Playoff Rivalries Breed Intensity in the NHL
Guest Post to Hockey Pub
BOSTON, MA. — Many of the enduring rivalries in professional sports are based on geography. Proximity breeds familiarity which often fuels contempt. In baseball, it is the Dodgers – Giants, in the NFL, it’s Packers – Vikings and in hockey the Battle of Alberta pits the Flames vs the Oilers. One of the most heated intra-provincial hockey rivalries, the Nordiques vs the Canadiens, yielded an incident forever known as “The Good Friday Massacre.”
But the oldest rivalry in the NHL and perhaps one of the most bitter in all of sports goes well beyond simple regional borders. It is framed by the identity of the respective fanbases, heightened by political and cultural values. Some of hockey’s most iconic photographs have captured the emotion of this 85-year old continuing battle.
On Thursday, the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins opened their second-round playoff series facing each other for the 34th time in postseason NHL history. If you’re a betting person, the Bruins, President’s Trophy winners as the top team in the league, would seem to be heavy favorites, but long-standing rivalries have a way of evening the odds. (For an in-depth look at the playoff favorites, sign up to read the best NHL news at Sportbet.com.)
In Saturday’s Globe and Mail, columnist Roy McGregor described the history of the rivalry in an article titled “Rivalry between Canadiens and Bruins continues to write history.”
Montreal Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin has called Boston-Montreal “probably the best rivalry in all of sports” – and it very likely is. When Montreal and Boston met again Thursday, it marked the 34th time in NHL history that the two franchises have met in the playoffs, starting in 1929. While the Habs won 24 of those first 33 series – and 18 in a row from 1946 to 1987 – the “Big Bad Bruins” have taken the past two, including a seventh-game white-knuckler in 2011 that sent Boston on to capture the Stanley Cup.
The numbers are so mind-boggling – 171 playoff games, Montreal winning 103 of them, the Canadiens outscoring the Bruins 515-423 in postseason play – that it defies comparison.
“Part of what makes it so unbelievable, surely,” says Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender who was in the Montreal net during several monumental battles during the 1970s, “is that no one has played each other as much in the playoffs as have Montreal and the Bruins. There’s no way anyone in Major League Baseball has played each other 33 times, nobody in the NBA and no one in the NFL.”
A rivalry with such intensity involving two very distinct groups is bound to attract a fringe element that can send things off the rails. Such was the case after Game 1 when Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban scored the game-winning goal. Bruins fans peppered social media with racial attacks that were quickly denounced by the Bruins, the league and hockey fans in general.
The “classless views” were addressed by Bruins president Cam Neely who released the following statement Friday in the aftermath of racist comments that appeared on Twitter.
“The racist, classless views expressed by an ignorant group of individuals following Thursday’s game via digital media are in no way a reflection of anyone associated with the Bruins organization.” — Cam Neely
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman also condemned the conduct. In a release, he said “We are about diversity and inclusiveness. We condemn bias and hatred. It has no place in our game and is unacceptable.”
Stereotypes provide fodder for this feud leading to toned-down rhetoric between the Canadiens and Bruins fanbases following Game 2. In what might be considered the one of the more lame examples of trash-talking, Boston fans were mocked for taking aim at one of the nation’s more tasty exports.
Is this the lamest #Bruins trash-talker ever? #GoHabsGo RT @Bmustafaraj: @Joseph_Bolger @All_Habs shut up and go make some maple syrup
— All Habs (@AllHabs) May 3, 2014
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