The Big, ‘Rad’ Bruins
O’Reilly: Today’s game faster, better
Tuesday night games at the Garden can be dull affairs. Early in the work week, crowds aren’t quite ready to let loose. That has a way of infiltrating the benches.
But last Tuesday was one of the more entertaining nights of the year on Causeway Street. It was kicked off by a celebration of the record-setting 1977-78 team that had 11 20-goal scorers, a mark that stands to this day. The soundtrack for the night was heavily disco-flavored. A nice touch.
And to make it all work perfectly, the Bruins and Flames played a highly entertaining game that the home team won, 5-2. In fact, if that game had been played in 1977-78 — with all the post-whistle shoves and scrums — they might still be tabulating the penalty minutes.
But that was then and this is now, so the gloves stayed on. There were surely a few members of the Lunch Pail AC who would have liked to seen a bout or two. But the guy who perhaps best personifies that era of Boston hockey, Terry O’Reilly, is pleased with the overall trends in the game.
“I think the skill level has just skyrocketed, the skating skills, the puckhandling skills of the players in this league, they’re really advanced,” O’Reilly said. “Just take a two-minute video clip of a game from the ’70s, then go to the ’80s, then go to the ’90s and you’ll see the absolute pace of the game.”
O’Reilly, who had the best season of his career 40 years ago when he notched 29-61-90 totals, assigns credit for handing the game over to the skilled players to a guy who doesn’t get a ton of it in this town.
“In the latter part of Mario Lemieux’ (playing) days, he was an excellent advocate for adjusting the rules of the game,” O’Reilly said. “I know when I was coaching, I would send Stevie Kasper out and say, ‘Just go out and stand beside him and put your stick in his ribs. I’d rather play 4-on-4 and have Mario over there.’ You could take the best player in the game out of the game by putting somebody so close to him that there wasn’t an opportunity for him to get the puck. Now you’re not allowed to do that. You can’t put your stick on somebody without getting an interference penalty.
“And Brad Park, I called him The Barnacle. There’d be a big power forward coming down the boards trying to swoop around Brad, and Brad would just put his stick out and just latch onto him and ride him into the corner. You can’t do that now. So it allows those players with the speed and the skill, the (David) Pastrnaks and (Brad) Marchands, to play. It’s the speed and the skill. It’s not so much the size anymore but the speed. And it’s exciting to watch.”
O’Reilly also reiterated his anti-fighting stance, which was borne as much out of practicality than anything else.
“I always said that it can’t last. It’s called a sport. You can’t have a game where you allow two grown men to drop the gloves and start punching each other. The NHL can’t defend themselves against a concussion suit if they allow that to continue to happen. It’s just common sense,” O’Reilly said. “But what was beautiful about the game, and they haven’t lost this, is the players would compete so hard, so intensely that they were willing to get to that point where they dropped the gloves. That’s what you
want to maintain, that absolute intensity.
“So they adjusted the rules and I have to give Mario Lemieux a lot of credit. Why do you want the best players in the game to be taken out by a third- or fourth-liner checker? Why are we allowing that? One of the best things they did was keeping a record of a player when he gets a suspension or a fine. It goes on his record then the next one it increases. That tones a player down. You eventually get the message. We never had that progressive punishment.”
Despite that stance, O’Reilly — who developed into a highly productive forward — knows he wouldn’t have gotten the chance to prove himself as a player if his two fists weren’t his initial calling cards. The advent of the World Hockey Association and further NHL expansion after the 1972 season helped, too.
“Oh, no. I remember Derek Sanderson lovingly called me ‘an expansion hockey player,’ ” O’Reilly said with a big laugh.