The Battle of Alberta between the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames has never been without drama. Back in 2005 there was changes happening in the league to discourage "rough stuff" and promote more "free-wheeling" hockey.
Read more about it in this excerpt from The Hockey News Archive:
The 2005-06 NHL schedule calls for eight games a year against each team in the division – that’s about three months of the season spent playing exclusively against five teams – and a return to wide-open hockey.
Hmm. This could get interesting. Let’s see, Toronto and Boston play each other four times in less than a month, six times before Christmas, and all that is supposed to be wide-open hockey…yes, this will definitely get interesting.
“The emotion won’t be something that you’ll have to manufacture,” says Bruins coach Mike Sullivan. “It will be there.”
We’ll give him that one. And there’s a vision at work here, no question. After witnessing the NHL stumble through plodding regular season after plodding regular season followed by no season at all, we all know that’s far better than the alternative.
It’s not as if fostering rivalries and flushing out waterskiing-on-ice are bad ideas, either. On their own, they’re positively dandy. Looking back, there weren’t many better ways to spend a cold winter evening than getting wrapped up in the electric Montreal-Quebec battles from the old Adams Division days, or watching Willi Plett and Behn Wilson do the how-you-doin’ in one of those Norris Division Hawk-North Star muckups in Minny.
Check that. The wide-open Oilers of the 1980s might have been better, but that’s about it.
It’s when fiercer rivalries and a return to freewheeling hockey get thrown together as the dual saviors of a league coming back from the dead, though, that the exercise starts to sound a bit – how to say it gently? – overambitious.
“My thinking is the new standard of enforcement isn’t really about rivalries, it’s just really about allowing more offense into the game and allowing the skill players to play,” says Stephen Walkom, the new head of officiating.
Walkom and NHL vice-president and director of hockey operations Colin Campbell say they want to put an end to interference, once and for all, and they really, really mean it. They say hooking and holding and tripping and the rest are going to be called tight and by the book. It doesn’t make a difference if the infraction is on the puck-carrier or some other guy, or if the play is in the neutral zone or offensive zone or the twilight zone, or if the game is in January or June. It all gets called the same.
So far, so good.
Except they also have eight (8) Battles of Alberta in a compressed schedule, not counting playoffs, and you’ve got to get a good hate going – but remember boys, no tugging on the sweaters. Philadelphia and New Jersey are supposed to face off four times against each other after March 20 – and the last day of the season is April 18. No clutch, no grab? Dare we say, no chance?
Good Hate Going
Nashville and Detroit, who had a good hate going during a six-game playoff series last May, will go up against each other four times in an 18-day span in the middle of the season. Big deal, say Carolina and Washington; in late March and early April they play each other five times in two weeks. The Bloods and Crips didn’t see each other on street corners that often.
But wait, it gets better. The Oilers and Canucks get a taste of life in the bigs Major League Baseball-style with a three-game back-to-back-to-back jam session, March 21-25, at Edmonton-Vancouver-Vancouver. That’s three games in five days against the same team in the same division in the regular season for possibly the first time in NHL history. (The Caps and Canes are doing the same.) Original Six rivals Detroit and Chicago get to do their own triple play Oct. 27 to Nov. 1 – three games in six days, at Detroit-Chicago-Detroit.
“We play three games against Detroit in a row? Really? Wow, that’s like a playoff series,” said new Hawk defenseman Adrian Aucoin. “They say when you play against your division it’s like a four-point game. That’s like 12-point games right there. You can only imagine by Game 3, you know that’s it’s going to be…”
He couldn’t complete the thought.
“Normally even back-to-backers, the second game there’s a little bit of carry-over from the night before.
“But three games – like I said, that’s a playoff series.”
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