|
Not That Orr Goal Again, Please |
|
|
|
|
|
Oh no, here it comes again. That Bobby Orr Stanley Cup winning goal in 1970 is on its way to being declared the Greatest Moment in NHL History, just like in 1996, when a credit card company ran a similar competition and shot the puck into the corner.
We’re telling you, it is as inexorable as a Caps loss in the second round. The Orr goal already has beaten Mud Bruneteau’s goal in a sixth overtime and Steve Yzerman’s in a second overtime. If 10-year olds who have been watching the game for two years had not already chosen Auston Matthew’s debut four goals over Pat Lafontaine’s goal in the fourth overtime, the Orr monster was on its way to devouring that marathon too,
Next up for in Orr’s bracket, I see, is Ray Bourque’s Cup. You might as well put away your hankie; your eyes are going to wind up even drier than Mika Zibanejad’s stats at even strength. Lanny McDonald scored a Cup winning goal and rode off into sunset but he was eliminated even faster than the Flames last spring. If Vlady Konstantinov were on the ballot, he wouldn’t open a single duct, either. There is something about the Orr goal that makes a voter more callous than Matt Cooke.
The remaining competition is doomed. Mario Lemieux is going to have to lace ‘em up again and invent a means to score six ways, not just five, to win this one. Scotty Bowman had better be back coaching again at the time of the 150th anniversary or he is going to be run over by Orr again, too.
What do we have against that goal? They are voting for a picture, not a moment. When we say it was a great shot, it’s no reference to Orr’s from just 15 feet on a passout from Derek Sanderson, but by photographer Ray Lussler, who captured No. 4 in mid-air, where he had been sent by the trip of the Blues’ Noel Picard after scoring.
The flashbulb caught perhaps the most dynamic player in NHL history in full, Superman flight, just after scoring to give Boston its first Cup in 30 years. I get it. The picture, I mean, not the moment. Wouldn’t even make my top 10. How can the Greatest Moment in NHL history be a goal that was a foregone conclusion at the end of a perfunctory sweep?
The Blues were in that final for a third straight year only because the format insisted the one of the six new teams from the three-year old West Division be represented. Orr’s goal sent St. Louis down to a 12th consecutive final series defeat. Like Lasse Kukkonen, the Blues had no shot, and the league was so tired of uncompetitive finals that the next year it blessedly ordered semifinals that crossed over the two divisions.
In other words, in 1970 the owners didn’t think it was a such a great moment, except maybe that it put them out of the misery of watching the Blues outscored in the series, 20-7. And now, mark my words, it will again become the best of all time.
You may wonder: It’s just a contest, albeit one official endorsed by the NHL, to get fans interested in the game and its history. So why are my shorts more in a knot over this than even Mike O’Connell’s logic when he traded Joe Thornton?
It’s because I have written a couple of histories and, probably, a few hundred articles about the sport’s heritage. I like to point out context even more than I love the game, which is considerably. While there are no absolute truths to question here, just the half-baked opinions of persons born after Alex Debrincat, the contest is not worth doing if they are going to come up with a choice weaker than attendance in Carolina. We are talking about THE greatest moment in the NHL’s 100-year history. A little respect for the concept, please.
As both Sargent Friday and Bill Friday used to insist: Let’s have just the facts ma’am. You are reading a guy who carries soap in his pocket to wash out mouths who dare utter the term “Original Six” in his presence. The Bruins entered the league in 1924-25, Year Eight. The Red Wings came in the following season, the Black Hawks the year after that. The Rangers were not even the first New York team in the league; the New York Americans were.
Only the Leafs and Canadien franchises trace back to that four-team birth season of 1917-18. So there is an Original Two, no such thing as an original six, so stop referring to it or I’m sending Mick Vukota after you. I’ve got Marty McSorley’s banana blade and vow to use it on the next copy editor who makes wrong my reference to Fred Shero’s blackboard exhortation he delivered to the Flyers during the 1974 final.
Shero wrote before Game Four: “Win and We Will Walk Together Forever,” not “Win today and we will walk together forever” before Game Six. Urban Legend is stronger than truth. Every time I see history reported incorrectly, it makes me nuttier than Frank Beaton at the site of Curt Brackenbury.
The bracket-ballot on NHL.com appears to be a sincere attempt by writers and editors who know the game. The event vs. event format for advancement is a sincere attempt to get hits on the site over a two-month period. But the nominating committee got most of the nominations right.
Most, I said. Other that the catch-all entry of Bowman’s nine Cups, and the Bruins-centered 1979 loss after putting too many men on the ice, there is not an entry about anything achieved by the 1976-79 Canadiens, the most dominating dynasty in the 50 years I have been watching the NHL and in the 45 that I have been covering it. In a watershed 1976 final, Les Habs dethroned one of the most willful teams of all time, the two-time defending champion Flyers, and then the next year lost just eight regular season and two playoff games during the NHL’s best season of the expansion era.
Wayne Gretzky’s passing Gordie Howe in goals is in there, but not passing Howe in points, something he did in a Los Angeles uniform at Edmonton. Hard to beat that–a passing of the torch between the two greatest players in the game’s history–for rising to an occasion, even if, admittedly, it may be down the list for the greatest occasion-riser of them all, No. 99.
I am impressed that there are 14 moments that occurred before expansion, leaving more than half the league’s history adequately represented or close. The only glaring omission was the last hurrah of a veteran Leaf team with 10 Hall of Famers winning its fourth Cup in six years in a 1967 upset of the Canadiens.
Also missing was the greatest final ever played. In 1987, the Oilers, the most talented team ever, under huge pressure after blowing a third-straight title the year before on an own goal, rose magnificently in Game Seven to finally subdue the gutsy Flyers, who, in their second crack at Edmonton in three finals, had rallied to win games from 3-0, 3-1 and 2-0 deficits.
The 1994 Rangers appropriately made the ballot with the epic seven-game double overtime thriller over the Devils–after Mark Messier delivered a guarantee and a hat trick in Game Six–and then appropriately again for outlasting the Canucks in seven games for the greatest night in New York’s long hockey history. Those were seesaw rides of epic proportions. But overlooked was the most dramatic of the Penguins four Stanley Cup wins, 2-1 in Game Seven in Detroit in 2009 on two goals by the ultimate Everyman, Max Talbot. It was the only road win of the series.
When you try to weigh great individual achievements against dramatic team triumphs, you realize that picking the greatest moment of all is really like choosing a Heisman Trophy winner. Considering the schedule doesn’t permit much testing of the nominees against each other and that a lineman has never even gotten close to being voted the honor, the best player in college football really doesn’t exist, only the most publicized great one.
So for my money, give me a money performance in a playoff hockey game over anything that involved statistical compilations. At the top of my list is the single most riveting sports event I have ever witnessed in person–better than anything I ever saw at a World Series, Super Bowl or Olympics that I covered in 19 years as a general sports columnist–is the two-many-men-on-the-ice contest But I chose it for multiple more reasons than the Bruins’ screw up.
Defeated by the Canadiens in the 1977 finals in a sweep and the 1978 finals in six games, Boston finally had the three-time champs beaten on Rick Middleton’s goal against Ken Dryden with 3:59 to go. Then it happened, The Bruins messed up a line change, got penalized, and Guy Lafleur, the best player in hockey, wasn’t about to let the dynasty end. On the power play, he went almost the length of the ice to nail a bullet from the top of the circle to Gilles Gilbert’s stick side with 1:14 remaining
The overtime goal went in off Yvon Lambert’s leg on his rush to the net. The Canadiens went on to win the fourth Cup in a more-or-less perfunctory and anti-climactic five games over the Rangers. That drained nothing from the drama of that epic Game Seven at the iconic Forum, when the ghosts tricked the Bruins from the rafters. They finally had ‘em, and then they didn’t because of a heartbreaking ironic twist and a champion’s masterful resolve not to let go of the rope.
Those Canadiens, loaded with stars, anchored by the best defense in history, perfectly balanced with two scoring and two checking lines, were the best team I ever have seen, and those Bruins of the Don Cherry era may have been the best never to win. I have attended my share of funerals but the visitor’s locker room at the Forum that night still was the saddest place I ever have been.
So, as long as Lake Placid 1980 is ineligible to be an NHL moment, that 1979 semifinal at the Forum had every element–including a buildup–that you would ever want in a Greatest Moment, including it taking place in Canada, where they care about the game the most. And it was defeated in the first round by Gretzky’s 1000th point, something that has been done by 86 players, even if he did it the fastest.
Get this right: There several choices I feel would not be wrong, the Orr goal absolutely not being one of them. It shouldn’t even get close and it’s going to win unless I make sure it doesn’t.
I have hired Russians–the same guys who must have nominate a Sergei Fedorov goal that had to be awarded on replay–to send evidence to Facebook and Twitter proving that Orr goal never happened the way people remember it.
The picture actually was taken at a Seals-North Stars game in 1969. That is Morris Mott flying through the air after shooting wide with Cesare Maniago down and out, then falling over his own feet. Orr’s face and the Bruins uniform were airbrushed in.
Have it on good authority. The inevitable Greatest Moment in NHL history was Fake News!
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • 
Join the Discussion:
»