PHILADELPHIA: The root of 1 the wildest brawls in NHL historical past got here solely per week earlier, when Ottawa’s Martin Havlat’s rocked Mark Recchi within the face along with his stick and drew a two-recreation suspension.
The Ottawa instigator was a repeat offender, and his strike on the lengthy-time well-liked Flyers ahead led Philadelphia coach Ken Hitchcock to declare of Havlat: “Someday somebody’s going to make him eat his lunch.”
Boy, did the Flyers pay attention.
What occurred on March 5, 2004 on Philadelphia’s residence ice — years earlier than goons went the best way of helmetless hockey and earlier than the troubling penalties of repeated blows to the top have been laid naked — grew to become the stuff of NHL legend.
Multiple brawls. Blood. Players tossed. Even the rarified ruckus of a goalie-vs.-goalie throwdown.
The recreation nonetheless holds the document for many penalty minutes in a recreation in NHL historical past with 419. It broke the document of 406 set in 1981 throughout a recreation between Boston and the Minnesota North Stars.
Combatants from that memorable evening look again on the previous-faculty scrap with some delight and laughs, believing it introduced every group collectively. From Flyers powerful man Donald Brashear vs. Rob Ray to nonfighters dropping the gloves, that South Philly slugfest is the trendy hockey normal for teamwide pugilism.
“Once it got to a tipping point,” mentioned Flyers goalie Robert Esche, “you knew it didn’t matter what was going to happen. It was just going to continue to unravel. I don’t know, we thought it was comical. We thought it was awesome, it was entertaining, it was fun to be a part of.”
It was a large number to kind out. Officials wanted about 90 minutes after the sport ended to calculate the penalties that included 21 combating majors and 20 ejections and a handful extra misconducts.
“It was like faceoff, drop, boom,” Ray mentioned. “They’d go at it, kicked out. Faceoff, drop, boom, go at it, and get kicked out.”
The remaining rating, Flyers 5, Senators 3, was a mere footnote. The Flyers racked up 213 penalty minutes — nonetheless the one-recreation group document — and Ottawa had 206. There have been 409 complete penalty minutes within the third interval. Brashear had 34 alone.
“When you go into a locker room like that, the bell rang, we stepped up to it,” former Senators heart Bryan Smolinski mentioned. “Everyone had to do what they did, and I think both teams became a closer-knit team after that because everyone knew that you had to step up for your teammates.”
True to a franchise famously nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies, the Flyers set their hearts — and fists — on retribution after Havlat’s excessive-stick. Even so, the fisticuffs didn’t really get heated the ultimate two minutes of the sport when Brashear triggered the melee by beginning a combat with Ray; the TV broadcast again then shortly flashed an on-display “Tale of the Tape” graphic.
It was Ray’s 294th and remaining combat.
“Brashear gave it to him pretty good,” then-teammate and fellow pugilist Todd Simpson mentioned. “Ray was bleeding out of both eyes, and it just didn’t look great, but it was fair. It wasn’t like dirty or mean or anything.”
Simpson nonetheless wonders what occurred to impress Brashear into going after Ottawa defenseman Brian Pothier, which reignited the melee. Even the goalies bought concerned, as Ottawa’s Patrick Lalime skated from his crease to get at Esche, and everybody else partnered as much as commerce punches.
“I wish I was out there — it looked like fun,” mentioned then-Flyers defenseman Chris Therien, who was left the sport with harm within the first interval. “It gets to a point where it ends up being more like a WWE event than an actual hockey game.”
Once all of the particles was cleared and calm restored, the combating continued as Senators powerful man Chris Neil went after Radovan Somik and 6-foot-9 Zdeno Chara after a lot smaller defenseman counterpart Mattias Timander.
That didn’t sit effectively with Hitchcock. Or with Bobby Clarke, Philadelphia’s common supervisor and captain of the Broad Street Bullies Stanley Cup groups of the Nineteen Seventies, who later tried to get into the visiting locker room to get to Senators coach Jacques Martin.
“Some of it was guys picking the wrong guys to dance with and kind of that stuff,” then-Flyers winger John LeClair mentioned. “So, ‘All right, you’re going to do that, the next shift up we’re going to do this.’”
The puck had dropped for 3 seconds earlier than Michal Handzus went after Mike Fisher.
“I guess I was the instigator of the whole thing,” Hitchcock mentioned this week. “I tried to run his bench out. That’s what I tried to do. I knew he had two less players, and so I just tried to run his bench out so he’d have zero and I’d have two left.”
The groups really performed 24 seconds earlier than the subsequent spherical of fights broke out. Smolinski and Recchi discovered one another at heart ice, and even LeClair and Wade Redden dropped the gloves. Before the subsequent faceoff, Hitchcock advised Sharp that he was to go after No. 39 — good buddy and up to date No. 2 draft choose Jason Spezza, when he bought on the ice.
In the ultimate minutes, Ottawa’s Peter Bondra thought he heard Flyers backup goalie Sean Burke attempting to goad him right into a combat. Bondra, from Slovakia, wasn’t a lot of a fighter and didn’t even know what would occur if his opponent’s two goalies have been thrown out.
“Good thing I wasn’t undressing myself like ‘Slap Shot,’” Bondra mentioned.
Longtime Senators captain Daniel Alfredsson and Flyers winger Sami Kapanen requested one another, “‘Should we go as well?” before deciding against it. Five players remained on the bench when the game ended.
“There was more coaches than players left,” Alfredsson said.
The consequences showed how engrained fighting was in the game and were actually quite mild. Only Philadelphia’s Danny Markov emerged with a suspension — one recreation for his third ejection of the season.
“It was kind of unusual for our team, really, because we weren’t known as a team that was a physical team or an aggressive team,” Martin mentioned. “I’m still kind of amazed that we’re still in the record book for the most penalties that game against the Flyers.”
That doesn’t imply both group regretted it. The Senators made the playoffs for an eighth consecutive season, and the Flyers reached Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final earlier than shedding to eventual champion Tampa Bay.
Recchi, like Alfredsson now a Hall of Famer, thinks Philadelphia was heading in that path anyway — however the brawl didn’t harm.
“It’s what you do as teammates,” Recchi mentioned. “A special bond, and when you go through stuff like that — we had guys that I don’t think ever had a fight in their life before and that were fighting.”
Guys like Sharp, who fought solely a handful extra instances within the NHL. Plenty of targets, but it surely’s laborious to copy how he felt that evening.
“About as loud as I’ve heard a building,” Sharp mentioned. “It was awesome. I had so many messages after the game, and the building, the energy, the fans, it was loud. I felt like a tough guy skating off the ice.”
___
AP Hockey Writer John Wawrow contributed.
___
AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
(This story has not been edited by News18 employees and is revealed from a syndicated information company feed – Associated Press)
