The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  Lemelin was drafted in Round 7 of that 1974 draft by the Flyers, in a time when the entry draft was a simple conference call conducted from the league offices in Montreal. No TV, no glitzy two-day event, and no eighteen-year-old draftees, surrounded by their families and their agents, pulling on a jersey on a big stage under the bright lights. In fact, the 1974 draft was even more clandestine, having been quietly moved up on the calendar because of the emergence of the World Hockey Association in 1972 and the reality that the WHA was beginning to poach a lot of talent from the NHL.

  Undeterred, the Chicago Cougars would select Lemelin in the thirteenth round of the subsequent WHA draft. In an interesting twist, the same draft would see the Minnesota Fighting Saints select a left-shooting defenceman named Dave Hanson. He would quickly be assigned to the Johnstown Jets and go on to star as Jack Hanson, one of the famed brothers in Slap Shot. Lemelin, meanwhile, had no intentions of attending the camp of the Cougars, a second-rate team in a second-rate league. But he also knew the path would be a long one with the Flyers.

  Only days before selecting Lemelin, Philadelphia had won its first Stanley Cup. The Broad Street Bullies were set in goal, with Bernie Parent in the midst of winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the top playoff performer in both Cup runs. Now they’d chosen a Parent prototype—a kid out of a Quebec City suburb who barely spoke English—whom they would assign to the Firebirds.

  Lemelin logged four hard seasons with the Firebirds, where he met his wife, Rona. Eventually, Lemelin’s time with the Flyers came to a close and he signed on with the Atlanta Flames—who promptly sent him back to the Firebirds. He couldn’t escape the movie, and like that little goalie, Lemelin was beginning to feel like he was in some goalie penalty box, “feeling shame.”

  Even when Lemelin made the Flames though, it didn’t feel to Lemelin like he was in the big leagues. The crowds at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta were small, and the newspapers barely acknowledged the Flames amid all the NBA, NFL, and NCAA interest in Georgia. It wasn’t hockey country then, just as it was not in 1999 when the Atlanta Thrashers were reinvented for eleven inglorious seasons before shuffling off to Winnipeg.

  Lemelin was still going up and down from the minors as Atlanta relocated to Calgary for the 1980–81 season and had now been passed by in the Flames system by a newcomer out of the WHA named Pat Riggin. Lemelin was sour about that, and on November 19, 1980—Lemelin’s twenty-sixth birthday—he got the fateful phone call while playing in Birmingham.

  “The Flames were going on a six-game road trip and they wanted me to join the team,” Lemelin said. “The whole trip I sat as the third goalie. Practised every day. We got back to Calgary, and the first game we were going to play the Islanders—the Stanley Cup champs. I’ll never forget this. I already knew I was leaving the next day and going back to Birmingham. Dan Bouchard was going to start, and Pat Riggin was the backup. But Riggin came down with the flu. They were going to dress him as the backup anyhow, but during the warmup, I’m in the stands eating popcorn, and somebody came and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come in and dress up,” he laughed. “Well, at the twelve-minute mark of the first period, Dan Bouchard goes down with a pulled groin. I have to go in, out of the blue, and we tie the Stanley Cup champion. I was the first star in the game.”

  Bouchard was on the shelf for quite some time, so Lemelin’s plane ticket to Birmingham was cancelled. Then he got the next start, two nights later. “I win the game, and I go on to win eleven straight games. And the rest is history.”

  The Flames would trade Bouchard and Riggin not long after, and little Réjean Lemelin of the Philadelphia Firebirds was finally an NHL No. 1. There was only one problem: “Our team was not as good as the Oilers when Reggie was playing,” said Calgary assistant coach Bob Murdoch. “We just weren’t as good as them, and I don’t think anyone believed, subconsciously, that we were as good as them. There was a psychological factor, and there is also that intimidation factor.”

  You know what they say when a team gets poor goaltending? That if affects the psyche of the entire team? That they play differently, and nothing can work the way it is supposed to when a team plays in fear that a long wrist shot from the side boards is going to end up in their net? Well, the opposite can be true as well.

  When a goalie knows that his team knows it isn’t going to win, it isn’t very often that he is able to win a game for them. For the Calgary Flames of the early 1980s, it was only a matter of time before the Oilers started scoring goals by the bunches, most nights.

  So it was not Lemelin’s fault that he became the subject of the “Reggie Lemelin Pool” in the press boxes of the Olympic Saddledome and the Northlands Coliseum. But for a few seasons at least, the Edmonton and Calgary scribes would put a $5 bill in the pot prior to puck drop, picking a number between one and ten out of a coffee cup. If the number you had drawn coincided with the number of shots Edmonton had when their first goal got behind Reggie, you won the pot.

  It became a running joke: if, by the time you were drawing, the numbers one through five were gone, you would moan about making a charitable donation and having no chance to win. It was half-joke, half-truth. Edmonton was just that strong offensively in the early years of the Battle, and Calgary had not acquired the roster or devised the defensive system to hold the floodgates for long.

  “They could have done that against every team,” Lemelin said when I told him about the pool. “I don’t give a shit. I was doing my thing. I’m very proud of my career.

  “You just played the games, and you knew that you were going to try to keep it under four, and then maybe you’d have a chance,” Lemelin continued. “If you got into a power-play game, then you had no chance because their power play was scary. You didn’t want to be embarrassed, was the whole thing. And sometimes, you know, they did [embarrass you].”

  Almost two hundred feet away stood a much younger goalie, whose path to the NHL had been paved in rose petals compared with Lemelin’s.

  Grant Fuhr grew up in a suburb of Edmonton called Spruce Grove, played his junior in lovely Victoria for the old Cougars of the Western Hockey League, and was chosen at No. 8, the Oilers’ first-rounder in 1981. As a nineteen-year-old rookie, he would play more than half the games for Edmonton, and spent only ten games in the minors on his way to becoming an NHL star.

  Oh, and Fuhr had a team in front of him that would score five goals a game. Edmonton was indeed a soft landing spot, compared with Lemelin’s career path.

  “Reggie and Donnie Edwards,” Fuhr recalled of the Flames tandem of the day. “You knew that if they stood on their head it might be a close game. But we knew we would get thirty-five or forty shots against them, and probably twenty, twenty-five of them were going to be good ones. So, they were in a tough spot. We always assumed we were going to win.”

  Lemelin saw it from pretty much the same angle, frankly. But when Fuhr was breaking in as a teenager in his own hometown, comfortably destined to be the number-one goalie on the most powerful offensive team in the history of the game, Lemelin was already a grizzled veteran in his eighth pro season. By Fuhr’s rookie season, Lemelin had already donned six different uniforms in four different pro leagues.

  The only adversity that Fuhr would face, it turns out, was self-induced. Off the ice, he fell into some financial issues, going a round or two with the fashionable cocaine lifestyle of the 1980s. Then there was the time that he called Oilers fans a bunch of “[bleep]in’ jerks.”

  “Yes I did say that,” Fuhr admitted today. “Nineteen years old, and a size 9 right in the mouth.” It earned him his ten games with the Moncton Alpines of the American League.

  “I was struggling, and hadn’t really struggled before that,” he said. “I decided to make things easier on myself and stuck my foot in my mouth. It’s not hard enough. You might as well make it a little harder.”

  That was perhaps the last time anyone ever saw any visible signs of stress on Fuhr’s face. It is the t
rademark of a great goalie—never let the last goal affect you, lest it turn into the next goal—and Fuhr was Teflon. Nothing stuck to him. He was the antithesis of the high-strung, high-maintenance goalie you always hear about.

  “Equipment would come from the factory, he’d put them on for a few practices, then he’d wear them [in a game],” said Oilers equipment man Lyle [Sparky] Kulchisky. “A new mask would come. He’d put it on. Grant was a low-maintenance guy. He rolled with it. ‘Oh yeah? Oh, well, okay.’

  “Grant, your pants didn’t come in. ‘Hmm? Okay.’ ”

  And that made Fuhr the perfect man for the job in Edmonton, where supporting the goalie was priority number ten in those early years. The Oilers gave up more prime scoring chances in an important playoff game in 1982 than the Los Angeles Kings or New York Rangers of today would give up in half a series. If your feelings were going to be hurt by a few three-on-ones, then surely you weren’t the man to tend the twine in Edmonton.

  In the best-of-three final of the 1987 Canada Cup—a meeting between Canada and Russia in the time before the Iron Curtain had fallen, believed by many to the highest pedigree of hockey ever played —Fuhr allowed sixteen goals. Each of the three games ended in an identical 6–5 score, yet no one ever said, as they would today, “You can’t win letting in five goals a night.”

  “That’s the fun of playing offensive hockey. You can make some mistakes,” Fuhr said. “It was a new style to the league at that time. We just played run ‘n’ gun. We knew we were going to get our four or five every night, and we [as in, he] just had to keep the other guys to one less. It wasn’t about numbers. It was about winning and losing.

  “I think people get hung up on that now. They’re so worried about what a goalie’s numbers look like. But at the end of the day, if you have a great average and your win–loss record is 10–20, people aren’t going to be happy. If you’re 20–10, all of a sudden people are happy.”

  Every great goalie becomes known for some trait. Like Patrick Roy’s cockiness, or the way Ron Hextall could play a drumroll on his posts with the blade and knob of his goalstick. Maybe it’s a piece of equipment, like Gerry Cheevers’s mask. Or Dominik Hasek’s weird but effective style that somehow kept even the most impossible puck out of his net.

  Fuhr’s contemporaries —and that included Lemelin—were the last of the “small equipment” goalies who played before men like Roy and Garth Snow made a mockery of the position by introducing chest protectors the size of bus benches and pants that could have been worn by a circus clown. Fuhr caught with a serpent-like right hand, which made him unique. And because those early-1980s goalies didn’t have the help of equipment manufacturers to make them bigger, it was a common sight to see goals like that Guy Lafleur classic, a blast off the boards from above the faceoff dot. Or Gretzky, coming down the wing and blasting high over Mike Vernon’s shoulder.

  As such, goalies would leave their crease to cut off the angle, which left them far out of position on rebounds. Then they’d have to scramble back through traffic to try to make the next save. It was a far more athletic position in the early 1980s, played by smaller, more acrobatic men compared with the giants of today.

  “To maintain a [goals-against] average under 3.50 in my day was pretty good. A ̣900 saves percentage meant you were an All-Star goalie,” said Lemelin. “Look at the equipment, and the size of the goalie. We were not big. Andy Moog was just a little guy but a really good goaltender. Today, they go down and they block everything with their chest. If the puck beats them, it’s in the net, but there is almost no net open to shoot at.

  “We made kick saves, we made glove saves. We were not on our knees trying to stop everything with our chest. It wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

  The undisputable calling card that would belong to Fuhr, the way Martin Brodeur will always be known as the best puck-handling goalie there ever was, was less about stopping pucks and more about which ones he stopped. Like Lemelin, Fuhr never had a saves percentage in the ̣900s (until late in his career with St. Louis). It was never about the fact that Fuhr would let a few pucks past every night. It was about when he would slam the gate shut—for good.

  He had the uncanny ability to recognize when his team could no longer afford “the next one.” Whether that meant pitching a shutout in a 1–0 victory in Game 1 of the 1984 Stanley Cup final or holding the Calgary Flames to four in the final installment of the Battle, a 5–4 Oilers win in overtime of Game 7 in 1991.

  “It still comes down to, can you make the right save at the right time. Growing up, watching goalies, nothing has changed: you still have to make the right save at the right time,” Fuhr said.

  There is less room in today’s game for the mistakes Fuhr speaks of because goals are more precious. A goalie’s team does not score four or five goals a night in front of him anymore: the highest-scoring team in the NHL in the 2013–14 season, the Anaheim Ducks, averaged just 3.21 goals per game. Anaheim, along with Boston and Chicago, were the only three teams whose goals-per-game average began with the number three.

  Contrast that with the early-1980s Oilers: in each season from 1981–82 to 1985–86, Edmonton scored in excess of four hundred goals per season. For that span of five dazzling seasons, the Edmonton Oilers averaged exactly 5.29 goals per game. But they allowed, on average, 3.83 goals per game.

  How many coaches have you heard today say, “Well, it’s a 3–2 league?” Back in the day it was a 5–4 league —at least in Edmonton —with a lot more fights. Which brand of hockey seems more entertaining to you?

  “The numbers don’t matter,” said Fuhr of his personal stats. “I just had a sense of, when the momentum of the game changes, you know you have to make that next save. Hockey is a game of momentum. If you’re up 3–2 and it’s early in the third period, you have to make that save to keep that momentum. [No matter how you’ve played in the game,] if that third goal doesn’t go in, you probably win that hockey game. You have to make that save, just to keep that momentum. At the end of the day, you need the W out of it.

  “I talk to people now, and they say, ‘Your numbers aren’t great.’ Well, the numbers may not be great. But four hundred-and-some wins? No one can complain about that. People get hung up on numbers and they forget what the essence of the game is. You still have to win.”

  Fuhr retired with 403 wins, ninth on the all-time list at the time of this writing. Were most of those wins due to the quality of the team in front of him? Perhaps. But what of the fact that Fuhr practised every day against the most prolific scoring machine in National Hockey League history?

  Facing Wayne Gretzky every day in practice? Fuhr admits there was something to be learned every day—even if that lesson often boiled down to being glad you weren’t Lemelin or Vernon.

  “Even today, Gretz would easily be the best passer in the game, so first and foremost, you had to respect that. Which made his shot that much better,” Fuhr said. “He never really shot the puck hard, but he was very accurate. If you gave him a foot, he could hit that spot. But because he was such a great passer, you always had to be aware of him not taking that shot.

  “It was a vicious cycle of covering the net the way a goalie would for any opposing player within shooting range, but diverting your attention —and perhaps compromising your positioning—to account for where Kurri or Coffey was. You were never really in balance,” Fuhr said. “I saw it every day in practice. For Reggie only seeing it eight or nine times a year would be a big adjustment. That’s something that helped me in Canada Cups because that’s the way the Russians played. It wasn’t a huge change for me.”

  Ask Lemelin who had the best shot on the Edmonton Oilers and his answer comes quickly, and with little thought. “They all did, it seemed to me.” It was the variety in players the Oilers had that gave Lemelin fits, coming from every angle, including the defensive corps.

  “Coffey was all about speed, and cutting left to right. Gretzky, he was just waiting, waiting. He just floated down and made passes abso
lutely perfectly on everyone’s stick,” Lemelin said. “Messier was the bully. He ran through everybody. The great complimentary guys, Anderson, Simpson for a while, Hughes for a while … And Fuhr was a pretty good goalie. But it’s nice to start the game knowing your team is going to score four or five goals. I’m not taking anything away from him. He did his job. But that’s a nice start for a goalie.”

  It became the balance every NHL coach tried to walk. If he played run and gun, he had to believe his shooters could outscore Edmonton’s. Well, there weren’t any coaches who thought that. So the other side of that coin was to limit chances. But playing a defensive game to limit Edmonton’s chances meant cutting down on the numbers of shots and scoring chances your team generated as well.

  Now the question became “Is my goaltending likely to be better than theirs?” With Fuhr in net, most nights the answer to that question was also a resounding no. And so, you have an idea what it was like to be an NHL coach in the 1980s.

  “The Oilers had so much confidence in their goaltending,” Murdoch said. “If you break down the scoring chances from so many of those games, we might have a 17–9 lead in scoring chances. But we’d lose the game 8–2 because whenever the Oilers had a scoring chance, they were so bloody skilled they’d score. They were willing to trade chances, and if you did, they’d eventually beat you.”

  Then a kid named Mike Vernon graduated from the Calgary Wranglers junior team. It was as if the Flames had been waiting for his arrival—the local kid in goal, to match Edmonton’s local kid in goal—because almost the moment Vernon became a regular, for the 1986 playoffs, the Flames began to beat the Oilers with regularity. Edmonton had not lost a regular-season series to Calgary in the five years before the 1986 playoff upset. The Flames would win that series, go 6–1–1 versus Edmonton the next season, and would not surrender a season series to Edmonton again until 1996–97, long after the Battle had been tamed.