THE SUN SPLASHED ACROSS Vancouver Harbour on a glorious, warm spring day. It was May 23rd, 1994. Snow-peaked Grouse Mountain beckoned in the distance as sea planes landed and took off over the harbour. Ships cruised lazily under Lions Gate Bridge. At the cushy Westin Bayshore hotel on the edge of Stanley Park, members of the Toronto Maple Leafs had a perfect view of the vista as they stretched out on cushioned chaise lounge chairs, catching a few rays. Or catching their breath. They were down three games to one against the Vancouver Canucks in the 1994 Clarence Campbell Conference final, with Game 5 the next night. They’d played seventeen games in thirty-four days, including three in the Central Time Zone and five in the Pacific. The travel had been endless. Including a pre-season trek to England for a two-game exhibition series with the New York Rangers, the Leafs had played 103 games over the previous nine months. They were running on fumes.
Head coach Pat Burns convened an impromptu meeting over a poolside lunch with the two longest-serving Leafs, captain Wendel Clark and defenceman Todd Gill, plus star centre Doug Gilmour. They knew the situation was bleak. Just like the 1993 playoffs, the trip to this point had been long and exhausting. The Leafs had beaten Chicago in six games, then needed seven games to vanquish the surprising and stubborn San Jose Sharks. Vancouver, however, had proven to be like running into a brick wall.
Back then, teams with home-ice advantage in a series could choose a two-three-two game format against teams from certain time zones. The Leafs had used that choice effectively to win Games 6 and 7 at home against the Sharks, but against the Canucks, the ploy had backfired. The Canucks, the seventh best team in the conference, had split the first two games in Toronto, then won the first two at Pacific Coliseum. The weary Leafs were on the ropes.
Toronto had been shut out in Games 3 and 4 and were in desperate need of help. A boost. An injection of energy. Something. But the magic of ’93 was gone. That had been a joyous, raucous, surprising ride. By comparison, this had been a grinding uphill slog. The team had won an NHL record ten straight games to start the ’93–94 season, seemingly shaking off the disappointment of losing to Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings in the previous year’s conference final. That early streak seemed to serve notice that it might be the year the Leafs returned to the top for the first time since 1967, that they were ready to take the next step.
After that spectacular start, however, the season had bogged down. In the final seventy-four games, the Leafs had won thirty-three, finishing second in their division. Gilmour had led the team in scoring. Dave Andreychuk had become the first Leaf ever to score fifty goals—he ended up with fifty-three—and Clark had been right behind him with fourty-six of his own. But the team just wasn’t quite the same as the group that had suffered that painful Game 7 loss to the Kings twelve months earlier. Not as close, not as unified, not as able to produce extraordinary moments.
Some players, set to be free agents, were already eying the door. Sitting around a pool basking in the sun felt like surrender. It wasn’t the image hockey players traditionally wanted to create while the season was still alive. Like getting caught on a golf course. As Burns huddled with his leading players at the Westin Bayshore pool, munching on fries, club sandwiches and burgers, he already knew it was over. His team was out of gas and he was out of answers. Gilmour had gone public two weeks earlier with the news he had received death threats from an unidentified stalker earlier in the season, and now he was hobbling on a badly injured ankle. He’d played 204 regular season and playoff games over the previous two NHL campaigns, most of them while skating in excess of twenty minutes a game. He barely could lace his skates, let alone bear the painkilling injections before each game.
Still, the Leafs players tried to lighten the mood as they wore sunglasses to darken the bright sun. Gill and Gilmour joked about getting their heads shaved for Game 5. Clark, wearing jeans and a black t-shirt over his muscular torso, playfully distended his belly, as if to show how he planned to look in retirement. He was also dealing with tough questions about his play. After being a nearly unstoppable force in the ’93 conference final against the Kings, Clark had been that same player for the first two rounds of the ’94 playoffs, scoring eight goals against the Blackhawks and Sharks. But against the Canucks, like the rest of the team, he was ineffective. He didn’t have a single point. Vancouver fans taunted him with the “Wen-dy, WEN-DEE” chant that had started in Detroit the year before when an anonymous Red Wings player said he was “Wendel at home and Wendy on the road.” Mean-spirited, nasty stuff. We often hear that hockey is a family and that players respect opponents who play the right way. But this was just an anonymous slur against an honourable player who had finally been given a chance to show what he could do in the playoffs on a good team, and had delivered exemplary performances.
The Canucks put the Leafs out of their misery the following night, but not before subjecting the easterners to one final dose of humiliation. The Leafs led Game 5 by a 3–0 score, but gradually frittered it away, and then lost in double overtime on a rebound goal by Greg Adams. Four straight losses. Felix Potvin, after being unable to stop Adams, slumped, then fell backwards into his net, expressing the exhaustion and disappointment of a team that believed it was destined for greater things that spring.
The beloved underdogs of the year before had given way to a contender that never seemed comfortable in the role of favourite. The Leafs had gone back to the well with basically the same team, minus Glenn Anderson, who had been traded to the Rangers for Mike Gartner. But they had ended up even further away from the Cup, while Anderson ended up getting another ring when the Blueshirts beat Vancouver in the final. “We just can’t get over the hump,” said Burns after the final loss to the Canucks. “We tried two years in a row and we just can’t.”
Two days later, Burns was talking even more negatively. He spoke of the need for an overhaul of the roster. It was an entirely different feel from the loss to LA the previous year in the conference. That felt like the beginning of something. This felt like an end. The Leafs coach was making it plain that the roster GM Cliff Fletcher had given him wasn’t good enough. Plus, he wanted the final two years of his contract ripped up, replaced with a new deal and a big raise. He was more than well aware that two straight visits to the Final Four had given the franchise twenty lucrative home dates over the previous two years, representing millions of dollars in revenue. That was more playoff home games than the Leafs had played in the previous decade before Burns arrived. His general unhappiness with the status quo also meant the gnawing insecurity that had driven Burns out of Montreal two years earlier was back. “If management is satisfied with me and the work I do, then we have to change the club,” he said. “If they want to stay with the team they’ve got, then maybe it’s time for me to move.” To Burns, the Leafs had already become “they,” no longer “us.”
Burns got his raise and stayed, but it was over for the Leafs, for the group of Leafs players who had come so close in ’93. A month later, Clark was finally traded after all those years of rumours, sent to Quebec City along with defenceman Sylvain Lefebvre in a blockbuster deal for Mats Sundin, another multiplayer Fletcher special. The stoic Clark cried, and a city mourned. Underrated Bob Rouse bolted to Detroit via free agency for a big pay increase. Mike Foligno was sold to Florida. The Leafs tried to build a new team around Gilmour as captain and Sundin as the new star, but it didn’t quite mesh. Eventually, the other stalwarts of the ’93 playoff run—Gilmour, Andreychuk, Dave Ellett—were all traded. Fletcher eventually fired Burns after a loss in Denver. Owner Steve Stavro finally fired Fletcher, which he had wanted to do the moment the Silver Fox was hired. Eventually, Stavro lost control of the Leafs, and lost his business empire along the way.
That gritty ’93 team had promised so much, but after losing Game 7 to the Kings, really didn’t deliver anymore. At the time, it seemed Gilmour and Clark would be Leafs forever. It seemed Potvin would stop pucks in Toronto for the rest of his career, en route to the Hall of Fame. It seemed the Leafs had finally figured out how to be a competitive NHL club and sustain it. But those promises turned out to be empty. Three years after the ’93 playoffs, Toronto was once again one of hockey’s worst teams.
For the Kings, the fall was even more precipitous, even uglier. After the exhilaration of riding Gretzky’s magical night to the Game 7 win over the Leafs, LA lost the ’93 Stanley Cup final in a dispiriting five games to Montreal. Marty McSorley, such a force against the Leafs, was caught using an illegal stick in Game 2—penalized by Kerry Fraser, no less—and it proved to be the turning point in the series.
On the way home from Montreal after losing the final game, McSorley argued on the plane with a team scout who felt all the former Edmonton Oilers on the team had cost the team the Cup, that it meant the team was divided into cliques rather than unified. By July, McSorley signed in Pittsburgh as a free agent, with Kings management deciding to give the younger Warren Rychel a new contract instead. McSorley had been everything to LA, both a blood-and-guts performer and a dangerous offensive player. But the Kings just let him go. Corey Millen, a key player against the Leafs, was quickly dealt to New Jersey. It was all more evidence that Bruce McNall’s empire was crumbling and he couldn’t hide that fact from prying eyes any longer.
McNall defaulted on a $90-million bank loan six months later, and by May, 1994, as the Leafs were playing the Canucks, McNall had been forced to sell controlling interest in the team and was out as chairman of the NHL’s board of governors. Just one year after being in a box at Maple Leaf Gardens celebrating with his Hollywood friends, McNall was headed down a path that led to prison.
While the Leafs made it to the ’94 conference final against Vancouver, the Kings didn’t even make the playoffs. Dave Taylor retired, while Gretzky lasted only two more years with the Kings before being traded to St. Louis. LA didn’t make it back to the Stanley Cup playoffs until 1998. “It was heart-wrenching,” recalls Mike Donnelly, who was eventually traded to Dallas. “The way our team dissolved was brutal.”
Looking back, it’s clear that the thrilling Leafs-Kings series of May, 1993, was a spectacular peak for both teams. It was as special as it was fleeting. It was about a specific time and place, although players on both teams genuinely felt they were part of something that was going to last for more than one shining spring.
Maybe the Leafs and Kings knocked the heck out of each other, and left each other broken, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier after the Thriller in Manila in 1975. The Leafs and Kings certainly brought out the best in each other, delivering all-or-nothing performances. Both clubs were heavily laden with veterans, and you could certainly argue that many of them were either at the top of their careers or never played as well as they did in that seven game set, either before or after. Both owners had used questionable or outright illegal means to become NHL proprietors, and when their empires started to crumble, their hockey teams did too. In an event of pure irony, Steve Stavro could have signed Gretzky as a free agent in ’96, but didn’t have the money. Perhaps McNall, had he not been on his way to prison by then, could have helped Stavro negotiate a bank loan to pay for Number 99.
The inability of both teams to take the next step makes their extraordinary ’93 clash that much more meaningful in retrospect. At the time, it was a rollicking, entertaining hockey series, one that seemed to sidestep a date with history when the Leafs lost and didn’t get to meet Montreal in the final. But a quarter century later, it’s as if those fourteen days of heated playoff competition now appear larger in the review mirror. Rather than fading with time, that series has been enhanced as the years have passed. “I kinda get goosebumps when I think about our team,” says Donnelly. “When I look back at that year, I don’t look at Montreal series, at the final. It was that series against Toronto that was unbelievable.”
The Kings survived all kinds of problems that year, from a back injury that threatened to end Gretzky’s career to goalie Kelly Hrudey’s in-season crisis of confidence to internal problems linked to McNall’s fraudulent business practices. It forged a unique bond between players on that team. “What was it like to sit on the bench next to Wayne, and Dave Taylor and those guys?” asks Tony Granato. “Those were guys that if they called me up today and said we’re challenging that old Leafs team to a best of seven series, can you be ready? I’d do it in one second. Just because I’d want to have the opportunity to compete with those guys again.”
For the Leafs, obviously, the series left painful scars. Bill Berg still agonizes over failing to curl down in the defensive zone far enough to thwart Gretzky’s power play winner in Game 6. He has never watched a replay of Game 7. “That was the best playoffs ever. I loved that time,” he says now. “But I don’t want to watch it because the hockey gods were against us.” Dave Ellett, the victim of Gretzky’s infamous bank shot in Game 7, the series winner, prefers not to even discuss the series. Twenty-five years have passed, and still the wound is fresh. “As of today, I am not interested in commenting on your book,” he politely explained in an email. “This was, and still is, one of the most devastating losses in my career, and personally there is no joy in re-living it. Sorry.”
Other Leafs don’t want to forget. Potvin has a copy of a video of the ’93 Leafs playoff run called The Passion Returns, the creation of Mark Askin, then a senior producer with Molstar Sports and Entertainment. Every once in a while, Potvin pulls out the video, pops it in to an old VCR player and watches the memories. He grimaces over getting his knee on Gretzky’s winning shot in Game 6 but not being able to keep it out, and then giving up a hat trick to The Great One in the deciding game. “Having Wayne score three goals on me is not one of the great souvenirs I have from my career,” he says.
There remains for all the Leafs the satisfaction of being part of a team that was so tight, so close, and a team that erased the negativity surrounding the Leafs and replaced it with, at least for a time, an exciting, winning culture. “Whenever I see those guys it’s like I’m transported right back to Maple Leaf Gardens,” says Berg. There was a formal team reunion before Burns died of cancer in 2010. “It confirmed a lot of things to me,” says Berg. “To me, Burnsie was all about roles. His role on that team was to be the taskmaster, to get the best out of us. That meant not being the nicest guy. The last time I saw him at the Air Canada Centre, I walked into the luxury box where we were sitting. Burnsie came over and gave me a big hug. I couldn’t have imagined him doing that when I was playing for him. But it gave me perspective.”
Gretzky’s four-point, Game 7 performance seemed nearly poetic. He was the kid from Ontario who was recruited to sell hockey in Hollywood, then returned home as a conquering hero. Ironic how, back in the Original Six days, Toronto would have once had playing rights to Gretzky simply by the fact that he was born in Ontario. When Gretzky led the Kings to victory over the Leafs, it was another symbol of the inability of the Toronto franchise to succeed and win in the more complicated post-expansion NHL when the Leafs were no longer granted those preferential territorial advantages.
Gretzky played in 208 Stanley Cup playoff games and four Stanley Cup finals, as well as four Canada Cups, one World Cup and the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Still, he says playing against the Leafs in ’93 and winning that series stands up to any of those competitions in terms of his personal satisfaction. “It was one of the best series I’ve ever been a part of,” he says. “It just went on and on. It was incredible how hard everybody played, and what they brought to the table, and the energy and the emotion.”
That series was also his last hurrah, as it turns out, arguably his last burst of truly magnificent play. He was only thirty-two years old. He did win the NHL scoring championship in the ’93–94 season even though the Kings missed the playoffs. But after that, as scoring dried up across the NHL, he never scored more than twenty-five goals or one hundred points in a season again. He played another seven seasons, but was unable to get another serious sniff at a fourth Stanley Cup ring. Canadian hockey fans will always remember him sitting forlornly on the Team Canada bench at the ’98 Olympics when head coach Marc Crawford didn’t pick him to take part in the critical shootout against the Czech Republic.
Gretzky played seven full seasons in LA and most of an eighth, but the only time the Kings got past the second round with him in the lineup was in the ’93 playoffs. He believes personnel decisions by management cost LA a better chance at a championship during his time there, particularly the trade of Mike Krushelnyski to the Leafs in November, 1990, and the deal that sent Paul Coffey to Detroit during the 1992–93 season. “Had Mike Krushelnyski been on our team in the ’93 playoffs, he would have been a difference-maker in the final series against Montreal,” says Gretzky. “He was strong, he could play left wing, centre, right wing. He was a good faceoff guy, a great teammate. From my point of view, that was a trade that maybe cost us a Stanley Cup. At the time when they made the trade, I understood they wanted to get younger. Michael was a little bit older, they traded him for John McIntyre. Ultimately, had Mike been part of our team in that final, it could have been a different outcome. There’s no question in my mind. If we could go back in time I wished they hadn’t made that deal.”
On the Coffey transaction, Gretzky acknowledges that Gary Shuchuk, one of the players acquired from the Red Wings, played a significant role for the Kings in the ’93 playoffs. “He was that guy that brought that energy and toughness that maybe we lacked. But Paul Coffey would have been pretty nice heading into the Stanley Cup final. I’m biased because I have a great deal of respect for guys who win. Both Paul and Mike had won a lot.”
On the Toronto side of the ledger, both Gilmour and Clark played the best hockey of their careers in that series. They went from Leaf stars to Leaf legends. Gilmour equalled Gretzky’s 1.67 points-per-game average in the ’93 playoffs, and after years of competing against Number 99 while a member of St. Louis and Calgary, he was finally vaulted into a position of being on equal competitive terms with Gretzky in that series. Gilmour only played four full seasons and parts of three others in Toronto—he came back in 2003 and played one game before suffering a career-ending injury—but that series and his gutsy performance still made him one of the most popular Leafs of the post-expansion era.
Gilmour succeeded Clark as Leafs captain after the trade with Quebec. But Clark one-upped Gilmour by returning to the Leafs not just once, but twice. Less than two years after being dealt to Quebec in 1994, Clark was re-acquired in a deal with the New York Islanders. On March 15, 1996, he made his triumphant return at Maple Leaf Gardens against the Dallas Stars. The Leafs were in desperate shape. Burns had been fired weeks earlier, and scout Nick Beverley—the Kings general manager in ’93—had been thrust behind the Toronto bench. Only six players remained from the roster that had clashed with the Kings and Fletcher was desperate to do something to dramatically improve his team, whatever the cost.
Clark, wearing noticeably bulkier shoulder pads, scored in his return and the Leafs beat Dallas that night. But it’s what happened late in third period during a lull in play that people remember. Clark was on the ice, waiting for the next faceoff. The Gardens seemed to grow oddly quiet, and then organist Jimmy Holmstrom popped in a CD. The very familiar lyrics from the popular sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter filled the Gardens. Just as the song says, the names had all changed, but the dreams had remained. It was a brilliant, emotional moment, and the Gardens crowd rose as one. The officials leaned against the boards, drinking it in with the fans. Clark seemed to briefly tear up. It was an expression of how Toronto fans already longed for those special feelings of just three years earlier when their Leafs came so close against the Kings, and Clark was their beloved leader. It was about him, but it was also about then.
In 2000, as his career wound down, Clark was released by Chicago. He returned to the Leafs one more time. Clark was used sparingly, and was a healthy scratch for seventeen of thirty-seven regular season games. In the first round of the playoffs against Ottawa, he dressed for only two of six games. But when the second round began against New Jersey, Clark was in the lineup at Toronto’s new home, the Air Canada Centre. The Leafs were up 2–1 in the third period, and Clark roared through the neutral zone, crossed the Devils blueline and released one of his patented wrist shots that had so often thrilled Leafs fans. The shot beat Martin Brodeur in the New Jersey net, but struck the post and stayed out. The Toronto fans reacted as if Clark had scored. The whistle blew moments later, and the fans stood for an extended ovation that lasted more than a minute. All for hitting the post. “It was as though the fans knew I was done playing before I did,” wrote Clark in his book Bleeding Blue. He never played another game, and the Leafs have never been as good as when he captained the team.
Clark is one of fourteen Leafs who are part of “Legend’s Row,” a series of bronze statues outside the Air Canada Centre. The young man who came to Toronto off the farm from Kelvington, Saskatchewan, to save the Leafs with his scoring and fighting is a unique character in Leafs history. In his mind, he played at a time when characters and personalities were embraced more than today. “Today if you have a personality, you’re suspended,” he says, only half-jokingly. “You started losing personality with the game the era before me. The time when there were no helmets. You got to know everybody by their face, their hair. You know, Motor City Smitty’s choppy skating style, one hand on the stick. Because you could see faces and hair and everything, you got personality. You could really identify with a player. Today, everybody’s a robot. Kids grow up with mouthguards, neckguards, face guards, helmets. You’ve taken away the personality because of all the equipment and how the game is.”
Clark’s right. But if hockey started losing personality in the era before he played, as he contends, the process accelerated after the ’93 playoffs. It was then that the hockey industry began to change dramatically under the leadership of Gary Bettman and new players’ union boss Bob Goodenow, and the game itself also began to change dramatically. Uniformity, not individuality, became the goal of the NHL head office, which certainly made sense from a business perspective. Hockey began to see the growth of a more homogenous NHL with a more homogenous style of play. New gimmicks flourished. When the Fox Network bought rights to broadcast NHL games, it introduced “FoxTrax,” which came to be known as the “glowing puck,” and talked about re-organizing hockey into a four-period sport.
Player salaries escalated wildly, erasing the myth of hockey players who loved the sport so much they would play for nothing. Rob Blake, for example, was making $165,000 during that series with the Leafs. By 1995, his salary had jumped to $2.25 million, and by 2001 he was making more than $9 million per season, more than the entire payroll of the Leafs team he had faced in that ’93 playoff series. Over the course of twenty seasons, Blake made more than $80 million. By comparison, his teammate Dave Taylor, at one time a member of the highest scoring line in the NHL, never made more than $1 million in any of his seventeen seasons and made about one-tenth of Blake’s career earnings. That’s how much the money in the NHL changed in a generation. In ’93, millionaire players were stars, and still fairly rare. A decade later, they were the fourth-line checkers making less than the NHL average wage. By the turn of the century, making the NHL was no longer just about fulfilling a dream. It was about becoming impossibly rich.
With this escalation of salaries came a new militant attitude from the NHLPA, and led to a series of owner-imposed lockouts. What began with a ten-day walkout from the players in the spring of 1992, the first in NHL history, grew into open warfare between owners and players. Teams in Quebec City and Winnipeg couldn’t keep up with the costs of the game and were squeezed out. They were vibrant, enthusiastic hockey markets in the 1992–93 season, but soon after moved south to new US homes, as it seemed the league no longer cared about protecting the heartland of the game if larger, more lucrative US markets wanted a team.
Along with more money and more focus on profits gradually came greater walls between the media and players, coaches and executives, and between the public and those same figures. The days when Gilmour or Clark would walk out of the east doors of the Gardens onto Church Street and sign a few autographs before walking home or jumping in their car were over.
The ’93 playoffs also marked the end of wooden sticks and goalies wearing equipment that approximated their physical size. New composite sticks gradually came into the game allowing just about anyone to absolutely rip the puck. That, however, didn’t produce a more offensive game. Instead, offence began to wither. Goalies gradually became the most dominant force in the game, using lighter and larger equipment to take up more of the net. As well, the butterfly technique, little used in the early 1990s, gradually became the only accepted goaltending style. Save percentages jumped from around an average of .880 in ’92–93 to .910 by the turn of the century. Along with that came greater use of video by coaches, along with larger coaching staffs and strategies like the neutral zone trap. Analytics invaded the game eventually, and by the 2017–18 season, a new version of the sport had emerged based on speed and possession. The pokecheck—an “active stick”—became more important than the bodycheck. The slapshot as a means of scoring had come close to disappearing.
Comparing eras in the NHL has always been difficult. Technology has played a major role, particularly in the last twenty years. All we can really say is the NHL in 2018 is a far different game than that which the Kings and Leafs used to burn an indelible mark in the memory of hockey fans twenty-five years earlier.
From that series, a basic hockey question remains: why, in the end, did LA beat Toronto? After all, the Leafs were the better team in regular season, won the series opener easily, led the series 3–2 at one point and had Game 7 on home ice. Their best players played well, usually a recipe for success. With all those factors in their favour, the odds were with them. The debate continues to this day as to why the Kings prevailed, although more from the Leaf side of the equation where Fraser’s Game 6 call still endures as a primary point of complaint. The problem with that reasoning, of course, is that the Leafs still had Game 7 at Maple Leaf Gardens after that call, and as a team that had already won two seventh games in those playoffs, they should have been a team more confident of victory. The Fraser call extended the series, perhaps, but it didn’t decide the series.
From the LA point of view, many believe McSorley’s hit on Gilmour in Game 1, and his resulting bout with Clark, was actually the decisive sequence, robbing the Leafs of the momentum that should have been theirs after a resounding, series opening victory. “It was the pivotal moment of the series,” says Hrudey. McSorley was one of the most influential players at both ends of the ice with his skills and his fists. “Marty was a beast in that series,” says Berg. “Everybody talks about Gretz and all that. But the guy who killed us in that series was Marty.”
Toronto was primarily a defensive team that relied on a few players to generate offence, while LA was primarily an offensive team that, with the biggest payroll in the game, had several good scorers along with Gretzky, perhaps the greatest offensive player in the history of the game. As the ’93 conference final wore on, and as the two teams grew increasingly weary and bruised, it became more of an offensive series. In the final two games, eighteen goals were scored, ten by the Kings. It was wildly entertaining, and a style of play that favoured the high-scoring Kings.
Neither Dave Andreychuk nor Nikolai Borschevsky, who had combined to score fifty-nine goals for the Leafs during the regular season, scored at all against the Kings. Andreychuk, a right-handed shot playing left wing, was nullified almost completely by the right side of the LA defence, particularly McSorley and Blake. They had the requisite size and nastiness to deal with him. Toronto was more effective than LA at even strength, but the Kings power play was better, scoring four times in Game 6 alone. Even more decisive was the fact that LA scored four short-handed goals in the series to none for the Leafs, and won two of the three games in which they scored while Toronto was on the power play. Gilmour, Clark and Anderson combined for more than 60 percent of Toronto’s goals, while the Kings had a more balanced attack and got goals from thirteen different players. Goaltending wasn’t a deciding factor. Hrudey was marginally better in the final two games, stopping fifty-three of sixty-one shots while Potvin saved fifty-one of an identical sixty-one LA drives.
One of the aspects of the series that hasn’t received a great deal of focus over the years is why Burns and the Leafs coaching staff didn’t devise a specific plan to stop Gretzky, and force other LA players to beat them. In the first round against Detroit that year, Wings forward Dino Ciccarelli had been a major problem for the Leafs early in the series, but Toronto came up with a new game plan in Game 3 to make Ciccarelli less of a factor in front of the net and it worked brilliantly. But no similar adjustments were made to stop Gretzky as he heated up in the LA series. Burns seemed to either discount the fact that Gretzky alone could beat him, or he decided matching against him was too difficult, and he needed to be able to play various groups against him. Maybe Gretzky lulled the Leafs into a false sense of security by being relatively ineffective in the first five games of the series. Whatever the reason, the Leafs simply rotated defencemen against Number 99, rather than assigning a specific pair, and used a variety of forwards, rather than assigning a player or a line to check the game’s most prolific player.
In Game 7, the Leafs, who had the last change on home ice, were caught with rookie Kent Manderville assigned to check Gretzky with the game tied 2–2. Not surprisingly, Gretzky won that matchup, and scored to put his team ahead 3–2. Defenceman Bob Rouse is still bothered by the fact the Leafs didn’t have a specific game plan for Gretzky. “He got better and better. I just don’t think we paid enough attention to him,” says Rouse today. “We had no game plan trying to stop Wayne Gretzky. That may have been a bit of a blunder. I just never felt there was an emphasis on that.” To be fair, few teams had ever had much success shadowing Gretzky, and he was difficult to track, often jumping on with different linemates or even seeming to play left wing or right wing.
Most hockey analysts would have given the Leafs the coaching edge before the series. Melrose was a raw rookie as an NHL head coach, while Burns was one of the most high-profile coaches in the game and had been to a Stanley Cup final. As it turned out, Melrose was more than up to the task of coaching against Burns. He shuffled his lines more, using Gretzky on eight separate lines in Game 1 alone. He got more from fourth-line players like Conacher and Dave Taylor than the Leafs did from similar players on their rosters. His players rallied around him, appreciated his style and liked the way he helped players like Hrudey when they struggled. Leafs players, meanwhile, appreciated Burns’s ability to teach, but feared him. Some loathed him, and that dislike was a unifying factor for the players. This much is true: most expected Burns to thoroughly outcoach Melrose, and that didn’t happen. It was a saw-off at worst, which was essentially a victory for the California side.
Melrose lasted only a season and a half more with the Kings and never had any further success as an NHL coach. In fact, the Tampa Bay Lightning was the only other NHL team to hire him, and they fired him after just sixteen games. Burns, on the other hand, coached another 418 NHL games after Toronto with Boston and New Jersey, and won the Stanley Cup with the Devils in 2003. He’s in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Burns was, compared to Melrose, by far the more celebrated and successful NHL coach. They weren’t equals before or after that series, but for seven games in the ’93 playoffs, they were.
There was also the unpredictable element of what folks in the industry might call puck luck. Alexei Zhitnik’s slapshot ricocheted off Rouse’s leg directly to Donnelly with Game 7 tied 3–3, and gave Donnelly an open net to score. Only thirty-seven seconds later, Gretzky got an even better bounce off Ellett’s skate for another LA goal. To what can such fortuitous bounces be attributed? Probably nothing more than the natural unpredictability of a sport played on slippery ice by players moving very quickly on razor sharp blades chasing a piece of vulcanized rubber. That’s hockey.
A generation later, the memories probably linger more in Toronto where the fans still wait for another Stanley Cup, and where hockey is more part of the daily conversation. In LA, two Cups won by the Kings in 2012 and 2014 have written the most successful chapter in team history. For many, beating the Leafs in ’93 has been surpassed by defeating the Devils and the Rangers to lift the greatest trophy in sports.
But Toronto sure remembers ’93, the heightened sense of drama and the extraordinary competition. For the most part, the players who competed love to relive the games, the moments. It was a spectacular, interesting time to be a hockey fan. It was a time when the game seemed just a little bit out of control, both on and off the ice, because it was. A time when the value of a player was defined more by his ability than his contract and the salary cap space his pay cheque represented.
For fourteen days in May, 1993, the Leafs and Kings captivated the hockey world at a time when passions seemed to run a little higher, burn a little brighter.
It’s easy to miss what the sport had then that it doesn’t have now.