After a Record Streak, a Blown Call Ended the 1979-80 Flyers' Quest For
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The best there never was: After a record streak, a blown call ended the 1979-80 Flyers’ quest for a third Stanley Cup by Frank Fitzpatrick, Updated: February 12, 2019 -The Philadelphia Inquirer ELWOOD P. SMITH / FILE PHOTOGRAPH First in a six-part year-long series about the best local teams that never won a championship. Today: 1979-80 Flyers. Coming in April: the 1976-77 Sixers. When Pat Quinn replaced that day’s traditional practices with mandatory bonding sessions, during which his players could compete in anything but hockey, the Flyers coach began referring to Mondays as “Fun Days.” Though the name sounded oddly genteel for a sport that celebrated grinders and goons, the weekly softball, volleyball, and touch-football games, followed by beers at Rexy’s or the Philadium, helped fuse the 1979-80 Flyers, a loosely connected roster of veteran minor-leaguers, talented prospects, and leftover stars from the franchise’s back-to-back Stanley Cup champions. “We were together all the time,” said Bob Kelly. “If you didn’t blend in, you weren’t there very long.” INQUIRER FILE Pat Quinn (standing) coached Behn Wilson (left), Bob Dailey, Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber and Reggie Leach to an incredible 35-game win streak in 1979, but his Flyers team fell just short of another Stanley Cup. They drank together. They hung out together. They fought together. And they won together. Playing with a persistent pugnacity, they shot to the top of the NHL and stayed there, defeated only 12 times in 80 regular-season games. But the 1979-80 Flyers suffered together too, never more so than when, hours after their season was jolted to a close in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals, they boarded a bus for a journey back to Philadelphia that would be muffled by disappointment. “That bus trip home,” goalie Phil Myre recalled, “it wasn’t a happy one.” Until that Saturday before Memorial Day 1980, Quinn’s Flyers had seemed invincible. They lost once in their first 37 games, put together an NHL-record 35-game unbeaten streak spanning 86 days, compiled a league-best 116 points, won 11 of their first 13 postseason games. Then suddenly on that afternoon in Uniondale, N.Y., in the last nationally televised NHL game in the United States for a decade, fate turned on them. The Flyers’ enchanted season, one of the most memorable in franchise history, concluded with a controversial 5-4 overtime loss to the Islanders, a defeat made more maddening by three questionable New York goals, one the result of a legendary lapse by linesman Leon Stickle. “If we were going to lose,” Bill Barber, who had 40 goals that season, said nearly four decades later, “we didn’t want it to be that way.” The Philadelphia Inquirer sports cover on May 25, 1980, the day after the Flyers lost the Stanley Cup. What really stung was the knowledge that had they beaten New York that day, Game 7 would have been at the Spectrum, where the 1979-80 Flyers won all but seven of 51 regular-season and postseason contests. “The Islanders were really good, but I don’t think we’d have lost a Game 7 at home,” said Kelly, the turbo-charged left winger whose 10-year Flyers career ended that day. “But what can you do? They didn’t have replay yet and Leon Stickle sucked.” Every hockey season yields a harvest of physical and mental anguish. The bumps and bruises eventually disappear. The psychological hurts, especially those untreatable “what-might-have-been” wounds, linger. Even now, almost four decades later, those Flyers lament their lost opportunity. “You talk about being depressed and disappointed,” said Barber, 66, now a Flyers scouting consultant. “When you put in the kind of year we did, holy moly, a championship would have been icing on the cake. We’re proud of the streak and what we accomplished. But we were there to win a championship. And we fell short.” Most would never win another Stanley Cup. Quinn would coach 18 more NHL seasons without one. And only two of the 26 players who wore the Black and Orange in 1979-80 would subsequently get a championship – Ken Linseman and Tom Gorence with the 1984 Oilers. Building toward greatness It’s hard to say when the transformation of the 1979-80 Flyers began, when a team apparently in decline morphed into a juggernaut. Their schedule would suggest it happened after their second game, a 9-2 blowout loss in Atlanta on Oct. 13. “We absolutely got blistered,” Barber recalled. “I remember thinking, 'Wow, if this is how it’s going to be, we’re all going to be embarrassed.’ But that’s not the kind of team we were. We came together and we started winning. And we didn’t lose until January.” Others pointed to the morning Quinn stormed off the ice during a practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Class of 1923 rink. If it was a motivational ploy by the second-year coach, it worked. “Bobby Clarke got us together on the ice,” recalled goalie Pete Peeters, 62, a retired goaltending coach for several NHL teams. “We all felt like we’d disrespected Pat. "Then we went and bag-skated ourselves,” he said, referring to drills usually reserved for punishment. Myre thought the spark came later, when an oddly timed team meeting in November helped turn an impressive streak into a historic one. “We’d just won at Los Angeles and Vancouver [pushing it to 16] and Bobby Clarke called a players-only meeting,” said Myre. “He was ticked off with how we’d played. His message was that if we kept it up, we wouldn’t be successful. Everybody was like, 'What are you doing, Bobby? We won both games.’ But he was clear. That was a turning point for us.” That run of 25 victories and 10 ties, still the longest in the major professional sports, shocked everyone, especially those who’d picked Philadelphia to finish behind both New York teams in the Patrick Division. The prognosticators’ pessimism was understandable. In the four seasons since winning consecutive Cups in 1974-75, Philadelphia’s victory total had dipped annually – from 51 to 48 to 45 to 40. And when Quinn replaced the fired Bob McCammon in January 1979, he became the Flyers’ third coach in eight months. “When we started to slip, everybody loved to bury us,” said Mel Bridgman, who replaced Clarke as captain in 1979-80. “We were not the most loved team in the league.” Nor, on paper, the most impressive. Clarke was only 30, but the grind of centering the first line, killing penalties, and taking his turn on power plays had worn him down physically. Peeters was an untested 22-year-old goalie. And the defense was a mess, so banged-up and thin that Quinn summoned three longtime minor-leaguers to help. “If you looked at our team in the beginning of the year and heard someone say we were going to go 35 games without losing and get to the Finals, you’d have laughed,” said Barber. But after that spanking in Atlanta, the Flyers wouldn’t lose until the decades changed. “So many people around the league came up to me and said, ‘How the heck are you guys doing this? With mirrors?’" Quinn, who died at 71 in 2014, told the Inquirer in 1990. “They’d see defensemen like Norm Barnes, Mike Busniuk, and Frank Bathe and a winger like Al Hill and they just couldn’t understand how we were able to play so well.” Much of the credit had to go to Quinn, a gruff, 36-year-old former defenseman who liked cigars and three-piece suits, who ran crisp practices and cozied up to his players. “He reminded me of Doug Pederson,” said Kelly. “He had a good feel for us and for chemistry. He was a player and he knew how to put people together.” As a player, Quinn had been a plodding but chippy blue-liner. Behind the bench, though, he was surprisingly laid back, a coach who rarely lost his cool. “I played with Pat in Atlanta and he was mean,” said Myre. “But as a coach he wasn’t. He didn’t try to change people. He let you be yourself. We had a highly disciplined, very competitive team. We didn’t need a lot of verbal or psychological motivation. That was really contrary to what we were used to.” Quinn shook things up. He made Clarke a playing assistant coach and reduced his on-ice workload. He gave the captain’s responsibility to Bridgman and more playing time to sniper Reggie Leach, who responded with a team-high 50 goals. He got insurance for Peeters by acquiring Myre in a trade with St. Louis. Looking for a two-way line, he teamed rookie Brian Propp, aggravating center Linseman, and Paul Holmgren. They would outscore the Clarke-Barber-Leach line and drive opposing lines to distraction. But his most prescient move might have been promoting several of the unspectacular players he’d coached with the Flyers’ Maine farm team, including Hill and “The Three B’s” — gritty defensemen Busniuk, 28; Norm Barnes, 26; and Frank Bathe, 25. “In my opinion, our success was due to the ‘Three B’s’ back there,” said Kelly, 68, now a Flyers ambassador. “Nobody knew them, but they played really tough hockey. They stayed at home. They were old-school.” While their penalty-minute total made it appear these were the same old Flyers, the 1979-80 team was actually transitioning from its brutish Broad Street Bullies days into a more freewheeling style, the kind Montreal had used in winning the previous four Cups.