Bruins icing rivalry with Kings
Stars shone in past meetings
You had Bobby Orr. We had Wayne Gretzky, at least for a while.
Your Bruins won a Stanley Cup in 2011 and ticked off the Vancouver citizenry so much they torched downtown. L.A. doubled that output the next four years, and not only did players swear on live TV during the celebration, so did the mayor, the Hon. Eric Garcetti.
(And along the way the Kings’ social media crew set new standards for Twitter snark with their own dagger after an early-round elimination of the Canucks: “To all of Canada outside of B.C., you’re welcome.” I trust people in Vancouver still haven’t forgotten.)
Still, the most memorable interaction between the Bruins and Kings came way before Gretzky, and in Orr’s final injurymarred season in Boston. This was 1976 when the NHL, geography be damned, matched the Kings (85 regular season points) and Bruins (113) in a secondround playoff series.
It wasn’t supposed to be a classic. But it was. The Bruins won games 4-0, 3-0, 7-1. The Kings won 3-2 in Game 2 at the Garden in overtime, 6-4 in Game 3 at the Forum, and then 4-3 in overtime in Game 6 in Inglewood on a goal by Butch Goring, who remains the only hockey player I’ve ever seen carried off on the shoulders of his teammates after that win.
I believe that was also the series where the Forum fans were so worked up in the moments before the game that Johnny Bucyk cut the cord to the microphone used by the anthem singer, hoping to mute the noise slightly.
There were six Hall of Famers in that series: Bucyk, Gerry Cheevers, Jean Ratelle and Brad Park for the Bruins, Rogie Vachon and Marcel Dionne for the Kings (plus Orr, who played 10 games that season and none in the playoffs). Boston won that series in seven, the teams played again the following year and the Bruins won in six, and they haven’t met in the postseason since.
You take your history where you can find it, right?