The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs, Roger Neilson was behind the Leafs’ bench and Fred Shero was behind the Flyers’ bench, and the series consisted mostly of a sequence of mad brawls followed by flurries of penalties and goals. The Flyers were known as the “Broad Street Bullies” for their style of hacking, hitting, and chopping their way to victory.
The Flyers won that series. This year, the Leafs won. The Leafs won a playoff series without ever scoring more than 2 goals in a single game. Ironically, this is the long-term result of the style of play popularized by those Shero Flyers years ago.
What Shero realized before anyone else did, was that the officiating in the NHL had reached a kind of regulatory quandary by the early 1970’s. The NHL was busy trying to sell hockey to expansion U.S. markets and it was widely believed that U.S. audiences were more attracted by fisticuffs and brawling than the slick play-making of teams like the Canadiens and Maple Leafs or Red Wings. So fighting was “good” for hockey. But even hockey has rules. If players like Ken Linseman of the Flyers got penalties for all the rule infractions he committed, the Flyers would lose every game.
Fights or no fights, sports fans hate losers, so the NHL had to find some way to allow the violence to continue, while giving dirty teams a chance to win.
Now, nobody that I know of ever actually came right out and said, “hey, let’s just call the same number of penalties on both teams no matter who actually breaks the rules”. They didn’t have to. You heard it from coaches and managers and sports analysts and Don Cherry. They used euphemistic phrases like, “let the boys play”, “the referee shouldn’t become part of the game”, “they play an aggressive style” (not a dirty style– “aggressive”). I’m sure that within the private offices of the NHL, more explicit instructions were issued.
The strategy was very simple. There are a thousand interactions in any particular game of hockey that could, with a stretch of the imagination, be called a penalty. So the referees would occasionally call a penalty when a thug like Dave “Hammer” Schultz tried to take somebody’s head off, but the next penalty would inevitably be called on the other team. Schultz could hook, hack, chop, grab, elbow, and punch a dozen players and get one penalty. A few minutes later, Borje Salming would lean on a player in front of the net and get called for interference. Even-steven. If a referee ever dared to call three penalties in a row on the same team, coaches, players, and managers screamed bloody murder– the referee had broken one of the unspoken rules of the game: he had actually penalized the team that committed the most infractions!
The end result was that teams like Philadelphia, and, later, New Jersey, could commit hundreds of fouls and still win, because no matter how many fouls Philadelphia committed, the other team would get just about as many penalties. Philadelphia rode this strategy to a Stanley Cup. New Jersey learned to simply mug players in the neutral zone less conspicuously than the Flyers, but it worked just as well and they won several Stanley Cups.
Well, even the NHL has some shame. After a few years of pronounced media coverage of the “Broad Street Bullies”, the NHL decided to make a relatively modest attempt to eliminate fighting. They started handing out serious penalties for actual fisticuffs, especially in the playoffs when fighting seems more… “unseemly”. But it did not eliminate the officiating style that permitted teams to get away with thousands of little infractions. Teams like New Jersey refined the schtick, with holding, interference, and obstruction, refined to a high art. Because it didn’t look as dirty as a Ken Linseman cross-check or a Bobby Clarke slash, the officials tended to let it go. New Jersey was able to win a Stanley Cup with its “neutral zone trap”. The drawbacks, however, were obvious: scoring decreased and many hockey games became nothing more than a long boring sequence of impeded skaters and incomplete passes.
The lack of scoring alarmed the NHL. Next to fighting, fans want to see scoring. They tried various strategies, adding space behind the net, trying to call more “obstruction” penalties, and so on. But ingrained habits are hard to change. The referees keep drifting back to their old style of indifference and equity, just like the umpires in baseball keep calling the same ridiculously low strike zone.
If you look at the over-time stats for the past year in the NHL, the numbers are truly embarrassing. Only a small percentage of the games ended with a victor. And everybody knows that a tie “is like kissing your sister”.
And thus we have the 1999 Toronto-Philadelphia series. During the regular season, Toronto scored more goals than any other team in the NHL. Philadelphia was in the middle of the pack, but it was clear that their strategy depended upon the ability of their huge defensemen to impede, obstruct, and interfere with their faster opponents.
It is a bit of the miracle that the Leafs won, and the way they did it is telling: they simply did to the Flyers what the Flyers intended to do to them. The Leafs only scored about six goals altogether. Well, all right: they scored about 10. They held the lead, all told, for about ten minutes over six games. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, those few minutes were always at the end of the game.
The winning difference was Curtis Joseph, who seems to be able to make the big stop when it is most needed, and the Leaf forwards, almost all of whom can shoot, who were able to get a goal when it really counted: in the last minute, or in overtime.
The biggest irony was the series deciding goal– on a power play with three minutes left. Toronto had been called for five penalties in a row in the second and third periods, and Philadelphia had been unable to cash in. If anyone had a right to complain, it was Toronto: the referees (two of them now) broke the unspoken agreement– they called real infractions, even if all of them went against the same team. When they finally did call a Flyers’ penalty, it looked like something they might have let go in the Dave Schultz era.
The Flyers complained bitterly about it afterwards. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They lost the series because of their pathetic inability to score during five consecutive man advantages, including 3 in a span of 7 minutes, not because of the one Leaf goal at the end.