In the Box with John Kreiser

In the Box with John Kreiser
Remembering the 1967 Maple Leafs
By John Kreiser, Featured Columnist

It was the spring before the Summer of Love. The NHL was a six-team league, untainted by the offensive mayhem of Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky, the rigors of coast-to-coast travel, the plethora of third jerseys. Just six teams, the same way it had been for 25 years.
And the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. Had Leaf fans known then what they know now, the end-of-the-war-like celebration that accompanied the victory might have lasted a lot longer.
Thirty years have gone by since May 2, 1967, when George Armstrong's empty-net goal sealed the 3-1 victory in Game 6 that gave the geriatric Leafs their 11th title. Three decades later, they're still stuck on 11, which made last week's 30-year reunion of that championship team a little more special.
The 1967 Leafs were a textbook argument for the worthlessness of the regular season. They were riddled by injuries; Ron Ellis' team-high 22 goals were the lowest total ever to lead a modern Cup-winner. The Maple Leafs lost 10 straight games in one stretch, and coach/GM Punch Imlach was so frazzled that he checked into a hospital for a brief stay.
But the Leafs regrouped and made the playoffs, passing the Rangers in the final week to finish third. That earned them a meeting with first-place Chicago (the pairings then were 1-3 and 2-4) in the opening round. With an average age of 31.2, the only apparent advantage the Leafs had was experience; the Blackhawks had the game's most feared scorers in Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, who headed a star-studded cast that had finished with 94 points, 19 more than Toronto.
However, the Leafs' goaltending warhorses, Johnny Bower and Terry Sawchuk, weathered everything the Hawks could throw at them. The result, a stunning six-game victory that defenseman Marcel Pronovost, another oldie-but-goodie, calls "the real upset."
The Leafs-Canadiens final was everything Canada could have asked for in its centennial year. The rivalry was so intense that even the Hockey Night In Canada crews didn't do the traditional mix-and-match for the final. The Leafs got some added incentive when someone in Montreal remarked how good the Stanley Cup looked in the Quebec Pavilion at Expo '67, the World's Fair being staged that year. The Canadiens, who won in 1966, had the Cup on display in the provincial pavilion and obviously had no intentions of giving it up.
But give it up they did. The Leafs' plodding checkers and ancient defense slowed Montreal's Flying Frenchmen to a crawl. Toronto also caught a few breaks, winning Game 3 in double overtime and getting a heroic effort from Sawchuk when Bower was injured just before Game 4. The line of Bob Pulford, Jim Pappin and Pete Stemkowski did the checking job of a lifetime and Leafs center Dave Keon was everywhere, checking, scoring and generally making life miserable for anyone in bleu, blanc, et rouge; he did it well enough to earn the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
A dozen Leafs, including Imlach, wound up in the Hall of Fame, but only three ever sipped champagne from the Cup again. Time quickly caught up with an aging team, with Imlach paying the price for the Leafs' inability to discover new talent when he was fired after the 1968-69 season, which ended in a four-game sweep by Boston -- though ironically, those Leafs had a better winning percentage than the Cup champs of two years earlier. "What do you have to do, win the Stanley Cup every year?" said a miffed Keon, who continued to excel for the Leafs until 1975, when owner Harold Ballard basically ran him out of town and into the WHA -- a bitter memory that has estranged the star center and the team to this day.
Sawchuk died in 1970 of complications after a scuffle with a New York Rangers teammate following what would have been his final NHL season anyway, and another netminder, Bruce Gamble, died of a heart attack 15 years ago. Most of the rest of the '67s are in good health -- but the same cannot be said for the current Leafs, who have yet to make it back to the finals since that fabled night in May and show no signs of getting there any time soon.
"They may not have been the best players," Imlach said at the time of his last championship team, "but they never quit, never let me beat them and they sure weren't going to let the other team win."
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME: Three weeks ago, the Philadelphia Flyers were in ruins, a team that had lost confidence in almost everyone and everything. Now, they're two home games away from the Eastern Conference championship round. They can thank the Boston Bruins for the turnaround.
Why Boston? Follow this: The Bruins beat Pittsburgh on the final day of the season, dropping the Penguins into sixth place in the East and giving the Flyers a much-easier first round opponent. Had Pittsburgh won, the Flyers would have met the New York Rangers, who had beaten them twice in the last week of the season and embarrassed Ron Hextall in the process. Instead, Philadelphia got to play a team with a weak, non-physical defense, one superstar on the way out (Mario Lemieux) and another trying to play on one leg (Jaromir Jagr, who missed time with a groin injury).
With Garth Snow replacing Hextall, a five-game blitz got the Flyers to round two, where instead of meeting the Rangers, they got to face a Buffalo team without its best offensive player (Pat LaFontaine, who's missed most of the season) and its MVP goaltender, Dominik Hasek. The Dominator missed most of the first-round series with a knee injury, and any dreams the Sabres might have had of getting him back early in the second round disappeared when Hasek was suspended for three games by the NHL for attacking a writer.
Steve Shields, who won the Ottawa series in goal, showed that he's no Hasek in the opening game, giving up a bad goal in the final minute as the Flyers rallied to win Game 1. Philly's 2-1 win in Game 2 sends the Flyers back home with a chance to sweep.
And in the third round? The Flyers will play either the Rangers or New Jersey -- with the winner likely to be worn down by a series that looks like an on-ice version of Rollerball (It's a '70s flick with James Caan about a violent futuristic sport). This isn't to say that the Flyers haven't been good ... but a break here and there doesn't hurt, either.
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