Taking Back A Piece of History

There was a interesting little note in the fine print of Kevin Dupont's hockey column in the Boston Globe on Sunday that will take Maple Leaf fans back a little in recent history.

Goalie Felix Potvin, Dupont reported, has decided to retire at age 35, with no takers for his netminding services. Potvin is the last member of the 1992-93 Leaf team that made it to Game 7 of the Western Conference final against Los Angeles before losing a heartbreaker on home ice to pack it in.

Potvin, of course, was also the main man in the Leaf net the following autumn when the club set an NHL record for wins from the start of the season with 10, a mark that could be in jeopardy this week as the Buffalo Sabres remain perfect out of the gate with eight consecutive victories.

And whose record did the Leafs break back in '93? Why, one owned by the Sabres, of course, the 1975-76 Buffalo squad that opened the year with eight straight wins to tie a previous best set by the 1934-35 Leafs.

So the Sabres may be looking to get a piece of their history back this week. They have Montreal on the road Monday night, and if they win that one they can tie the record of 10 straight wins to open the season on Thursday on Long Island.

The record-breaking contest would be at home against red-hot Atlanta on Saturday.

Back in October, 1993 the Leafs tied the previous record with their eighth straight win in Miami against the Florida Panthers, a 4-3 triumph with Potvin's backup, Damian Rhodes, in net.

They then set a new mark against Tampa Bay before 22,880 at the St. Petersburg "Thunderdome," and extended it to 10 games with a 4-2 triumph in Chicago that ended a four-year, 13-game losing streak in the Windy City. Potvin made 46 saves in that game.

The streak was ended on Saturday night in Montreal Oct. 30, 1993 with a 5-2 loss to the then defending Stanley Cup champion Canadiens.

Four days later Doug Gilmour signed a new five-year, $15 million contract, and a day after that Nikolai Borschevsky had his spleen removed after a game against the Panthers at Maple Leaf Gardens.

The Leafs started 12-1-2 that season, amassed 32 points in the standings in their first 21 games and went all the way the Western Conference final again, losing to Vancouver.

Comments

[Mark]

Thanks for the history lesson. Yawn. I'm surprised you didn't trott out the old "Kerry Frasier cost us a cup.." diatribe. I can't figure out how you manage to keep your editors at bay. One day I read your 'Spin' and it's a collection of one-liners .. a stream of consciousness that shows no thread. The next time I get a history lesson. How about writing something with a bit of depth that is relevant in 2006?

[Ron Rogers]

The Buffalo-Montreal game tonite sounds like it'll be a good one; definitely one of the more highly anticipated matchups of this early season. So I suppose I shouldn't be at all surprised to find out that I won't be able to actually watch the game on television, unless I choose to invest an enormous chunk of change in the NHL's pay-per-view package. It'd be nice to see tonite's game, but do I really want to fork over that kind of cash to eventually watch a mid-week November game between, say, Columbus and Chicago??

But hey, I'm sure TSN and Sportsnet will be happy to provide viewers with another 6 or 8 hours of intense, exciting poker coverage!!

[Mark C.]

It's a shame that neither of these two franchises has ended a season on a win streak in the past forty years, after giving their fans so much to hope for while swapping this record back and forth.

[Simon]

I know that this won't make it into the comments section but I'd like to give my $.02 anyway.

Where does the first commenter (Mark) get the nerve to complain about the types of things that are being written as opposed to, say, the arguments therein? Does he realize that this is:

1) a WebLog, and hence an *informal* forum for ideas?
2) written in addition to 1 or 2 polished articles per day?
3) FREE to read (or not to read)?

It's analagous to asking a construction worker to build you a utility shed while he is building your house and then getting pissed when he paints the shed the wrong color.

It ticks me off when people use the internet to say things that they would never say if they were standing in front of the person to whom the comments were directed. It's as though the anonymity gives them some sort of license to be uncivil.