It was never supposed to get this far.
The Edmonton Oilers were a team in the midst of a dynasty, and they had taken a 3–1 series lead over the Philadelphia Flyers. Sure, the Flyers had received a few days of clemency by winning Game 5 against an over-confident Oilers team. But c’mon…
Even the Philadelphia players look back now and have a hard time believing how long it took that Oilers team to put them away.
“We’d cruised through the playoffs. We got up 3–1,” said Kevin Lowe, paraphrasing the unspoken words of he and his teammates. “‘All right, this is going to be over soon enough.’ Then, when the Flyers scored that winning goal in Game 6 — J.J. Daignault — that is as loud as I’d ever heard a building. The place went crazy.
“That game could have been 5–0, but for (Ron) Hextall. We were up 2–0, and it was men and boys there for 25 minutes or so. We’d obviously realized we’d made mistake in Game 5, and we had our ‘A’ game on. When they tied it and went ahead, I remember thinking, ‘Holy, cow…. Are we gonna lose this thing?’ They really seemed to have it going.”
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Watch Game 7 the 1987 Stanley Cup final between the Oilers and Flyers Saturday, May 9, at 7:00 ET on Sportsnet and Sportsnet NOW.
Wayne Gretzky walked into the post-game visiting dressing room at The Spectrum in disbelief, after outshooting Philly 32–23 and losing 3–2.
“The one thing about our team — we were a great front-running team,” Gretzky remembers. “When we got ahead of a team in a series, we never let ’em off the hook, over the years. For a team to come back from 3–1 on us was unheard of. Almost impossible.
“So when we walked into that locker room at 3–3, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God. What did we just do here?’ We should have won this series five days ago, and all of a sudden we’re going back to Edmonton for a Game 7.”
The Oilers had, in fact, never lost a series that they had led at any point. The next thing they knew, there they were: Just 1:13 into Game 7, facing a 1:19 five-on-three with Mark Messier and Paul Coffey in the box.
“We got off to a bit of a slow start, took a couple of penalties,” said Grant Fuhr. “Then I gave up a crappy goal — to make things exciting.”
Murray Craven scored from the goal line, and Fuhr managed to poke check Doug Crossman before he deposited the puck into the empty net. The Flyers had a couple more chances to make it 2–0, but Fuhr did what became his calling card, never giving up the goal that allowed the other team to believe.
“If we got that second goal, it could have been different,” said Flyers winger Scott Mellanby. “One of the early penalties was Messier (34 seconds into Game 7). I think he tried to rip someone’s head off. They were there to win — I just remember the look in his eyes.”
Hockey lore is full of teams that refused to lose. Or players who metaphorically put their teammates up on their shoulders and said, ‘Let’s go.”
Well, among their 18 skaters that night — May 31, 1987 — the Edmonton Oilers had five Hall of Fame players, and two more who would play over 1,000 games. So they didn’t need one man to carry the team.
“I’ll give you three names: Messier, Kurri, Anderson,” Mellanby said. “Who scored those goals in Game 7? All three are in the Hall of Fame — great players.”
I asked Mark Messier, who would play one more Game 7 in a Final series in ’94 for the New York Rangers, if it unfolded the way he’d always dreamed that it would.
“The best thing about it was, we’d had enough experiences not to expect anything. Just let the game unravel,” he said. “We wanted to focus in on the details of the game, and not fight the game. At times in Game 5 and 6 we’d been fighting the game a bit. We wanted to get back to getting into our comfort zone.
“For me, and for the guys who been around a bit, it’s about not anticipating anything. Don’t expect the game to go a certain way. Let the game unravel, and react to it.”
After that opening flurry, the Oilers got their feet underneath them. Messier scored at 7:45 of the first period, and despite the opening blitz the Flyers had executed, by the first intermission the shots were 18–12 for Edmonton. The Oilers would outshoot Philly 25-8 the rest of the way, allowing six and then just two Flyers shots respectively in the final two periods.
Surmised Flyers head coach Mike Keenan: “They got ahold of the puck and they weren’t going to give it back to us.”
“That’s as good as I’ve ever seen a team play,” said defenceman Mark Howe, who played 929 NHL games and another 426 in the World Hockey Association. “They just came at us — wave after wave after wave. It was just relentless.
“We couldn’t do (bleep). They proved how good they were.”
Said Mellanby: “I just think that the greatest players turned it up to another level. By the end of it they were rag-dollin’ us. We were still in it, but it was wave after wave, the way they were comin’ at us.”
Ironically, the decade’s best offensive team may have had its finest defensive performance that night.
“For a team that wasn’t known as a great defensive team, if you look back at that Game 7, defensively that was probably as well as a team has ever played defensively in a Game 7,” Gretzky said.
“It was a solid performance,” agreed Kevin Lowe. “A veteran team that had two kicks at it previously, and we weren’t letting this one get out of our grasp. We had the scare early, but you’ve got to fight through those moments in a game. Methodically, we began to take that game over.”
The Flyers had always suspected that they were overmatched in this series, especially with leading scorer Tim Kerr injured and unable to play even a game. But like all successful athletes they had effectively pushed those negative thoughts out of their minds until now. As the tide of the game continued to flow Edmonton’s way, however — Jari Kurri scored late in the second period and Glenn Anderson even later in the third — it became clear:
Philly was a good team. But Edmonton was better.
“They were the best team in hockey,” said Mellanby. “We scared the (bleep) out of them, but in Game 7, the big boys came to play.”
