• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

The Official 2012 NHL Stanely Cup Finals Thread: Part II

#403
mkandolf said:
BTW, 25 years ago today, the infamous pregame brawl between the Philadelphia Flyers and Montreal Canadiens minus Ron Hextall who was kept locked up to make sure he could play in the game!
Click to expand...

I have lost count...is this the one Claude Lemieux instigated?

:)

Which reminds me-
A few pages back, it was asked what opposing player(s) would you have liked to play on your team.
Man...cannot believe I'm thinking this but-
Claude Lemiuex. Why? I love Claude Lemieux because I hate Claude Lemiuex.
:)

Darren McCarty woulda worked well in a Flyers' sweater, too!
:):)
 
#406
Yep, Claude Lemieux's pregame ritual to shoot a puck into the opponent's net with a little help from Shayne Corson pre-empted by Ed Hospodar and Chico Resch. Resch turned the net around against the boards before he left the ice, then he and Hospodar waited at the tunnel. Lemieux took a look like he was going to go for it with Corson looking to turn the net around. Resch goes for the net, Hospodar yells across the ice to Lemieux that he better not try it. They think about it for a sec, then go for it, then all hell broke loose.

Both team had all players on the ice, save one. Ron Hextall. Held in the Flyers locker room under orders of Mike Keenan under pain of death should he escape.

Couple things to note about this... At the time you could pull stunts like Lemieux's during pregame. This was eliminated afterwards.

Also, during pregame warmups at the time, you could dress as many players as you wanted. Philadelphia had 24 skaters and 2 goalies on the ice. Montreal had 18 and 2. That no longer happens either.
 
#409
mkandolf said:
Yep, Claude Lemieux's pregame ritual to shoot a puck into the opponent's net with a little help from Shayne Corson pre-empted by Ed Hospodar and Chico Resch.
Click to expand...

I remember it!
I was sitting there watching ESPN & waiting...and IIRC, Bill Patrick comes on & sez "...we have an ugly situation in Montreal between the Canadiens & Flyers".
There was a small part of the screen showing the "festivities".
Link Removed
 
#412
chuck norriss said:
Kings looking good so far. 44 shots on goal in game 1 yesterday.
Quick can't be allowing that many goals but he did a great job still. Good enough for the W.
Click to expand...

Phoenix benefitted from a fluke goal, and the Kings missed some great chances, but Mike Smith did a good job keeping it from being a complete blow-out in the face of a very lopsided game. In the end, all that matters is the scoreboard.
 
#417
JimK said:
...just missed this Anniversary!
Hextall/Chelios May 11 1989

http://www.google.com/search?q=hext...l+chelios&aq=3K&aqi=g3g-K2g-m1g-mK2g-bK2&aql=

Hextall was repaying Chelios for laying out Brian Propp earlier in the Series.
IIRC, Hextall was suspended for 30 games the following Season.
Click to expand...

I still have my Hextall jersey and some day want to wear it to Chelios' bar here in downtown Detroit on a day when I know he's there just to get his reaction. I'd even go up to him and try to get his autograph to get an even better one.
 
#418
And the organist just played on...gotta love that!

Back when we had an ECHL team (John Brophy-coached)...we had a pre-game brawl. Back in that day, people were allowed to smoke in the outer concourse...anyway, I go runnin' out there & yell "THEY'RE FIGHTING"!!!
...and damn near got stampeded by the rush. ;)
 
#419
mkandolf said:
I still have my Hextall jersey and some day want to wear it to Chelios' bar here in downtown Detroit on a day when I know he's there just to get his reaction. I'd even go up to him and try to get his autograph to get an even better one.
Click to expand...
From www.puckreport.com-
http://www.puckreport.com/2009/05/today-in-nhl-history-hextall-hammers.html


Asked twenty years later if the pair had made amends, Hextall explained:

No, we’re not friends. I've talked to him a few times. You know what, honestly, when the game's over, when your career’s over, you look back at guys like that and you respect them more than anyone else because he is a competitor. He’s one of the top competitors in the league. I look at a guy like that, would I like to have played with him? Damn right I would have. Those guys that are competitive, there's a respect there even if you can’t stand the guy. There's a respect there that never goes away. When I was standing at the bench in Detroit two years ago when we were in town who comes over to talk to me? He does. It’s in the past.

​
 
#420
Interesting read. Don't know if I agree with it, but it helped with the withdrawals this morning:

Link Removed

In the beginning, when hockey was void and without form, and darkness was upon the face of the ice, there were no penalties. In the very first rules of the game, from 1877, the stated punishment for any infraction is the play whistled dead and a fresh bully (faceoff-ish thing). By the 1890s, hockey had developed a three-strikes policy for physical fouls, with two referee’s warnings followed by expulsion from the game. In 1904, we find the first evidence of modern penalties, which could be given in two, three, or five-minute increments according to the opinion of the officials, but also allowed a team to put in a substitute for the offending player. In 1914, under NHA rules, all penalties were increased to five minutes and an obligatory fine introduced as a gesture towards further deterrence, but punishments were still thought of as an individual thing- the bad man had to do his time, but his team suffered nothing.

It was the NHL that invented the power play. When the new League formed out of the shattered ruins of the NHA in 1917, it reduced penalties to three minutes but forbade substitutions. For the first time in the history of the game, teams were forced to pay a price for their players’ rule violations. Four years later, they shortened the obligatory time of a minor penalty to the familiar two minutes, and two years after that, they added the five-minute and ten-minute penalties to the officiating toolbox.
This punitive structure stood for thirty-three years. The offenses changed- during this time there was, perhaps not surprisingly, a massive surge in player-on-referee violence and a subsequent crackdown on such- but the hierarchy of punishments was largely unchanged. For the entirety of the thirties and forties and half of the fifties, all penalties were served in their entirety, the offender’s team playing short-handed until his time ran out, no matter how many goals they gave up in the interim. It made for some dire situations, particularly for truculent teams in the late minutes of playoff games, but seems to have been overwhelmingly considered a just and reasonable system.

Until 1955.

In 1955, the Montreal Canadiens were on the verge of their first dynasty. The late 1940s had been the time of the Maple Leafs, and the early 1950s belonged to the Red Wings, but the rest of the decade would be Montreal’s exclusively, and, like an omen of things to come, the 1955 Canadiens’ power play chewed up the League. Since the founding of the NHL, it had always been possible to score multiple goals on a single penalty, but never had any team exploited the rule so dramatically. On November 5th, Jean Beliveau scored a hat trick against the Bruins on one PP, and through the month of December the Habs added four more incidents of two-goal power plays. By the end of the season, Montreal had scored nine extra PP goals. No other team came close, and the Canadiens themselves seemed particularly impervious to being scored against more than once per penalty. That summer, at the annual Board of Governor’s meeting, the NHL passed a new rule stating that penalties would end when the advantaged team scored a goal. The rule passed with five teams for and one against. Ironically, to this day it is sometimes affectionately referred to as “The Canadiens Rule”, in honor of the only team who didn’t want it.

Now, while the Canadiens in 1955-56 were doubtless a powerhouse team with an extraordinary power play, this is nevertheless a capricious reason for changing the penalty structure of the League, and just goes to show that the hockey’s tendency to overreact to weird little spikes of luck is a very old tendency indeed. In fact, we find ourselves in a remarkably similar situation today: after a few rounds of playoffs featuring a high proportion of shot-blocking, there are more and more people convinced that shot-blocking has become a scourge of the game which must be banned. When it comes to player safety, of course, hockey will permit something to be a problem for a decade without resorting to major rule changes, but when some team develops a competitive advantage that opponents find frustrating, the League cannot wait to stamp that **** out.

But I digress. The fact is that now, as ever, hockey faces two perennial problems: violence and defense. No matter what the era, no matter what the circumstance, the tactical pressures of the game push it in the direction of more aggressive physical contact and more stifling defensive strategies. Half the coaching innovations in the history of the game have been based on these principles, and half the rules on the books have been put there to prevent them. North American hockey wants to be a bloody, boring game. It is only the constant tinkering of the NHL that forces it to be the cleaner, faster sport we dream of. And, fortunately, right now there is one change the NHL could make that would accomplish both ends at once, that would simultaneously deter headshots and increase offense.

The NHL needs to remove the Canadiens Rule. All minor penalties should be served for the full two minutes, no matter how many goals are scored.

Yes, I’m serious. Yes, really. Stop laughing. STOP. Okay, I’ll
wait.

Are you done now? Chuckles over? Good. Now think about it: as I mentioned last Monday, on-ice punishments have several advantages over supplementary discipline as far as their ability to deter undesirable behavior. They’re immediate, they have uniform impact no matter what the status of the offending player, and they hit the entire team where it hurts most, in their chances of winning. To a coach, who sets the style and the tone of the game his team plays, who determines more than anyone else the extent and manner in which his team uses violence to achieve their aims, the risk of playing large chunks of time short-handed is far more threatening than the possibility of some guy getting a couple games suspension later on. If a single penalty lasts the whole two minutes and could easily result in multiple goals against? If it’s going to put that much more stress on his penalty-killers and goalie, if it’s going to guarantee that much more time per game with almost no opportunity for offense? Then coaches are going to think very hard indeed about whether the ‘intimidation’ factor of a charge or high hit is really worth all that much. Full two-minute penalties would put far more pressure on teams to discipline their roster internally and preemptively than any other punitive measure, and as such would be a far better deterrent than supplementary discipline.

Moreover, more power play time encourages offense in exactly the ways hockey people perennially claim they want. More power play time means more goals and more scoring chances, it means more space for great players to set up great plays. It means more tense moments, more drama, more frustrated goalies banging their sticks on the posts and hiding shamed faces in their water bottles. It makes offensive specialists worth more and will almost certainly boost their ice time, but as it also provides more opportunities for second-unit players, and will probably also add to the scoring depth of the League. And, in a gesture towards cosmic justice, it gives the team that was offended-against a greater opportunity to tear the jugular out of their opponents- on the scoreboard, where it really kills.

There would, of course, be problems. There will be problems with any rule change. Full two-minute penalties would encourage diving, and refs would likely respond with an increase in concurrent minors against both an actual tripper and his embellishing victim. It would increase the potential impact of an overzealous call, and might result in a trend towards more conservative enforcement of the restraining fouls. It would require the abolition of the stupid puck-over-glass delay of game penalty. And it would shift the balance of the game in the direction of special teams; a deep-level change which would alter the character of games, although not in a wholly unwelcome way.

But reverting to the pre-1956 penalty customs would not be any sillier than penalizing shot blocking or adding more lines to the ice or any of the other propositions that people routinely put forward to increase offense. In a game where knowledgeable hockey folk still call for somehow ‘banning’ the trap, as if it were as easy to outlaw an entire school of hockey-thought as it is to call a high stick, it is actually a very simple, elegant, and effective solution to common problems. And it has the charm of being authentic to the sport, an honest part of the heritage of hockey rather than something borrowed from the experiments of the NBA. At the very least, it needs to be considered; the oldest solution to all the newest problems.
Click to expand...
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back