by Mark Spector
That 1987–88 season was also the first year that Calgary had ever finished ahead of Edmonton in the regular season. It was Calgary’s first Presidents’ Trophy, having led the entire NHL in points, and if you consider the arc of each team, 1988 was likely the apex of the Battle. The two teams were as good as they were ever going to be, with Gretzky still in Edmonton, Coffey having moved on, and the Oilers on their way to a fourth Cup in five years.
Calgary had been to the Cup final in 1986 and would finally win it in 1989. This series was quite possibly the most hotly anticipated of any of their five meetings between 1983 and 1991. Yet somehow it would turn out to be the shortest.
“We were the Presidents’ Cup winners,” recalls Bullard, “and the whole thing was, everyone knew that whoever won this series would win the Cup. So I get a knock on my door before the series, and it’s a landscaper. He says, ‘I’ll landscape your whole property if you give me your tickets to the series.’ So I go to my wife, and I say, ‘We can get our place landscaped, a couple of trees … I can always get tickets. Should we give our tickets away?’
“She says, ‘Hell, why not?’ That’s how devoted the people of Calgary were to seeing that series.”
With the series ready to drop its first puck, Oilers defenceman Steve Smith told the Edmonton Journal, “This may be the toughest series we’ve ever had. Maybe for the first time since the Oilers beat the Islanders in 1984, we’re going in as underdogs.”
If only they’d known. The Oilers, opening at the Saddledome for the first time, won Game 1 by a 3–1 score. Normally, to list Game 1 as a turning point in a series would be absurd. But when the team that loses the first game never manages to even get a nibble of the series …
“I remember reading the paper the next day,” Gretzky said, “and Bob Johnson was saying, ‘It was one of the best games we’d played all year. And Edmonton was really not in the game, and somehow they won.’ And that really was the case. They were the better team that night, our goalie [Grant Fuhr] stood on his head, and somehow we found a way to get a couple of goals. Had they won Game 1, the series would have been completely different.”
Even though they had swapped Game 7 victories in their last two meetings, and Calgary had finally passed Edmonton as a regular-season team that season, Calgary was still the little brother in this relationship. Edmonton had three Cups by this point. They had the greatest player in the world. In the 1987 Canada Cup played prior to the 1987–88 season, Edmonton had put five players on Canada’s roster to Calgary’s none (three Flames played for Team USA).
“I believe that the best team that Calgary ever had that didn’t win the Cup was that team of 1988,” Gretzky declared. “They were flying. We were coming off of three Stanley Cups in four years, but we’d stumbled during the season a bit. We didn’t play our best hockey, but we were good. We snuck through the first round because our goaltender was so good.”
Game 2 went to overtime—a typical mid- to late-1980s offensive classic—in a game Calgary had led for most of the way. But Jari Kurri walked through Paul Reinhart and, with Hakan Loob hooking him for all he was worth, still managed to blast a slapshot off the right wing past Mike Vernon to tie the game at 4–4 late in the third period.
That set up the goal that, among 1,016 lifetime goals in the NHL both regular season and playoff, to this day Wayne Gretzky refers to as “the best goal I’ve ever scored.” And it began with a mistake, an overtime penalty by Mark Messier.
It was a blatant trip of Joey Mullen in the offensive zone, with still 150 feet and four Oilers between Mullen and Grant Fuhr. But Messier’s penalty helped to create a magical goal, as Gretzky unleashed the best slapshot of his career over Mike Vernon’s shoulder.
Of all the goals in all the big games, why was that one Gretzky’s favourite?
“One, Vernon was playing as well as Mike Vernon had ever played at that point in time. So the opposition, the game was really strong,” Gretzky said. “Two, the team in Calgary was the best team they’d put together in a lot of years. A tough team to beat, to say the least.”
In Game 1, Gretzky had come down on Vernon, not quite as close to the boards and at a better scoring angle, and very nearly blown a similar shot past the Calgary goalie. But Vernon got the tip of his glove on the shot, and the puck cartwheeled off of the post and stayed out.
This time, Gretzky had hopped the boards with just over twenty seconds left in Messier’s penalty, circled back inside his own blue line, and, as always, Gretzky accurately read what was going to happen next before anybody else on the ice could even consider the possibility. The puck squirted out of the corner to Jari Kurri near the right faceoff dot, and before Kurri had even reeled the puck in, Gretzky was flying out of the zone up the left-wing boards.
Kurri instinctively banked the puck off the boards with Gretzky in full flight. The linesman hopped up on the dasher boards to allow the puck to slide under his skates uninterrupted, and as it passed a churning Gretzky he didn’t even bother to touch it with his stick for a few strides, knowing it would be there when he needed it.
The 1 to 1.5 seconds that Gretzky’s instincts had bought him back in his own zone was now the distance between him and a chasing Flames defenceman, Gary Suter. That buffer allowed Gretzky the time to settle the puck, lift his head to set his sights one last time, then bury his head and unleash the slapshot every Canadian kid tried to make on that outdoor rink near the school grounds, winter day after winter day.
“For a team that, over the years, had not had home-ice advantage against us, to finally have earned home-ice advantage against the Oilers —but all of the sudden look up and be down two games to nothing?” Gretzky stated. “Our team was on a roll. We were in a good position to win that series and obviously go on and win a Stanley Cup.”
The goal was shown across the land for the next two days, and so it should have been. They don’t come any sexier—blazing down the wing, dropping his head, slapping a puck high over Vernon’s shoulder. The “ping!” off that bar in the back of the net. When you dream of scoring a game-winner, that’s what a kid dreams of right there.
Unless that kid is Bullard, who had the panoramic view of Gretzky’s shot.
“Every goddamn time I see that highlight of me coming back late into the zone,” Bullard says. “Got caught back late, just like everybody else.”
It broke the Flames’ back, that goal. They’d gone from a power play in overtime to a road trip up Highway 2, trailing a series they were supposed to lead by two games. Edmonton would sweep the series, likely the most unpredictable result in Battle of Alberta history. Many picked Edmonton to win but not in four straight games.
The Oilers would win another Cup that year, and then Gretzky would be sold away. He could have won more had he stayed, but one thing that Gretzky took with him from his time in Edmonton is the knowledge that his Oilers left nothing on the table.
“One hundred percent,” he said. “That’s one thing I would never waver from, about that group. It was a really unselfish group that was motivated by winning and being successful. The preparation of the team—not only for being ready for every game during an eighty-game season—but playing the best and being the most ready you could be for each and every series we played in.
“Unfortunately for our club, we faced a very good team in the Calgary Flames. They were a well-put-together group. Cliff was one of the most respected people in the game, with Bob Johnson, and they put together a package with an elite team that wanted to win as badly as we did.
“Are we disappointed we lost to them in 1986? Sure, but we respected them because they were such a good team. But the one thing I will go to my grave saying is that we did everything we could to beat them each and every time we played them in the playoffs. Just, sometimes, teams are a little bit better than you are. That’s not to say you left something on the table. It’s a credit to how badly they wanted it also.”
In the end, the Flames should get some credit for an Oilers team that won four
Cups in Gretzky’s final five seasons in Edmonton.
“We really rebounded after 1986 and became a better team in playing in the finals in 1987 and 1988. Our team was a better team in 1987 and 1988 for what we went through in 1986,” Gretzky said. “You know, we said the same thing about the New York Islanders. You learn from teams that beat you. They make you better. The Islanders made us better because we respected them, and Calgary made us better because we respected them as a team, and how hard they played.”
12
The Flames’ Lanny McDonald Hoists the 1989 Stanley Cup
“Thank you very much. I am out of here.”
Lanny McDonald was thirty-six years old and at the end of the line in the spring of 1989. He uses the word we today, but you can be sure, then a part-time player, in his own mind he was thinking first-person.
“We all knew,” he said, “if we didn’t win it in 1989, we likely weren’t going to win at all. That window of opportunity, all of a sudden, goes by you.”
In a career that spanned 1,111 regular-season games, McDonald had only played in one Stanley Cup —a losing cause with the Flames in 1986. Now he was back, and almost certainly in the harvest days of a long, bountiful career. He had done most everything, including that trademark overtime goal as a Maple Leaf—Game 7, 1978, against the New York Islanders.
McDonald had been moved on to the hapless Colorado Rockies the following December, and after a couple of years there they shipped the native of Hanna, Alberta, home to play for Calgary. In a time when Canadians got one televised NHL game a week—Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night—Lanny’s time with the Maple Leafs had made him a household name. But it was that iconic, walrus-like moustache that set him apart, sitting on his lip like a tumbleweed, under friendly, weathered eyes and an ever-rising forehead.
Truly, when McDonald grew a playoff beard, all he needed was a mule and a pickaxe to pass for Klondike Mike, the old prospector. Behind the moustache and the personality, however, resided an elite goal-scorer. The Maple Leafs had drafted him No. 4 overall out of Medicine Hat, and no one out of that 1973 draft would score more goals than McDonald’s five hundred career goals. He had sixty-six one season for Calgary—twenty more than the next closest Flame—after consecutive seasons of forty-six, forty-seven, and forty-three goals in Toronto. When he was dealt to Colorado, Toronto fans gathered outside Maple Leaf Gardens in protest.
On this night, however, inside Canada’s other hockey shrine of the day, the faithful had arrived at the historic Montreal Forum to witness Game 6 of the 1989 Stanley Cup final. Dressed in dinner formal, the way so many did when attending a Habs game, Montreal fans were expectant of a Canadiens victory. They always won big games here. In fact, no team other than les Canadiens had paraded the Stanley Cup around the Forum before or since. Surely this expansion team, relocated from Atlanta to Calgary less than a decade before, would not deign to be that team.
The Canadiens had run away with the Eastern Conference, then lost just three games over their first three playoff rounds that spring. They still counted such luminaries on the roster as Bob Gainey, Larry Robinson, Bobby Smith, Mats Naslund, Chris Chelios, and, of course, Patrick Roy in goal. Meanwhile, the one true elder statesman on the Flames, McDonald, hadn’t even dressed since Game 2. Head coach Terry Crisp, the old Broad Street Bully who had succeeded Bob Johnson behind the Calgary bench, had been using hard-nosed winger Mark Hunter in McDonald’s spot.
It was the cycle of a hockey player’s life, as McDonald sees it now.
“As a rookie coming in, you’re trying to do anything you can to find a spot, and stay in the lineup,” he explains. “Then you become a mainstay, and you play all the time. Then, toward the end of your career, you’re not a rookie, but you’re finding whatever way you can to try to help the team, help the guys to be well prepared.”
Now, in Game 6, Lanny was back in the lineup. Mike Vernon had let in a softie just 1:23 into the second period for a 1–1 tie, and seconds later McDonald found himself in position to restore the lead.
“Dana Murzyn had a shot on net, the rebound came out, and all I had to do was pull the puck straight sideways and I would have almost had an open net,” he said. But over a week on the shelf, McDonald had grown cold. He had been watching games from the dressing room, which was not at all his style, and now the head and the hands weren’t in sync like the old days.
He had scored only eleven times that year, and ten the season before. The old hands were, well, just that. Old hands. This wasn’t 1978 anymore, when he’d swiftly beaten a diving defenceman named Dave Lewis to the puck, then snapped it calmly past Billy Smith to send the Leafs into Round 3 for the first time since 1967. It was eleven years later, and the miles had piled up along the gravel road that was McDonald’s gritty career.
“I tried to do it too quickly,” he remembers ruefully. “Patrick Roy makes the save, the puck goes in the corner, Bobby Smith picks it up, heading up the boards … And you want to get it back right away, and I take a stupid hooking penalty on Bobby Smith trying to get it back.”
He had panicked on the chance and messed it up. Then, compounding the frustration, he’d made a poor decision to hook Smith. This is what happens when you’re in the back nine of your career. Your hands can’t do what your head asks of them anymore, and then your head, frustrated by a body that can’t perform the way it used to, lets you down as well.
Now you’re in the box, in a Game 6 in which you’d stood up and told your teammates how important every shift would be. Nice.
Meanwhile, on a stationary bike in the Flames dressing room, watching it all on television, was twenty-eight-year-old winger Jim Peplinski.
The first Flames practice jersey he’d pulled over his shoulder pads had the Flaming A of the Atlanta Flames on it, but already his career was closer to being over than he would imagine. While Lanny was out there, sitting in the box, Peplinski—and veteran tough guy Tim Hunter—had been made healthy scratches for a game that they had spent a career in anticipation of.
Peplinski wasn’t saying much now. He was sour, and he’d spoken his piece when assistant coach Doug Risebrough had delivered the news prior to the game.
“Crispy says you’re not goin’ tonight, Pep,” Risebrough had said.
“Tell Crispy to go &^%$ himself.”
In 1989, free agency and the new NHL economy were only beginning to take hold. The Oilers had commenced their breakup, and the Flames would not be that far behind. Nobody had a clue how dry the province of Alberta would become after the last Cup was won by Edmonton in 1990. We’d had the Stanley Cup here for so long, it had simply become part of an Alberta summer, taken for granted like 10:30 p.m. sunsets.
Where parades had become a tradition in Edmonton, however, in Calgary they had only played in a Stanley Cup final in 1986. They hadn’t actually won one. So while the rest of the country looked westward and thought, “Those Albertans are so lucky,” you can imagine that Flames fans didn’t quite see it that way. Not only wasn’t their team winning the Cup, but the stupid Oilers were, most years. And when the Flames had finally cracked the code, climbing Bob Johnson’s mountain in 1986, they had bungled the final ascent and lost to an underdog Montreal team.
“We knew we had blown it in Game 6 [of the Campbell Conference Final] in St. Louis in 1986,” Lanny McDonald said. “We were up 5–2 and allowed them to score three goals in about the last twelve minutes. They tied it up and won the game in overtime, which meant we had to come back home, play a Game 7. We found a way to win 2–1, but that extra game took a tremendous amount out of us. We won Game 1 [of the Final], but after that it was over. We just didn’t have the resources. This young guy by the name of Patrick Roy came in, besides, and he was playing pretty damned well.”
They’d lost in Round 1 in 1987 and would be swept out by the Oilers in 1988. But in March 1988, two days before the NHL’s trading deadline, the Flames made a move that only a Stanley Cup parade would be able to justify. General manager Cliff Fletcher trade
d Steve Bozek and a young prospect named Brett Hull to St. Louis for backup goalie Rick Wamsley and a big, solid defenceman named Rob Ramage.
At that point, Hull had scored twenty-seven career goals, all for Calgary. He would go on to score 714 more times, and today there is a plaque for Bobby’s son in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“We knew we were trading a forty-goal scorer, but there were some shortcomings on the team,” said assistant to the president Al Coates. (In fact, they were trading a five-time fifty-goal scorer who once had eighty-six goals for the Blues.) “I think I was on a pay phone on that decision for a minimum of three hours. Finally, the decision was made to go ahead, trade Hull for Wamsley and Ramage.”
As it turned out, Gary Suter—father to Minnesota Wild defenceman Ryan and son to departed Miracle on Ice defenceman Bob—was knocked out of the playoffs with an injury in Round 1 that year and Ramage stepped into his spot. It had required a valuable piece to acquire Ramage, a former No. 1–overall draft pick who was right in his prime at age twenty-nine, and Hull was that piece. It was truly a brilliant, courageous move by Fletcher, who had tired of finishing second.
“Truth be known, if you’re going to win you have to make some bold choices sometimes, to give yourself that chance to win. And it was not out of naivety. To a man, we all knew this guy was going to score forty goals. Knowing that, and everybody agreeing on that, the decision was still made to trade him,” Coates said. “Suter goes out in the first round. Ramage moves to the left side, plays there for the whole playoffs. Ramage was a real integral part of that team, playing on his off side. Do you win the Cup in 1989 if you don’t make that trade? Likely not.”
Ramage, at that stage of his career, was a major upgrade on Hull. But it was just one upgrade from a 1986 team that did not have the depth required to survive four tough playoff rounds. Where the 1986 Flames were led in scoring by the skilled but grit-less Dan Quinn, the 1989 Flames had Doug Gilmour at centre, and he was the full package. Joe Nieuwendyk, still at Cornell University in 1986, was coming off a fifty-one-goal season three years later. Brad “Sarge” McCrimmon had come on board to help man a blue line that had been revamped.
