99

by Al Strachan

  The next test would be to see if they knew how to win in the Stanley Cup final, a test the New York Islanders would willingly provide.

  As far as that Oilers team was concerned, the regular season presented only one serious question: When they got to the Stanley Cup final, would they be good enough to win?

  Everyone agreed that the Oilers would be in the playoffs with a high seeding. In their first and second years in the league, they had barely managed to squeak in. In the third year, they finished second overall. This time, even though they wouldn’t say it publicly, they intended to gear down a little in the regular season to make sure they’d be fresh for the playoffs.

  This prompted a new round of criticism for Gretzky to handle. In accordance with the plan, he logged less ice time, but then the same people who had said that his slew of records came only because he spent so much time on the ice started criticizing him for not matching the previous season’s record-setting pace.

  “I think last year was a special year,” explained a healthy Gretzky with still a month to go before the playoffs. “Everybody on the team worked so that I could get my records. I double-shifted a lot more than I am this year.

  “I know my responsibility is to score goals, to put the puck in the net, but we were criticized last year for tiring Wayne Gretzky out for the playoffs. Last year, Glen gave everybody a chance to go after individual awards and individual achievements and then, at the end of the year, we were criticized for not worrying about the team and for forgetting about the hockey club. I don’t feel I was tired. Glen doesn’t feel I was tired. But this year, that can’t be an excuse.”

  It wasn’t. The Oilers reached stage three of the four-part “Gretzky season,” when they cruised through the regular schedule and survived the opening stages of the playoffs. Now they had to learn how to win a Stanley Cup final.

  Their opponent, the New York Islanders, who were on a run of three consecutive Stanley Cups, had also eased off a bit in the regular season and had settled for a fifth-place finish overall. As they closed in on what they hoped would be a fourth Cup, they faced a major problem: How could they do what no one else in the NHL had done? How could they stop Wayne Gretzky?

  Trying to find a way to stop Gretzky was not a new challenge for anyone in hockey. Coaches had been working on it since Gretzky was seven years old. And no one had found an answer yet. You could reduce his impact, but you couldn’t stop him.

  Nevertheless, it was a fundamental question, not only for that particular playoff season but for every team that encountered Gretzky during his entire career. As such, it deserves an in-depth examination.

  First of all, it must be conceded that no single-faceted approach ever worked. Gretzky was such a genius on the ice that he was able to quickly work out what strategy the opponents were utilizing and devise a counter-strategy.

  For instance, there were those who tried to shadow him with a forward. He would respond by positioning himself near a defenceman. “When teams have a guy on me, which a lot of teams do,” he said, “it’s very difficult for me to get in the open. It’s really tough with all the hooking and holding that goes on behind the play.

  “So basically, what I do is go and stand beside one of their defencemen and eliminate two people.” Now two opposition players would be sticking with Gretzky while his remaining teammates enjoyed a manpower advantage.

  Furthermore, you can never legally cover a man so well that he can’t make a pass. You can stop him roaming, but you can’t stop him passing—and Gretzky was as dangerous setting up goals as he was scoring them.

  When the Montreal Canadiens assigned super-checker Doug Jarvis to cover Gretzky in the opening game of the 1982 playoffs, Gretzky didn’t get a single shot on goal. However, he did get five assists, an NHL record at the time.

  Physical intimidation didn’t work, either. For one thing, Gretzky was extremely adept at avoiding checks. For another, until he reached the respected-veteran status accorded to long-time NHL players who don’t fight, he always had someone on his team who could make sure no liberties were taken.

  A further relevant point is that although Gretzky couldn’t do more than two chin-ups, he had phenomenal hockey stamina, as he showed in the 1987 Canada Cup.

  If you assigned a single checker to watch him, you had to find someone who could match his ice time, and there weren’t many who qualified.

  The Toronto Maple Leafs, a team on which Gretzky routinely feasted, instituted a policy of trying to keep the puck away from him. But to do that, you had to keep the puck away from the entire Oilers team. Otherwise, as soon as they got possession, they’d feed Gretzky. No wonder Gretzky loved playing in Maple Leaf Gardens.

  The Vancouver Canucks sometimes designated six checkers on the premise that no one person could do it—a whole line was needed—but since Gretzky was on the ice so much, two lines had to be assigned rather than one.

  The drawback to that approach is that it cripples your offence. Of course, you could simply let Gretzky do what he wanted and battle offence with offence. But since the Oilers were routinely averaging more than five goals a game in those days and had Grant Fuhr in the net, that strategy wasn’t such a good idea, either.

  So usually, after examining all these options, coaches decided that they couldn’t stop Gretzky, but they’d try to minimize his impact by assigning a quality player to watch him as closely as possible. Next question: Which player?

  Some teams used a defenceman. Some used a centre. Some simply selected the best checking forward and juggled accordingly. In those early Edmonton years, it appeared that the best tactic was to assign a right winger despite the fact that Gretzky played centre.

  The reasoning had its merit. Gretzky was a great skater, even though he never agreed with that assessment. After his retirement, he told me that he felt his eldest son, Ty, had a lot more natural skating ability than he did. “If I could have skated like Ty, I would really have been something,” he said.

  Gretzky had the ability to change direction on a dime, and to most of us, it didn’t matter which way he turned. But to the trained eye of the professional hockey observer, he seemed to be more effective moving to his left than to his right. Therefore, the idea was that until Gretzky got the puck, the checking right winger would keep parallel with him as much as possible. Once Gretzky got possession, the winger would move directly at him, forcing him to move to his right, not the more dangerous left.

  At this point, the hockey strategist is thinking, “Well, who is watching Gretzky’s left winger, the guy who would normally be the responsibility of the winger who has now decided to attach himself to Gretzky?”

  That job has to fall to the right defenceman, and that’s where the strategy encounters difficulty. There aren’t many defencemen in the world who are good enough to make those split-second coverage decisions and then carry them out effectively.

  This, then, was the problem the New York Islanders faced as they entered the 1983 Stanley Cup final against the Oilers.

  The Islanders were coached by Al Arbour, a superb strategist in his own right. Furthermore, Arbour was extremely close to Scott Bowman, probably the best strategist in the history of hockey. In theory, coaches never help each other out. In the real world of the National Hockey League, they do. Arbour’s strategy was a combination of the best points of the options mentioned above.

  First of all, the Islanders not only forced Gretzky to his right, they forced all the Oilers’ big gunners—Mark Messier, Paul Coffey and Glenn Anderson—to the right because they all shot left and would be forced to use their backhand.

  They used a physical approach on Gretzky as much as possible. They kept mostly within the bounds of legality, but players like John Tonelli, Butch Goring, Bob Bourne and Bob Nystrom were veteran checkers who knew how to take away Gretzky’s time and space.

  To counter the problem of finding a single checker who could match Gretzky’s thirty-five to forty minutes, the Islanders used a defenceman. A good defenceman c
an log that much ice time, and that approach would leave the Islanders’ forwards free to focus on the offensive side of the game.

  The key to all this, of course, was Denis Potvin. He always played left defence, so when Gretzky was pushed to that side by the Islanders, he had to encounter Potvin. Because the Islanders were so stacked with experienced players, they were able to react accordingly when Gretzky moved elsewhere to pull Potvin out of position.

  The Islanders had found the only way to stop Gretzky: they put together a better team. Everybody on the roster had to play at an elite level, not only physically, but mentally. A Hall of Fame defenceman has to be part of the equation as well, not to mention a Hall of Fame coach and a whole whack of Hall of Fame forwards.

  The following season, other coaches, having noticed the Islanders’ success, tried to follow the formula. But a tactic that works against Gretzky for four games—which was all the Islanders needed to win the Cup—didn’t work over a full season because Gretzky made adjustments. Furthermore, the rest of the teams in the league didn’t have the kind of talent that had won four consecutive Stanley Cups.

  Gretzky often tells the story of leaving the Nassau County Coliseum after Game Four. He dreaded the necessary walk down the hall past the dressing room of the victorious Islanders, expecting to see a bunch of happy, laughing players slapping each other on the back. Instead, he saw players who were bedraggled, bleeding and dog-tired.

  At that moment, he realized what he would later enunciate. After the regular season and the playoff season comes the Stanley Cup final season. Each phase is difficult, and each is more demanding than its predecessor.

  But Gretzky had faced a lot of challenges in his life, and although he might have failed initially, sooner or later, he invariably came out on top. Therefore, in his mind—and in the minds of the Edmonton Oilers—the 1983–84 season was devoted to getting another crack at the Cup.

  The Oilers continued their assault on the record book, led the National Hockey League in attendance and filled the net in one arena after another. They finished first in the standings, generated more revenue than any team in the league and averaged almost six goals a game—446 in eighty games, to be precise, an NHL record that stands to this day.

  But whenever you talked to any of the Edmonton players during that season, it became clear that their interest in any of these achievements ranked a distant second to getting another crack at the Islanders. Since the only way to get that second chance was to reach the Stanley Cup final, it was clear where the Oilers’ priorities lay.

  Nevertheless, it seemed that every year, whatever the team’s ultimate target might be, Gretzky would eclipse another long-standing NHL record along the way. This time, he ran up a streak of fifty-one consecutive games in which he got at least one point. In fact, the record was a lot more impressive than that number would indicate, but as has been mentioned before, the NHL often takes a rather curious approach towards its record book. As far as the league was concerned, the record for consecutive games with points belonged to Guy Lafleur with twenty-eight. But Gretzky also had a point in each of the final eleven games of the previous season.

  “Those don’t count,” said league officials. “That was last season.”

  Yes, but there weren’t any games between seasons.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s a different season.”

  If you count those earlier eleven games, Gretzky’s streak was really sixty-two consecutive games.

  “I knew about the record because guys had been asking me about it,” said Gretzky, years later, “but it didn’t really hit me until I came out for the warmup in the forty-sixth game. It was in the old Chicago Stadium and there was a big sign hanging up there saying, ‘The Streak Stops Here.’ ”

  As far as Oilers public relations man Bill Tuele was concerned, there was no reason to keep close track of the numbers. “He’ll go all the way,” he said after Gretzky broke Lafleur’s record. “He’ll go the entire eighty-game schedule. Who’s going to stop him? A four-point game is just an average night for him.” (That was something of an exaggeration. Gretzky’s average was closer to 2.5 points a game. Even so, barring injury, Tuele’s projection did not seem far-fetched.)

  But what few people knew was that Gretzky was indeed injured.

  “I probably shouldn’t have been playing because my shoulder was really bothering me,” he explained afterwards, “but in the NHL, if you sit out a game, the streak ends, so I stayed in. We were winning by a goal late in that forty-sixth game, and I still didn’t have a point. Naturally, the Hawks pulled their goalie. The fans booed! They didn’t care if they lost as long as I didn’t get a point.

  “I went out there, and there were only a few seconds left when Troy Murray tried to make a pass that I blocked. I scored into the empty net with two seconds left to keep the streak alive.

  “For the next five games, my shoulder was really sore, but I kept playing and kept getting points. Then, in the fifty-second game, against Los Angeles, I didn’t get a point. After that, I didn’t play for the next six games until my shoulder healed.”

  Had he stayed in the lineup, he almost certainly would have broken his own record for points in a season, which, at that time, stood at 212. Instead, he had to settle for a measly 205.

  In earlier years, he might have stayed in the lineup despite the nagging shoulder injury. Not this time. The priority had changed. Records didn’t matter. The goal was the Stanley Cup.

  There are many hockey fans who will insist that no one has ever scored a hundred goals in a hockey year. But that year, Gretzky did—if you include the playoffs. He scored eighty-seven in the seventy-four regular-season games he played and added a further thirteen in the playoffs—yet another NHL record.

  Even so, the 1984 playoffs were not directly dominated by Gretzky. It was one of the few occasions—probably the only one—that a major achievement of the Gretzky-era Oilers did not depend primarily on his contributions.

  He certainly had an impact. He got his goals, and he forced the Islanders to dedicate so much effort towards minimizing his accomplishments that it detracted from their own offence. But this time, the Oilers were what they needed to be: a total team. Glen Sather and his staff knew that, the previous season, they had been beaten by the Islanders because the Islanders were the better team. They were determined that it wouldn’t happen again.

  After the Oilers swept the Minnesota North Stars to guarantee their place in the final, they had a nine-day break. Sather first acquired the services of the late Roger Neilson, a brilliant defensive coach known as “Captain Video” for his use of videotape.

  In 1984, videotape represented the cutting edge of technology. Neilson was a pioneer in analyzing the tapes—finding a team’s weaknesses, strengths, and, more important, its tendencies.

  In the case of the Islanders, the tendencies far outweighed the other considerations. This was a team that was well coached and stable. It had won four consecutive Stanley Cups. You didn’t suddenly break into the Islanders lineup and decide to freewheel or introduce a few of your own innovations. You played Al Arbour hockey. You played Islanders hockey.

  The Oilers’ assistant coaches took the information that Neilson provided, and by the time the team finished that nine-day hiatus, the players knew more about the Islanders’ tendencies than the Islanders did.

  When hockey chroniclers look back at the opening game of the series and examine the Oilers’ 1–0 victory, they invariably point out the contributions of the grinders. What they don’t point out is that, time after time, what appeared to be a blossoming New York attack was thwarted when a perfectly placed Oiler intercepted a pass.

  The other thing they don’t point out is that the grinders were involved because almost all the play was along the boards. Ever since the Oilers entered the NHL, their attack had been based on an up-the-middle breakout. When in doubt, throw the puck up the middle and Gretzky or somebody would gather it in and take off.

  Against the Islanders
, every breakout was along the boards. Nothing went up the centre, and the New York defenders, doggedly clogging up the middle as ordered, stood there confused while the Oilers roared down the flanks.

  A number of other strategic factors were involved.

  The Oilers had always liked to hit the head man with a pass on a breakout. In this series, they started using the head man as a decoy. But the Islanders, accustomed to covering that lead man, invariably stuck with him, thereby leaving a hole for the second man.

  Neilson had spotted the tendency of Denis Potvin, who generated a high proportion of the Islanders’ attacks, to circle behind his net and then either carry or pass the puck up the middle. When he tried that in this series, he invariably found his path blocked by an Edmonton checker. And so it went.

  The Oilers were so well versed in the time-tested—or perhaps timeworn—New York strategy that they were able to effectively counter it.

  With no Edmonton passes going up the middle, Gretzky’s involvement was reduced. Similarly, he was usually the head man on the breakouts, but now the Oilers were hitting the second man. Furthermore, the Islanders were still blanketing Gretzky as much as possible.

  For all these reasons, he was not as visible as usual. But more important to the Oilers and to Gretzky himself, they won the Cup, beating the Islanders in five games. Despite their reputation as a team of defensive incompetents, they allowed a total of only six goals in their four victories.

  Before the deciding game, Gretzky made an impassioned plea to his teammates. Essentially, he told them to keep on doing what they were doing, to ignore any individual achievements and to keep producing the team effort that was working so well. He said that while he was happy to rack up all his records, they were not his goal. “I said the only thing that matters is the Stanley Cup,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  And when he finally got to lift it, he nearly dropped it. “I almost fell over backwards,” he said a couple of hours later when most of the hangers-on had left and only the players and a few close friends remained in the dressing room. “I was starting to lose my balance, and I was yelling, ‘Help! Help!’ I didn’t realize how heavy it was.”