second-best team in the west and, on occasion, the second-best team in the entire National Hockey League. But because of the 1980s playoff format, only one of them could get past the second round, and it tended not to be the Flames.
In 1986, the two teams renewed their annual rivalry. As usual, the Oilers were expected to be the survivor. There was ample precedent.
The Flames opened the series with a 4–1 road win, but there was little concern on the part of the Edmonton players, even though Gretzky had been banged around all night. Jari Kurri suffered a similar fate. Every whistle seemed to prompt a minor scrum—sometimes a major scrum—with lots of pushing, threatening and face-washing. For impartial viewers, it was terminally tedious, but for Jim Peplinski, Neil Sheehy and Tim Hunter, it was a trip to the Promised Land. They were the three main perpetrators of the scrums, and they were merely following the explicit orders of Calgary coach Bob Johnson.
Distasteful as it might have seemed to Oilers fans—and to purists, for that matter—it was the best possible strategy for the Flames to use. There was no sense in getting into an end-to-end battle with the explosive Oilers. Instead, they aimed to distract them, to take them off their game, to bang them around, to inhibit their movement through hooking and holding, and to slow down the proceedings.
Today, that set of tactics probably wouldn’t work. Officiating standards have changed. But in that era, with only one referee and the traditional approach that all rules were relaxed in the post-season, it was effective.
It was clear that if the Oilers were to advance in the playoffs, they’d have to forsake the style they loved and play a much grittier game. They bore down and did enough to win Game Two in overtime, but lost Game Three. Gretzky was easily the Oilers’ best player, but few, if any, of his teammates were playing up to his level. He had taken a six-stitch cut under the chin from a Calgary stick, but it was considered to be just a part of playoff hockey. “This series is a long way from over, believe me,” he said. “When you’re playing for the Stanley Cup, you’re playing for an awful lot. We’re not going to roll over and give someone the Stanley Cup. They’re going to have to take it away from us.”
At that point, there was every indication that the Flames were poised to do just that.
The Edmonton players remained confident—or cocky, if you prefer—but the coaches didn’t share their conviction. “We’re not playing the way we’re capable of playing,” said Sather. “We’re not pressing, and we’re not getting into the holes. Whether the problem is with the players’ not getting into the holes or whether it’s Calgary interfering with us so much we can’t get there, I don’t know. Only the individual player can tell you whether he’s giving the second effort or whether he’s letting a guy hold him up so he can’t get there.” Translation: “My guys aren’t trying hard enough.”
Assistant coach Bob McCammon added, “They’re physically intimidating us. I don’t mean that they’re physically beating up on us. They’re just playing a strong physical game and we’re allowing it. Out of nine periods, they’ve won eight.”
The Oilers’ coaches knew what needed to be done. The problem was that the players weren’t doing it. To make their point, Sather and his two assistants ignored the next practice. The players were on the ice by themselves. The message was clear: if you’re not going to listen to us anyway, you might as well do whatever it is you want to do.
As the series progressed, the Oilers sporadically followed the game plan the coaches laid out for them. Gretzky continued to be consistently outstanding, but Kurri seemed to be bothered by the Flames’ physical play. Messier was nursing a groin injury, and Coffey was going through one of his occasional slumps. Of the six core players, therefore, only Gretzky, Glenn Anderson and Grant Fuhr were playing up to their normal standards.
When the Flames opened a 3–2 series lead, Sather, clearly worried, made a desperate move. For the first time in five years, he split up Kurri and Gretzky, putting Kurri on Messier’s line and Anderson with Gretzky.
“It was a gutsy move,” said Gretzky. “The line changes were a good shake-up. Mess likes to go to the net. That gave Jari some room. Andy likes to go to the net, and that gave me some room.”
Whether the moves made a big difference or not was unclear. But the Oilers did win. After six games, the series was tied.
Game Seven was memorable, but for a reason that Oilers defenceman Steve Smith would prefer to forget.
With the score tied early in the third period, Fuhr left the puck for Smith behind the net. When Smit
h tried to make a pass up ice, he fired the puck off the back of Fuhr’s leg, and it bounced off it and trickled into the net.
The Oilers’ season was over.
The cockiness that had often stood the Oilers in such good stead had killed them. Throughout the series, the coaches tried to instil a game plan. Again and again, the players ignored it.
Defenceman Kevin Lowe knew what had happened. “We kept wanting to revert to our normal style,” he said, “but over the past couple of years, we’ve really won the championship by grinding it out. In the games that we won in Calgary in this series, we did it by grinding it out.”
Sather was aware of it as well. “We lost as a team,” he said. “We had lots of time to come back. We kept dipping and diving at the blue line and twisting and turning. We told them from the beginning that they should dump it in and use the points.
“I guess this team still has some growing up to do. There are still some people who believe that the ones who are running the team don’t know what they’re doing.” In hindsight, it turned out to be a good lesson. And as the adage says, experience is the best teacher. What the adage doesn’t say is that experience tends to come at a very high price. In this case, the price was a Stanley Cup that, given what was to follow, would have made the Oilers one of only two teams in NHL history to win five consecutive Stanley Cups.
In sports, as in life, success breeds imitation, so the following season, when the Oilers faced the Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup final, they knew what to expect. The Flyers would do everything the Flames had done—and more. When the Flames decided to use a host of skill-neutralizing tactics, they were wading into relatively uncharted waters. But this was the way the Flyers played every day, and the approach had lifted them to second place in the overall NHL standings behind the Oilers.
The Flyers were masters at physical intimidation—some of it “accidental,” such as Ron Sutter slamming into a goalie with astonishing regularity; some of it downright vicious, such as the stick-swinging of goalie Ron Hextall. On top of that, the Flyers not only held players, they held sticks. They were nowhere near as bad as their famous predecessors in Philadelphia, the Broad Street Bullies of the 1970s, but they did adhere to exactly the same principle: the referee won’t call everything because the game would become a travesty, so just keep committing the infractions because you’ll get away with most of them.
Had the Oilers been the same team as the year before, the Flyers would have come out on top. But to their credit, the Oilers had not only learned their lesson, they were coming in with a different approach. For the first time in their existence, they were heading down the mountain. Throughout their first four years, they had been climbing the mountain. Then they got to the summit and stayed there for two years. Then they got knocked off. This time, they were facing the choice of battling their way back to the top, or continuing their slide and giving their critics all the ammunition they wanted. For the first time in their hockey lives, there was a fear of failure.
“We changed a lot of people over the year,” said Sather on the eve of the series, “but I think that handle was a misrepresentation of our hockey club. I think sometimes they got uptight, and it was perceived in a different way. I’ve seen these guys on occasion play in a certain way, and you wonder what happened.
“Guys will say, ‘Oh, it’s a lackadaisical attitude on their part,’ but it’s not. They’ve got nerves the same as a lot of other people do.”
The series against Philadelphia was a tough one, as tough as any the Oilers faced in their run. And it took them seven games. But finally, with Gretzky leading the way with thirty-four points in twenty-one games, the Oilers persevered.
They had won their third Stanley Cup in four years, and they were back on top of the hockey world.
For those first three Stanley Cups that Gretzky won, the story line had been essentially the same.
The Edmonton gang, their young players now aware of the rigours of the playoffs, cruised through a regular season that was all sweetness and light. No morale problems. No injuries. No defections. Then, in the playoffs, with only hockey on their minds and being the heavy favourites, they called upon the tactics that had served them so well, cranked up the defence a bit, and won the Cup.
In the case of their 1988 Cup, only the last three words of that story line were true.
Until the playoffs started, it was a horrible year for the Oilers. The rift between the team and penny-pinching owner Peter Pocklington was growing ever wider. Messier skipped training camp to support his demands for a better contract. Coffey took it a giant step further: he held out so long that the acrimony reached the breaking point. Coffey announced that he was so sick of dealing with Pocklington that he would never again play for the Oilers. He was traded to Pittsburgh.
Even Gretzky, who usually managed to rise above the internal conflicts, got caught up in this one. Like the rest of the team, he was despondent during the early stages of the season. From a hockey point of view, these guys had grown up together. They were like a family, and now Coffey was gone.
The mood in the dressing room, which had always been full of outgoing, fun-loving guys, was noticeably muted. It wasn’t funereal, but it certainly wasn’t anything like what it had been.
“I was a big part of it,” admitted Gretzky years later, “because I was close to Coff, and I couldn’t understand why Slats had traded him, why they couldn’t have worked out their differences. I was probably as down as anybody—more down than anybody.”
Coffey wasn’t an original NHL Oiler. Only Gretzky, protected at the time of the WHA merger, was. But the guys who were subsequently drafted or had been there for the first Cup were viewed within the team as originals. Andy Moog and Randy Gregg were both in that category, and they too were absent that season.
Moog, like Coffey, was unable to come to contract terms and left. Gregg, a doctor, wanted to practise medicine while playing hockey and forsook the Oilers for Canada’s national team in the upcoming Calgary Olympics.
A couple of other players who were not originals but who had been around for the 1987 Cup run, Kent Nilsson and Reijo Ruotsalainen, had gone back to Europe.
Then, to make matters worse, Gretzky suffered the first serious injury of his career and missed sixteen games in mid-season.
The cumulative toll of these setbacks was that, for the first time in seven years, the Oilers didn’t finish first in the Smythe Division. For the first time in seven years, they didn’t earn 100 points. Even Gretzky’s streak ended. Ever since his first season, when he had the same number of points as Marcel Dionne, he had run away with the scoring title. This time, he finished second to Mario Lemieux.
By the end of the regular season, the Oilers appeared to be a team in total disarray. The accepted wisdom, throughout the league, the media and hockey’s fan base, was that the Edmonton dynasty was over.
As the playoffs opened, there was certainly no evident reason to challenge that view. The Flames had not only finished ahead of the Oilers but had become even stronger at the trading deadline with the addition of two excellent defencemen, Rob Ramage and Brad McCrimmon. Adding those two to the best power-play point tandem in the league—Al MacInnis and Gary Suter—appeared to make the Flames invincible.
They certainly seemed that way to Calgary’s media and fans (two groups that often overlapped).
Both the Flames and Oilers survived the first playoff round, and on the morning of the next series opener, I wandered into the lobby of the downtown Calgary hotel where the Oilers were staying. “Have you seen this?” asked Muckler, brandishing that morning’s Calgary Sun. “And all this,” he continued, waving his arm at the array of Flames banners hanging all over the lobby. “It makes me wonder why we bothered to come. We don’t have a chance.”
Two weeks earlier, even Muckler might have believed that. But since then, the Oilers had twice bounced back from three-goal deficits to dispatch the Winnipeg Jets, and in the process, the old Oilers had been resuscit
ated. Suddenly, the team’s lifers accepted the guys who were new to the team. Just as suddenly, the new Oilers felt that they were a part of the squad, not just interlopers. Because players don’t get paid in the playoffs, the recurring gripes over salaries had become irrelevant. They just wanted to go out and prove that, no matter what anyone else might think, the dynasty was still very much alive.
“Against Winnipeg, we noticed it right away,” said Kevin Lowe, one of the originals. “There was a considerable difference in the way the guys reacted. There was camaraderie.”
But the Flames were not the Jets. They were a powerful team that relied heavily on their power play. Justifiably so: its success rate in the regular season was a whopping 29.5 per cent. But in the opening game, they scored only once in nineteen minutes of power-play time, and that lone goal was something of a fluke. The Oilers won 4–3.
Suddenly, there was concern in Calgary. But it was early. A loss in the opener could be overcome.
Gretzky had a different scenario in mind. “The rivalry at that point between Calgary and Edmonton got so intense, it got out of control,” he said. “Not just with the players; the cities got into it. I remember going to Calgary thinking, ‘We’re in for a dogfight because they have home-ice advantage.’
“We were down 3–1 in Game One. We ended up coming back and winning.”
Gretzky remembered the reaction of Calgary coach Terry Crisp. “He said, ‘I don’t know what happened. We outplayed them. We dominated them. Gretzky and Kurri were nonexistent, and they ended up getting the tying goal and the winner and we lose 4–3.’ He was right. I remember thinking, ‘We had a bad game and we won.’