Though a healthy NHL rivalry is an indispensable marketing tool, the times that call for solidarity over spirited opposition have their own pivotal place. As much as hockey fans sustain their enthusiasm through animated drama, the pure human element creates a balance by preserving a necessary sense of community.
Adding to the latter’s importance, those who lack an inherent interest in what happens between the boards and the whistles may still feel compelled to pay attention when that community attitude takes full view.
Almost any pair of parties in an NHL rivalry will combine to represent distinct geographic entities. Rooters may want bragging rights under all competitive circumstances, but no residents can refuse a gesture of goodwill.
Ceremonies like these embolden the adage of a player being a wild Kodiak in game action, but a teddy bear otherwise. They bring out the best in participants and viewers alike as they recognize and build around the sport as their unifying entity.
The 10 most notable examples from the league’s first century of operation are as follows.
10. The fight for financial fairness
The NHL’s so-called Golden Era, the quarter-century when it was only the Original Six, witnessed scarce cases of animosity giving way to amiability.
In a pre-draft, pre-free agency period, career-long loyalty to a single crest was all but a given. And because fewer opponents meant more frequent rivalry renewals, players and front-office personnel rarely respected the boundaries that the boards represented. Uncompromising partisanship had a way of overrunning the pond.
Detroit’s Ted Lindsay spearheaded the top exception amongst the players in the mid-’50s. While the NHLPA’s precursor failed to catch on, it had the near-unanimous approval of those who skated for the league’s six cities at its inception. The longer-lasting players’ association emerged in 1967, the same year NHL membership doubled to 12 teams.
After their last of many entertaining showdowns, Jarome Iginla and Trevor Linden retired their snarls as the latter prepared to retire from playing. (Photo by Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)
9. Flames laud Linden
Trevor Linden participated in three of the seven Vancouver-Calgary postseason sets to date. The Canucks have bested the Flames merely twice in those seven meetings, the more noteworthy being a seven-game triumph in the opening round of the 1994 tournament.
None other than Linden supplied a sudden-death strike in Game 6 to make the rubber match possible. Until Tampa Bay’s Martin St. Louis reversed the 2004 Stanley Cup Final in the same fashion, that moment left residual vinegar in Calgary’s mouths.
Fast-forward 14 years, at which point Linden had logged 16 nonconsecutive seasons in British Columbia plus many other memorable installments of the Flames feud. Vancouver was a 2008 playoff no-show, which made the April 5 home date with Calgary his anticipated swan song.
The visiting players drummed their sticks while visiting fans joined the home crowd in applauding Linden prior to the opening draw of the third period. At the final horn, Flames veterans Robyn Regehr and Jarome Iginla led a spontaneous handshake line.
8. Lemieux’s first sendoff
For all of the egregious pimples on their sportsmanship record, Philadelphia fans have applied appropriate remedies when the time has come to honor their definitive hockey tormentor.
The 1997 conference quarterfinals marked the second and final time Mario Lemieux took part in a playoff edition of Pennsylvania’s intrastate card. The third-seeded Flyers, who were on their way to a finals appearance, would repress the Penguins in five games.
Two nights after averting a sweep and absorbing a precautionary tribute from his own fans, Lemieux failed to prolong the series in Philadelphia. His goal supplied a short-lived 2-1 advantage before the Flyers ran away with a 6-3 decision.
With that, No. 66 entered what would be his first retirement. But not before his captaincy counterpart, Eric Lindros, sparked a salute to his adversary.
7. Guest of greatness
For all of the emotional wounds Wayne Gretzky’s trade inflicted, and everything that served to deepen them, Edmonton fans never let the player feel the resentment.
Not when Gretzky, in his first playoff round as a non-Oiler, led Los Angeles to a 1989 upset that denied his old allies a championship three-peat. And not when, in the fifth game of his second campaign as a King, he became the NHL’s new all-time leading point-getter at the Northlands Coliseum.
In the latter event, Gretzky matched Gordie Howe’s mark of 1,850 as the visitors battled through a seesaw affair. He then interrupted the action in the waning moments of regulation by tipping home a 4-4 equalizer for sole possession of the record.
Though Oilers fans went back to business when their team finished its unraveling in overtime, they reveled in speeches from Howe and Gretzky alike during the 10-minute pause.
Mark Messier, who had succeeded Wayne Gretzky as the Oilers captain barely a year prior, did his part to help Edmonton celebrate its friend-turned-foe when Gretzky surpassed Gordie Howe as the NHL’s all-time points champion. (Photo by Bruce Bennett Studios/Getty Images)
6. Super Mario’s Spectrum salute
At the start of the 1992-93 season, the aforementioned Lemieux was coming off a pair of achievements that doubtlessly disheartened the Flyers faithful.
Besides captaining the Penguins to consecutive Stanley Cups, he became the first repeat playoff MVP since Philadelphia goaltender Bernie Parent. The honor of being the answer to the trivia question had shifted to the other side of the state.
Those trifling matters took little time to emerge as just that when Lemieux missed the middle of the season with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But his resolve, dedication and passion for the game gained equal clarity when he returned to action within hours of his final round of treatment.
Fittingly enough, to ensure his return without further delay, he traveled across the state to catch a visit to the Flyers on March 2, 1993. Lemieux’s emergence for the first period drew applause for more than a full minute, plus a “Welcome back” message on the Spectrum scoreboard.
5. The Bailey benefit
Eddie Shore’s near-fatal hit on Ace Bailey in 1933 was the most harrowing scene in the NHL’s formative years. The Boston blueliner’s choice to avenge a borderline check by another Toronto player left the Maple Leafs forward on death’s door and in emergency surgery. The hit also spawned a series of other violent actions among players and bystanders.
But upon his miraculous recovery, Bailey insisted that cool heads prevail. He got his chance to lead by example when Shore, returning from suspension, joined an all-star team against the Leafs in a charity game to raise money for Bailey’s medical expenses.
When Bailey and Shore took the opportunity to shake hands prior to the opening draw, thunderous forgiveness reverberated throughout Maple Leaf Gardens.
4. Sabres stand strong with Boston
The stick salute is still a relatively new practice in professional hockey. Even in the collegiate and scholastic ranks, one typically sees the home team acknowledge its crowd alone.
That fact speaks to the perspective the visiting Buffalo Sabres maintained when they took part in Boston’s first sporting event to follow the April 15, 2013, terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon. The longtime Adams/Northeast/Atlantic Division foes treated the TD Garden masses to a 2-2 regulation draw before Buffalo claimed the bonus point in a shootout.
Once the diversion was over, all skate-clad, stick-wielding personnel let the locals know they supported their push to retain normalcy and live out the “Boston Strong” slogan.
From households to other arenas and everywhere in between, all of Canada electronically descended on Ottawa for a moving display of patriotism in October of 2014. (Photo by Jana Chytilova/Freestyle Photography/Getty Images)
3. Tri-city tribute
Three nights after the Oct. 22, 2014, Parliament Hill shootings in Ottawa, all three of the country’s Eastern Conference teams were home for Hockey Night In Canada. In the capital city, the Senators and Devils surrounded legendary vocalist Lyndon Slewidge for TV audiences plus attendees at the Toronto-Boston and Montreal-New York Original Six contests to see.
Following a 43-second moment of silence and his rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, Slewidge delivered the first line of O, Canada before turning the microphone to an aggregate audience of nearly 60,000 at the three arenas.
All combinations of the three cities — one being the nation’s largest Anglophone town, another the largest Francophone and the other the capital brushing a bilingual borderline — have enriched the NHL’s annals with their on-ice epics. But on this night, two tongues and three towns used one peerless pastime to underscore a singular national pride.
2. Patriotism over pucks
Two teams, two periods played, two goals apiece.
One unified appreciation.
That defined the Flyers-Rangers exhibition at the First Union Center on Sept. 20, 2001. It was nine days after the Sept. 11 tragedy, which occurred the day most NHL training camps were slated to begin and took the lives of L.A. Kings scouts Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis. The tall order of escaping from reality for even a fleeting moment was itself a natural reality.
That notion surfaced when, during the second intermission, the video board televised President George W. Bush’s address on Capitol Hill. Along with the spectators, players from America, Canada and several European countries watched intently and digested the news of the nation’s plans to respond to the attacks.
Even with no stakes beyond opening-night roster spots, the desire to resume even friendly play fizzled. In turn, the clubs opted to call off the third period and leave the game a 2-2 draw. The subsequent handshake line set the tone for a season where solidarity had the spotlight more often.
On a preseason visit to the Rangers in 2001, Flyers players presented commemorative jerseys to New York’s first responders. During the same exhibition slate, the same two teams took in President Bush’s world-changing post-9/11 address in lieu of finishing their game. (Photo by B Bennett/Getty Images)
1. Canadiens carry the Kitchener Kids
If the Montreal-Boston feud is not the most enduring NHL rivalry, it certainly is among those featuring a city from each of the league’s two countries. Cultural differences have arguably served to stoke the rancor as much as the franchises’ philosophical discrepancies have.
With that said, few developments have historically drawn the United States and Canada together quite like the World War II effort. Two months after the former nation’s entry in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Boston Garden witnessed a testament to that common sense of purpose.
Three Ontario-born ambassadors to America’s oldest NHL franchise combined for an 11-point effort to torch their Montreal visitors, 8-1, in a Feb. 11, 1942 contest. It would be their last formal on-ice engagement before the “Kitchener Kids” unit of Bobby Bauer, Woody Dumart and Milt Schmidt joined Canada’s military, which had been fighting since the war’s beginning.
In the wake of a mortifying defeat at the hands of the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Habs acknowledged the outside world’s more pressing priorities by carrying their rivals off the ice.
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