1982 double what if?

[Big Phil]

1981-82 Canadiens were crazy good. Noticeably better than the season prior.

+137 goal differential, and they were the #1 best defensive team of the entire 1980s.

1981-82 was the single highest-scoring season of the modern NHL era, and yet the Habs' defence that season was as good as the average NHL club in 2019. And they scored 360 goals!

No doubt in my mind they would take down Edmonton, for example, if both had progressed to the Finals. And Montreal vs. Vancouver would have been a sweep.

Or is it a repeat of 1981? Gretzky took the Habs to lunch in 1981, a team pretty nearly the same as the 1982 team more or less. Actually, the Habs got embarrassed badly in 1981. Do the Oilers keep that confidence going or is it revenge for the Habs in 1982 and does this help the Oilers learn some lessons and then gun for it in 1983? Hard to say, because the Habs of that era were unfortunate dumpster fires in the playoffs.

 

[MeHateHe]

Is there any substance to this?

I know those Oilers had a reputation as hard partiers, but not to the extent that it affected their on-ice play

The stories of the Oilers and their late-night ways weren't nearly as prominent in 1982 as they were after the Cup runs. If you lived in Edmonton between 84 and 88, you knew someone who had partied with them or had at least seen them at Denny Andrews or some other bar down on Calgary Trail - you know, snorting lines of coke off of random bar patrons. But not so much in 82 - they weren't nearly as full of themselves as they were, even after the loss to the Islanders.

Did it affect their play? Plenty of people will say it's why they lost to the Flames in '86 (Steve Smith notwithstanding ; that Flames team was solid but should not have been close to winning against that Oilers team). The infamous Sports Illustrated article (vehemently denied at the time, but c'mon) danced around it a bit, but certainly said as much.

The Joyless End Of A Joyride

 

[The Panther]

The stories of the Oilers and their late-night ways weren't nearly as prominent in 1982 as they were after the Cup runs. If you lived in Edmonton between 84 and 88, you knew someone who had partied with them or had at least seen them at Denny Andrews or some other bar down on Calgary Trail - you know, snorting lines of coke off of random bar patrons. But not so much in 82 - they weren't nearly as full of themselves as they were, even after the loss to the Islanders.

Did it affect their play? Plenty of people will say it's why they lost to the Flames in '86 (Steve Smith notwithstanding ; that Flames team was solid but should not have been close to winning against that Oilers team). The infamous Sports Illustrated article (vehemently denied at the time, but c'mon) danced around it a bit, but certainly said as much.

The Joyless End Of A Joyride

Sorry, your post is hogwash.

The reason the Oilers were seen partying around town is because Edmonton was a small city, where ALL hockey players were recognizable, in the pre-social media era.

It would the height of naivete to imagine that all pro-sports teams in that era didn't have players who experimented with stuff. (Michael Jordan, for example, recently recalled his first game with the Bulls, where, the night before the season-opener, he was invited to the team party in a hotel room where one group of guys had women, one group were snorting coke, and one were gambling and boozing. This is the night BEFORE a game.)

"The Joyless End of a Joyride" article you link is a big stain on the reputation of Sports Illustrated, as they clearly recognized that they didn't have enough to go on for a legit article, but decided to rush it into print when the Oilers lost to Calgary (it was originally supposed to be an expose of drug-abuse in the entire NHL). The article presents exactly ZERO concrete evidence of any Oilers doing drugs, and only has one Edmonton police staff stating that they have (I'm paraphrasing) heard that one or more players may have abused drugs. That is, there's nothing. The rest of the article is just innuendo about Fuhr's financial problems, etc.

We all know that Fuhr, for one, was an occasional abuser of cocaine, and no doubt someone else on the team experimented at some point, as humans with freedom and money do. But the suggestions that the 80s' Oilers were somehow a cocaine-blizzard team compared to other NHL clubs (the 80s Rangers, anyone...?) is absurd.

 

[hacksaw7]

Sorry, your post is hogwash.

The reason the Oilers were seen partying around town is because Edmonton was a small city, where ALL hockey players were recognizable, in the pre-social media era.

It would the height of naivete to imagine that all pro-sports teams in that era didn't have players who experimented with stuff. (Michael Jordan, for example, recently recalled his first game with the Bulls, where, the night before the season-opener, he was invited to the team party in a hotel room where one group of guys had women, one group were snorting coke, and one were gambling and boozing. This is the night BEFORE a game.)

"The Joyless End of a Joyride" article you link is a big stain on the reputation of Sports Illustrated, as they clearly recognized that they didn't have enough to go on for a legit article, but decided to rush it into print when the Oilers lost to Calgary (it was originally supposed to be an expose of drug-abuse in the entire NHL). The article presents exactly ZERO concrete evidence of any Oilers doing drugs, and only has one Edmonton police staff stating that they have (I'm paraphrasing) heard that one or more players may have abused drugs. That is, there's nothing. The rest of the article is just innuendo about Fuhr's financial problems, etc.

We all know that Fuhr, for one, was an occasional abuser of cocaine, and no doubt someone else on the team experimented at some point, as humans with freedom and money do. But the suggestions that the 80s' Oilers were somehow a cocaine-blizzard team compared to other NHL clubs (the 80s Rangers, anyone...?) is absurd.

The Oakland Raiders of the 70s were pretty much the Hells Angels moonlighting as a football team. Whatever went on in the NHL was really childs play compared to other leagues in the 70s and 80s.