Rangers 1970 Season Finale

[DarkStar50 679]

Hey Theo,

I was at this game! Oh, to be young, dumb, and a Rangers fan!

Emile Francis and the 1969-70 New York Rangers clawed their way into the playoffs on the final day that season.

Recalling the NHL's wildest day

By John Kreiser and John Halligan

NHL.com correspondents

April 18, 2006

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The end of each NHL season brings a frantic chase for the final playoff berths. But no season has had the kind of wild finish that hockey fans saw on the final day of 1969-70.

The New York Rangers trudged home for the season finale against the Detroit Red Wings on April 5, 1970, looking at one of the biggest collapses in NHL history. Five weeks earlier, they had been in first place in the tight Eastern Conference, only to fall apart after their star defenseman, Brad Park, went down with a broken ankle in Detroit on Feb. 28. Park made it back into the lineup in only four weeks and helped the Rangers to a pair of wins, but after a disheartening 6-2 loss at Detroit on the night of April 4, they appeared all but dead.

The only thing keeping the Rangers alive was the Montreal Canadiens' struggles. The two-time defending Stanley Cup champs had a chance to wrap up the fourth and final playoff berth in the East. But while the Rangers were losing in Detroit (allowing the Wings to clinch a playoff spot), the Canadiens lost to Chicago at home, leaving them only two points ahead of New York.

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Still, the Rangers knew when they took the ice at Madison Square Garden on Sunday afternoon that not only would they have to beat the Wings, they would have to score a lot of goals in the process. A Ranger win and a Montreal loss would leave the teams with the exact, same record, but the Canadiens entered the final day of the season with five more goals scored, which, under the rules in effect at the time, would have given them the playoff berth.

Coach Emile Francis tried to rally his troops after the loss in Detroit and keep their spirits up for the return match. "This game is slippery. It's played on ice. We're not out yet, and we won't stop fighting until the last soldier is dead," he said. One by one, the players filed sullenly into the anteroom to retrieve their topcoats. None of them spoke.

The teams got into New York early on the morning of April 5 -- less than 12 hours before the scheduled 2 p.m. start. Morning came faster than usual, and it wasn't an overly joyous morning, either. There was a power failure in the coffee shop at the Rangers' hotel near Madison Square Garden, and breakfast was not available. Some players went elsewhere; others just skipped breakfast and pocketed the meal money.

With the game on national TV, a lot of Ranger fans -- and the team's top management -- stayed home. They missed one of the great performances in the team's 80-plus year history.

"I had a game plan, I really did," Francis recalls, 36 years after the game. "I was going to keep changing lines and keep the shifts down to 30 seconds each, 45 seconds tops. It was the only way."

If the Garden fans were skeptical that the Rangers could somehow make the playoffs, the players weren't. Walt Tkaczuk nearly scored on the first shift of the game, and Rod Gilbert did score on the second.

Rookie forward Jack Egers, who had become a fan favorite because of his booming shot, connected at 8:25, and Dave Balon beat a beleaguered Roger Crozier at 12:21.

"It was incredible," Francis says of the onslaught. "I mean, we hadn't gotten three goals in a period in almost two months!"

Winning goaltender Eddie Giacomin was pulled in the Rangers' stunning 9-5 victory.

Egers scored again before the end of the period, making it 4-1 and giving Rangers fans some hope. "Of course, it was possible," Francis said. "I knew it, and it was my job to make sure the players knew it too."

The onslaught continued when Gilbert scored 20 seconds into the second period. Ron Stewart kept the fans in a frenzy with two more goals, giving the Rangers a 7-2 lead after two periods. By the time the third period began, the seats that had been empty at the start of the game were filled with brand-new believers.

"There were maybe 7,500 people in the stands at the start of the game," Park said. "At the end of the first period, we were leading 4-1, and we came out for the start of the second period and there were something like 12,000 people there. I think we were leading 7-2 after the second period, and we came out for the start of the third period and the place was full."

The Rangers had fired 39 shots at Crozier after two periods, and the best was yet to come. Balon scored twice in the first 9:48 of the third period to give the Rangers nine goals -- meaning that Montreal would now have to get at least five to make the playoffs (the Rangers had allowed fewer goals and would win the next tiebreaker if the teams had the same number of goals scored). Francis was so desperate for more that he pulled goaltender Ed Giacomin four times in the final minutes, surrendering a pair of empty-net goals amid the Rangers' barrage. New York wound up firing 26 shots in the third period and 65 for the game -- a team record that still stands.

The stunning 9-5 victory sent Rangers fans to their radios, trying to pick up the broadcast of the Canadiens-Hawks game from Chicago Stadium. One pair of enterprising fans even took a plane to Chicago and managed to get tickets.

Luckily for the Rangers, the game meant a lot to the Hawks, who needed a victory to finish first. The game was close for a while, but after the Hawks took a two-goal lead, the desperate Canadiens tried the same pull-the-goalie tactic that Francis had used. Instead, the Hawks kept hitting the empty net, sending the Chicago Stadium faithful into an uproar and turning a competitive game into a 10-2 rout that sent the Rangers into the playoffs.

It was a night like the NHL had never seen, and one that Park still remembers. "I was at Mr. Laffs (a popular New York pub)," he says, "and when I heard that the Blackhawks had won, I was so exited that I wound up buying a round at the bar. It was the most expensive round I ever bought."

[DarkStar50 679]

Unfortunately, they lost in the first round of the playoffs. The Rangers...........