This Day in Hockey History – October 15, 1983 – More to Score

Oct 15, 2019

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The goals came so quickly, the commentators could hardly keep up and the goalies certainly didn’t. On October 15, 1983, the Chicago Blackhawks and the Toronto Maple Leafs matched a record they set in 1977 and set two NHL speed scoring records that still stand.

The game was held at Maple Leaf Gardens for 16,382 fans, and the home team won 10-8. The total between the teams (18 goals) matched Chicago’s record for most goals scored in one game by both teams. Crazy enough, these two teams originally had set the record at Chicago Stadium on February 20, 1977, when Toronto also won 10-8. This was only three goals short of the NHL record of 21 goals in one game set back in 1920.

It did not take long before the scoreboard saw action. Only 43 seconds into the game, Toronto led things off. They scored again at 1:01 making the score 2-0 in about a minute. As the first period progressed, the Blackhawks were able to tie only to watch Toronto sink two more in the last five minutes.

Clearly, Chicago’s goalie was struggling. At 40, Tony Esposito was the oldest player in the NHL at the time. However, as Coach Orval Tessier noted, “I don’t think Tony had a great night, but pointing the finger at one guy when a whole group of guys didn’t have a great night, either, isn’t the answer. In the first period we had 16 turnovers in our own zone.”

In the second period, both teams rallied at the same time. Setting two NHL records, they scored five goals within the span of 1:24. This beat the record for the fastest five goals by two teams (1:39) that had been set by the Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings back in 1944. In the process, they had four goals in 53 seconds which broke the previous record (1:01) for four fastest as well. As commentator Gary Dornhoefer exclaimed, “Our statistician is going out of his mind.”

The free-for-all started about three minutes after Toronto’s Mike Palmateer blocked Rick Paterson’s penalty shot. As with the rest of the game, Toronto started the party. At 16:49, Gaston Gingras scored a “power-play goal from just inside the Hawk blue line.” Between 17:12 and 17:42, in exactly 30 seconds, the Blackhawks scored three goals. The first and third were the second and third goals of the night for Denis Savard, earning him a hat trick. Finally, only 31 seconds later at 18;13, the Leafs brought the score up to 8-6. In the midst of this, Dornhoefer remarked, “It’s been a wild one here in Toronto. They’re going for goals tonight. You like scoring, you got it.”

For the third time that night, Toronto scored the first goal of the period. Chicago came back with two more goals to bring themselves within a chance of at least tying. Unfortunately for them, it instead came down to poor Esposito. In the final seconds, he was caught too far out of his zone and threw his stick in a desperate attempt to stop the puck shot by Greg Terrion. Although Terrion missed the empty net, he made good on the resulting penalty shot.

Earlier, commentator Bob Cole had remarked, “But it’s no sense even talking about defense. We haven’t seen any all night.” Similarly, the Chicago Tribune called it “a hockey game so sloppy it could have passed for a mud-wrestling match.” Coach Tessier remarked, “We could talk about this game until tomorrow morning and still come up with plays we’ve never seen before. I told them it’s a game we had best forget in a hurry. You lose 2-1 or 10-8 it’s still a loss. Defensively, we made a ton of mistakes.”

Surprisingly, by the end of the regular season, the Blackhawks (with 68 points) finished ahead of the Maple Leafs (with 61 points), despite only winning five away games.