It was late May in 2000, the day before Game 6 of the NHL Eastern Conference finals. It was the day before Eric Lindros came back. He had been out for 10 weeks after suffering his second concussion of the season. He had blamed the Flyers’ doctors, blamed the team’s training staff, split the franchise, been stripped of his captaincy — but now he was coming back. The Flyers had lost the previous game to the New Jersey Devils, but they still held a 3-2 lead in the series. They were one win away from the Stanley Cup finals — and, now, Lindros.
A hundred reporters and cameras squeezed into a long hallway at what was then the Flyers’ practice facility, waiting for Lindros to speak about his return. General manager Bob Clarke saw it as a convenient time to try to escape. It was by luck that I saw him and chased him to his car. I’m pretty sure someone else was there, too. Clarke stopped. We talked. He shrugged and made a joke as his exit line.
He said, “We seem to play better when it’s all (messed) up. It’s only been like that for three months.”
Then they went out and lost Games 6 and 7.
Ten years later, the Flyers and Devils prepare for another playoff series with Brian Boucher and Martin Brodeur again in goal. Ten years later, it is impossible not to retell some of the stories of that unbelievable Flyers spring, of Roger Neilson and Keith Primeau and Boucher and Lindros. There is only one certainty: that there will never be another one like it, guaranteed.
“The odd thing for me, being a rookie that year, was that I was pretty much sheltered from all that,” Boucher said Monday. He and Simon Gagne were kids on that 2000 team, the only Flyers still on the team today.
“As a young guy, I didn’t really know half the stuff going on,” Boucher said. “The whole Lindros saga … I didn’t know. I was just getting ready to play. I didn’t know any of that stuff. I didn’t know that guys didn’t want him to play. I was just focusing on playing.”
He played great, too. There were two memorable moments for him in that New Jersey series. One was the save he made against Patrick Elias, early in the second period of Game 3 in New Jersey. Elias came in alone, shorthanded, and Boucher somehow made a glove save while sprawling on his back — with his back facing Elias — as he made this desperate reach into the open net. Oh, and his helmet was flying off because of the violence of his contortions.
After the game, Boucher said, “I didn’t even feel it hit me.” But it wasn’t his best quote of the series. That one came after a Scott Gomez howitzer in Game 6 hit Boucher square in his facemask and lodged there. He had to finish the period wearing his old Phantoms mask because the puck could not be pried out of the mask. Afterward, he said, “I was more in shock than anything. You’re looking right there and all you see is black.”
Boucher’s was the nice story of the spring — his along with that of a young defenseman named Andy Delmore, who came out of nowhere to score five goals in the second round against the Pittsburgh Penguins — a series in which the Flyers lost the first two games at home and came back to win in six.
In one of the games, Delmore had a hat trick, and he admitted, “Even when I dream at night, I don’t even dream that.”
The Pittsburgh series also featured the five-overtime game for the record books, won by Primeau after 152 minutes, 1 second. It was a night when the team refueled between overtime periods with takeout pizza delivered to the locker room, a night that ended at 2:36 a.m. with a clean goal, Primeau cruising in on the right wing and firing. As the night wore on, everyone knew the loser of the game would likely be sunk — such was the emotional investment. And that’s just how it turned out.
How the Flyers pulled it together for that series, well, it seems impossible when you look back. Neilson, the coach, had left the team to undergo cancer treatments with the understanding he would be back if the team made it to the second round. Craig Ramsay, his assistant, took over.
But before Round 1, Neilson shocked everyone by saying he wanted to coach immediately. The club refused, citing medical advice, and a difficult situation began to spin out of control. When Round 2 was about to happen, Clarke continued to keep Neilson on the sideline — at which point, Roger went on a Toronto radio station and said the Flyers didn’t want “a cancer patient who is a friend of Eric Lindros behind the bench.”
This was dynamite on about three levels, as you can well imagine. It is impossible to understate the uproar this caused, right before the Pittsburgh series was to begin. The next day, Neilson held a painful, sheepish press conference outside his office in which he took it all back, saying it was a weak attempt at humor, saying, “I’ve been treated like a king here.”
It was hard to believe him, frankly. But the thing is, as all of that was going on, it wasn’t even the franchise’s biggest convulsion. That was still Lindros.
Everybody knows the basics of the dispute. But the truth was, the team was making a deep Cup run without him. Up by 3-1 against the Devils, the Flyers lost Game 5 at home and then word leaked in the locker room after the game that Lindros was coming back. He played well in Game 6, but the Flyers still lost. Then, Game 7.
It began with an incredible ovation at the then-First Union Center, an ovation triggered by the first-ever performance of the digital duet, with Lauren Hart accompanying Kate Smith in the singing of “God Bless America.” It was something they cooked up pretty much on the fly and rehearsed for the first time in the arena that evening. Ten years later, the crowd still loves it and it still really works — but you cannot imagine the emotional reaction that night in the building, when nobody knew what was coming.
Neither can you replicate the awful silence, about 12 minutes into the first period, when Scott Stevens leveled Lindros with a shuddering shoulder check. Stevens caught Lindros with his head down in the middle of the ice, and he did not miss. It was sickening. Lindros went to the hospital with another concussion. Asked if he knew of a more star-crossed athlete than Lindros, Ramsay would say, “I’m sure there is one, but I don’t know which one it is.”
The Flyers lost that Game 7 to the Devils, 2-1.
It all happened one spring, in 2000.
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