I’ve heard it said that the infamous series-winning goal of the 1999 Stanley Cup Final is a Sabres fan’s JFK moment. Obvious differences in cultural importance aside, it’s certainly true to a point. Every Sabres fan remembers where they were at 14:51 of the third overtime of Game Six, when Brett Hull cheated to give his Dallas Stars the first Stanley Cup in franchise history. 18,595 of you (including my future wife and father-in-law) got to be kicked in the gut live and in person. Others watched a fraudulent Cup awarded while out on the town (and yet managed not to destroy the city like a Canucks fan would). As for me, I watched at home – and my most vivid memory is collapsing face-first into a beanbag chair in front of my couch in an odd combination of frustration and sheer exhaustion.
Many of us are still hot and bothered about how it went down, even today. We all knew the NHL’s explanation of two Brett Hull shots somehow constituting a single possession and therefore permitting his skate in the crease was, at best, revisionist history – despite some mythical NHL memo that supposedly “allowed” it. It was a ham-fisted attempt at backing up a ruling, or lack thereof, made by an officiating crew that got caught with its pants down. It may or may not have also been a grand conspiracy on the part of the big-market contingent of the NHL, as well as part of a sinister Gary Bettman plot to grow the game in his beloved Southern markets (although I’m personally not a subscriber to such theories, but to each their own). That skate was in the crease, that goal shouldn’t have counted, and we got robbed. End of story.
I’m not interested in reliving the debate about the legality of the goal, though. I’m more interested in challenging the notion that a single disputed goal cheated the Sabres out of a Stanley Cup, an argument that I still hear to this day. Sure, the Stars’ championship will forever be tainted, but “no goal” as a singularity ignores other factors that caused the Sabres to come up short, disregards a situation the Sabres should have avoided that altered Game Six for the worse, and makes assumptions about the outcome of events that never unfolded. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? Well, let’s get right to it, shall we?
Why You Can’t Blame Brett Hull’s Skate in the Crease for the Sabres’ Loss in the ’99 Finals
1) Can’t win if you can’t score. That sounds like an indictment of the Sabres’ offense, but really, it’s not intended to be. The Sabres, a team used to winning low-scoring games on the strength of goaltending, were unfortunate to get matched up in the final with the one team that gave up fewer goals than they did in the 1998-99 season. Dallas’ defense was as good as any other in the Dead Puck Era that year, giving up just 168 goals – the least in the league by a significant margin. In the finals Buffalo scored just nine goals in six games, and only six goals in the last five. When goals are that few and far between, it’s imperative not to give up bad goals. Um, about that…
2) The first-period goal Dominik Hasek gave up in Game Six was horrendous. Since all the focus would later come to rest on Dallas’ second goal, you might not remember the first.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNr0gR_UdPA&w=560&h=349]
Pucks shot from terrible angles like that are not supposed to elude All-Everything goaltenders, and that piece of Toskalan netminding put the Sabres in a hole just 8:09 into the game – a hole they spent a period and a half digging out of until tying the game with 1:39 to go in the second. Consider how well Dallas, a team with such defensive prowess as I’ve outlined, played with a lead. How much might the complexion of Game Six changed had that awful, awful goal not gone in? What if the Sabres had struck first and forced Dallas to come from behind?
3) As a #7 seed, the Sabres were in a bit over their heads. I hate to play this card – but one could argue that, by the numbers, Dallas was by far the better team. Buffalo did knock off three higher seeds to reach the finals, but this was an even bigger mismatch. The Stars claimed the President’s Trophy and the #1 seed in the West on the strength of a 51-19-12 record, good for 114 points – 23 more than the 91 points the Sabres posted. Run that one through any number of NHL ’11 simulations and tell me how often the Sabres come out on top. Honestly, I’m proud of them for stretching it to six games – and I don’t think I’m alone in the sentiment that the 2005-06 team that bowed out in the conference finals had a more realistic chance to win a Cup.
4) James Patrick came oh-so-close to ending the game in double OT. If you watched the whole video above, you saw Patrick beat Belfour cleanly in the second overtime only to clang one off the crossbar. Until I looked up that video, I had completely forgotten all about that. One inch lower, and today we’re discussing how the Sabres fared in Game Seven instead of lamenting Brett Hull’s illegal skate. Of course, a different outcome in Game Six has its own caveat…
5) Winning Game Six guaranteed nothing. To me, this is what really renders the “no goal” argument moot. We were not robbed of a Cup by that fraudulent goal – we were robbed only of the right to play in a Game Seven. Consider how good the Stars’ defense was. Consider Eddie Belfour’s 1.67 playoff GAA. Consider Game 7 would have been in Dallas, where the Sabres had won only once in three tries. Now, consider the Sabres’ history in Game Sevens. (In case you’ve forgotten, we’ve won exactly one in 40 years.) Are you positive the Sabres win Game 7? If not, “Brett Hull’s skate stole the Cup” isn’t a valid argument all of a sudden.
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Make no mistake about it, we got screwed. I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But it’s always bothered me to hear that Brett Hull’s skate single-handedly cost us a Cup, as if that event somehow exists in a vacuum. It takes away from the Stars’ achievements and insinuates that they weren’t a worthy Cup winner. They were, just not in that way. (Side note: I just heaped praise on a Dallas team. Please shoot me.)
The dying moments of Game Five actually serve as a larger source of frustration for me than Brett Hull’s foot in the crease, and the game as a whole was a microcosm of the series. Dallas held a 1-0 lead on the strength of an early second period goal and sat on that lead with the most brutally efficient display of trap hockey I’ve ever seen. Every Buffalo rush was thwarted at the blue line with relative ease, every Buffalo dump-in was rejected and tossed back down the ice as if it had bounced off a rubber wall. Every time a Sabre retreated to his zone to retrieve the puck, he was challenged by exactly zero Stars, as Dallas became as uninterested in scoring as I’ve ever seen a team. They challenged Buffalo to score but a single goal, and they locked it down so well that I’m not sure the Sabres would have broken through had they played 15 more periods that night. It was awful, frustrating, boring, and everything hockey should not be. It was the Dead Puck Era at it’s absolute worst.
And that, not Brett Hull’s cheating skate, is what won the Dallas Stars a Stanley Cup.
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Mike also writes about the Sabres at Roll the Highlight Film. You can follow him on Twitter at @mtracz.
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