In 1980, Islanders showed Bruins they had plenty of punch

Bryan Trottier of the New York Islanders heads to the ice with a little help from the Boston Bruins' Mike Milbury in the first period at the Nassau Coliseum on April 21, 1980. Credit: AP/Ray Stubblebine
Road roommates Bobby Nystrom and Clark Gillies were at their Boston hotel watching a local sportscaster prognosticate the Islanders’ upcoming quarterfinal series against the Bruins in the 1980 NHL playoffs.
“This guy said, ‘The Bruins are going to run them right out of the building,’ ” Nystrom recalled to Newsday this month as the Islanders mark the 40th anniversary of the first of four straight Stanley Cup championships. “I was so ticked off with it. I said, ‘We’ve got to show them.’ ”
“The guy says the Bruins will intimidate the Islanders and that they won’t even want to play and the Bruins will win this in five games,” Gillies remembered in a separate conversation with Newsday this month. “I thought Bobby Nystrom was going to go through the TV after this guy. He turned to me and said, ‘Clarkie, we’re not going to let that happen.’ ”
Being upset and muscled out of the 1978 quarterfinals by the Toronto Maple Leafs in seven games fostered the notion that the Islanders would wither against an intimidating opponent in a playoff series. Nystrom didn't want to see a repeat. And so was hatched the plan to prove, finally, that the Islanders could play a physical game with anybody.
Nystrom assigned the matchups: He took bruiser John Wensink and told Gillies to stay on Terry O’Reilly, one of the toughest, strongest players in NHL history.
The resulting fight-filled, five-game win over the Bruins from April 16-22, 1980, was a crucial turning point in the Islanders’ evolution from perennial Cup contenders to perennial Cup winners. The Islanders won the first two games in overtime at Boston Garden. More impressive, the Islanders took a 3-0 series lead even though sniper Mike Bossy was sidelined until Game 4 with a fractured thumb.
Pat Calabria, Newsday’s beat reporter during the Islanders’ dynasty, was on the team bus going to Boston Garden for Game 1.
“There was not a peep on the bus,” Calabria said in an interview this month. “They were totally into their game faces.”
“The team was ready to play whatever style they needed to play,” Butch Goring told Newsday this month. “But they weren’t going to get run out of that building.”
The 2-1 victory in Game 1 was just a feeling-out prelude, with the teams combining for a relatively gentlemanly eight minor penalties. The series really erupted in the Islanders’ 5-4 overtime win in Game 2. It featured 254 penalty minutes, including 248 in a first period that ended with a bench-clearing brawl.
“We knew it was going to be an incredibly physical series,” captain Denis Potvin told Newsday this month. “Speaking personally, the first thing you do, you try to get over the fear of getting killed, which was very much what could happen when you’re facing Terry O’Reilly, Stan Jonathan, John Wensink, Wayne Cashman. A whole slew of very, very tough guys on the other team.
“And you’re going to play in a little box of an arena,” Potvin said of the undersized rink, which measured 191 feet by 83 feet, nine feet shorter and two feet narrower than the standard rink. “There wasn’t a lot of room. In terms of trying to avoid getting hit, it was almost impossible.”
Gillies and O’Reilly fought twice in the first period of Game 2. Garry Howatt fought Cashman. Nystrom fought Wensink. The Islanders’ Gord Lane, Bob Lorimer, Duane Sutter and Howatt and the Bruins’ Cashman, Jonathan, Al Secord and Mike Milbury earned game misconducts in the period-ending melee.
“It really made us understand we were a pretty tough team,” Nystrom said. “I think of one guy that came into the locker room after that big brawl and it was Bobby Lorimer. He had a pretty good gash underneath one eye. He bled all over the place. He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, boys, this isn’t going to slow me down at all.’ And that was the epitome of us in that series.”
The Islanders took a 3-0 series lead with a 5-3 win in Game 3 at Nassau Coliseum that featured four more fights, including two more Gillies-O’Reilly bouts in the second period.
“Clarkie, he probably became a Hall of Famer, in my mind, in that series,” Potvin said.
“When you see stuff like that, you kick yourself in the rear end and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to do the same thing,’ ” Nystrom said. “I think we really stood up for ourselves and that was a turning point for us because we felt we could play that kind of game or we could play a finesse type of game with [Bryan] Trottier, Bossy, Clarkie, Denis and the boys.”
The Bruins salvaged Game 4, 4-3, with Nystrom fighting Brad McCrimmon in the first period. But the Islanders eliminated the Bruins with a 4-2 win in Game 5 at Boston Garden, with Gillies involved in one of the two fights.
“We got the rest of the league to take notice that ‘Holy cow, this team had never done that before,’ ” Gillies said. “We had just pounded the Big Bad Bruins into submission.”
FIVE FOR FIGHTING
The Islanders went toe-to-toe with the Bruins in their five-game quarterfinal series win in 1980. The penalty minutes for the leading combatants:
BRUINS
Terry O'Reilly 47
Al Secord 38
Mike Milbury 37
Wayne Cashman 30
Stan Jonathan 27
ISLANDERS
Garry Howatt 47
Duane Sutter 39
Clark Gillies 31
Gord Lane 31
Bob Lorimer 27
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