On March 8, 1986, Quebec Nordiques forward John Anderson showed up for a road game in Hartford and was told by the trainer that GM Maurice Filion wanted to see him.
Uh oh.
Anderson had been acquired the previous offseason from the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team that had taken him 11th-overall in the 1977 draft.
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He’d had a pretty good gig in Toronto playing with Rick Vaive and Bill Durlago, but Quebec wasn’t so bad either. The team was rock solid, with Peter Stastny, Michel Goulet and Dale Hunter, and his life away from the rink included a house with an indoor pool that was situated on a mountain outside Quebec City.
So when Filion told Anderson that the Nords had made a trade, Anderson’s first thought was: Where am I going?
Other side of the rink, Filion told him.
Uh oh.
When Anderson trudged around the event level at the venerable Hartford Civic Center, he soon ran into the man who’d just turned his world upside down, Hartford GM Emile Francis.
Francis told him he’d been trying to land him since Anderson had broken into the league. Then, as they approached the Whalers’ locker room, Francis stopped.
“He said, ‘Look, I’m going to level with you,’” Anderson recalled. “The locker room is kind of shitty compared to what you’re used to in Quebec.’”
But the man known as “The Cat” told him it was good enough for Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe, so it’d be good if Anderson didn’t make a big deal of it with the guys.
And so began Anderson’s run with what might be the smartest hockey team in the history of the NHL, the 1985-86 Hartford Whalers, for what would be their greatest season ever.
Even now, more than 35 years later, the roster boggles the mind for the influence they continue to have on hockey.
- Joel Quenneville: Florida Panthers head coach, second all-time in wins among NHL coaches and a lock to go to the Hall of Fame.
- Ron Francis: a Hall of Fame player and the GM of the expansion Seattle franchise.
- Dave Tippett: Edmonton Oilers head coach and a former Jack Adams Trophy winner (coach of the year).
- Doug Jarvis: four Stanley Cups as a player in Montreal, two more Cups as an assistant coach in Dallas and Boston, and remains in an advisory position with the Vancouver Canucks.
- Kevin Dineen: played almost 1,200 NHL regular-season games, won a Stanley Cup as an assistant in Chicago in 2015 on Quenneville’s staff, won an Olympic gold medal as head coach of Canada’s women’s team at the 2014 Olympics, and is currently the head coach of the AHL’s San Diego Gulls.
- Ulf Samuelsson: won two Stanley Cups as a player in Pittsburgh (with Ron Francis). He’s been an assistant coach at the NHL and AHL, including several years as an assistant to Tippett in Arizona and with Quenneville in Chicago, where he won a Cup in 2015. He was part of Francis’ pro scouting staff in Seattle before recently taking over the Leksands IF head coaching job in Sweden.
- Dean Evason: interim head coach of the Minnesota Wild.
- John Anderson: has coached for decades at the NHL and minor pro level. He has won multiple championships at the International Hockey League and AHL level.
- Tim Bothwell: was a head coach in major junior and the IHL, and was an assistant in Atlanta for two years. He coached women’s hockey at the Olympic level, winning a gold medal as an assistant with Team Canada in 2006.
- Mike Liut: player agent
- Ray Ferraro: broadcast analyst
- Steve Weekes: goaltending coach and assistant coach in the NHL
- Brad Shaw: associate and assistant coach in the NHL for 15 years
- Paul MacDermid: owner of the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack. His son Lane was born in Hartford and drafted by Boston. Ferraro called one of his first NHL games.
- Paul Lawless: part of the ownership group of an ECHL team in Austin, Texas.
- Paul Fenton: executive in Nashville and briefly the GM of the Wild. He played in just one game during that 1985-86 season.
- Stew Gavin: an investment specialist in Toronto. Many of his clients are tied to the hockey community.
Whew. Cue the “Brass Bonanza” one more time.
But beyond the post-career accomplishments, what makes this group special is the lasting impression on the community and a legacy that continues to this day with autograph sessions at the local ballpark, reunion events, alumni games and Whalers jerseys hanging from the XL Center in Hartford where the AHL Hartford Wolf Pack play.
And then there’s this.
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The 1985-86 Whalers team might well be the only team, at any level, that was honored with a full-blown parade — after they were knocked out in the second round of the playoffs.
Truth.
The Whalers arrived at the start of the 1979-80 season along with Quebec, Edmonton and Winnipeg from the remnants of the World Hockey Association. The Whalers made the playoffs that first season and were promptly swept in the first round by Montreal. They then missed the playoffs for five straight seasons.
“We were the Bad News Bears,” said Lawless, the 14th-overall pick in the 1982 draft.
Lawless figures he might have been the first player who was angry to be called up to the big leagues. He’d just made Canada’s World Junior team when he got the news.
It would take some time to get over it.
Before Ron Francis became the Whalers’ first and arguably only superstar player, the skilled center expected he’d be a Washington Capital.
Dale Hawerchuk, one of four centers expected to go at the top of the draft, had been tabbed by the Winnipeg Jets at No. 1. Los Angeles had its sights set on Doug Smith. Hartford originally had the third pick and was expected to take Bobby Carpenter, leaving the Caps with the fourth pick and presumably Francis.
But the Caps made a deal to move into the third spot and took Carpenter.
“Apparently neither team wanted me,” Francis joked.
The only person who seemed really enthused with the pick was the team’s head scout, Bill Dineen, father of Francis’ future teammate Kevin.
“Everyone else, not so much,” Francis said, laughing.
Francis went back to his junior club in his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, after his first training camp, but by November 1981 he was back with the big club.
Francis’ first road roommate was longtime Toronto captain Dave Keon.
For the first month they roomed together, Keon didn’t say a word to him. Their first conversation consisted of Keon asking Francis how old he was.
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“I’m 18,” Francis told the future Hall of Famer, who was 41 at the time.
“He said, ‘Hmph, I got three kids that are older than you.’ Then he turned out the lights and rolled over,” Francis recalled.
But Keon watched over Francis, taking him out to dinner on the road and teaching him the finer points of being an NHL player. The two developed a lifelong friendship.
It was the kind of education that would be passed on to other young players who followed Francis into the Whalers locker room.
Those young teammates, guys like Dineen and Ferraro, Gavin and Dana Murzyn, all looked up to Francis and revered him as though he were a grizzled veteran.
“We were like, geez, this guy’s done it all,” Evason said. “And he was a year older than us.”
And while there was some rookie initiation stuff going in other places, it didn’t happen in Hartford.
“Ronnie really stopped a lot of that for our group,” Evason said.
He told the guys that if they were a team, they weren’t going to be doing stuff like shaving the rookies and stuff like that.
Dave Tippett came to Hartford out of the Canadian national program and played for Canada at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo.
Tippett’s wife, Wendy, used to joke that if the Whalers were selling out games with 15,000 people she felt she knew 5,000 of them.
The wives and girlfriends were an integral part of the fabric of the Whalers franchise. They helped with the team foundation and took turns overseeing charitable events including the Whalers’ Waltz, a black tie event for 500 that was one of the highlights of the charitable scene in Hartford.
Many of the players met their future wives in Hartford. Francis met his wife, Mary Lou, at a charity event.
Quenneville’s wife, Boo, was from the area and her family would frequently host holiday gatherings for the Whalers family.
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Gavin became a Whaler on the eve of the 1985-86 season.
On his first day in Hartford, Gavin was at the Sheraton next to the rink and met a Whalers fan. Later, he went to do some shopping and ran into the same fan.
“My original thought was, geez, this place must be really small,” Gavin said.
All roads to the Hartford Whalers led through the Sheraton, which opened at the same time as the Hartford Civic Center in early 1975.
For three months, Ferraro lived in Room 1001 with Paul MacDermid after they were called up from the AHL.
Ferraro said he’s not sure why he didn’t ask for his own room.
The only time Ferraro ended up with his own space was when MacDermid’s future wife, Pam, came to visit and MacDermid paid for a separate room.
The next year at training camp, MacDermid was back in Room 1001.
Ferraro was taken by Hartford 88th overall in the 1982 draft. In his last year as a junior in Brandon, he scored 108 goals.
“I figured, not knowing anything, that I would probably make the (big) team,” Ferraro said.
Four days into camp in 1984, he was sent to Binghamton of the AHL.
At the time, Washington and Hartford shared the farm team there. Ferraro had run into Evason, an old Western Hockey League foe and Washington prospect, at the airport on the way to their respective training camps.
They agreed that if they ended up in Binghamton they would room together.
And so they did.
“We didn’t know what the hell we were doing,” Ferraro said. “You can imagine. It was a gong show.”
The two pooled their money and bought an AMC Matador for $600. Three weeks later, the muffler fell off. They never replaced it. Later that season, they left the keys in the ignition and abandoned the car on the street.
“Because it was such a piece of garbage,” Ferraro said.
From the moment he got to Hartford, Ferraro (5-foot-9 and 170 pounds when he was drafted) was “Peewee.”
“I haven’t been called Peewee since,” Ferraro said. “But with them, I’m Peewee all the time. I love those guys. I love that team.”
Murzyn, the fifth overall pick in the 1985 draft, signed his first contract just four days before the start of the 1985-86 training camp and then made the club out of camp. Management suggested that he and another young player, Lawless, move in with a man named Jim Ellis, a retired school principal and avid Whalers fan.
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Ellis refused to take any rent payment, but the players paid all of the utilities.
In the basement was a fridge. When Murzyn and Lawless moved in, it was full of soft drinks, chocolate and all kinds of snacks.
Murzyn recalled asking politely if there was a way to find some room for a few beers.
The next day it was wall to wall Miller Lite.
The two young players got along famously and were an important part of the young core being assembled in Hartford.
To this day, Murzyn believes Lawless might have had the largest head in the NHL, although there are no records to confirm this.
Lawless’ former teammates referred to him as “Jughead” and Lawless was a good sport about it.
One game in late October, Lawless took a puck to the face and the corresponding picture with his face all stitched together made the front page of the Hartford Courant with the words: “I thought my head exploded.”
“We were all over him about that,” Murzyn said.
Lawless remembers the shot, which came off the stick of Moe Mantha.
The trainer was stitching him up and it’s a big number — 63 stitches as Lawless recalls.
And he’s thinking, that’s it for the night. Might as well grab a beer and relax.
Nope.
Head coach Jack “Tex” Evans made his way to the trainers’ room between the second and third periods and after a brief discussion with the training staff, Lawless was back on the ice for the third.
A different time? To be sure.
One of the team’s biggest offensive stars outside of Francis was Sylvain Turgeon, who hailed from the mining town of Rouyn-Noranda in northern Quebec and scored 43 times in that ’85-86 season.
Turgeon’s pride and joy away from the rink was a Volkswagen bug that he was always working on. In fact, Anderson recalled Turgeon had two, one that he used for parts.
One day, Turgeon showed up at practice and his eyes were almost completely shut.
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The players asked him what had happened and Turgeon told them he’d been working on the VW and since he was only doing a little bit of work he hadn’t bothered to use a welding mask.
Turns out he missed a couple of games, Anderson said.
Evans, the coach of few words, was not amused.
“What the fuck?” was all he mustered.
This was not a time when players went off to lavish summer homes in Kelowna or the Muskokas. Many of the players set down roots in the Hartford area and stayed.
There were charity softball games in the summer and lots and lots of golf.
“You basically got a place in town and you stayed there all year,” Dineen said.
Quenneville took summer courses so he could become a licensed stockbroker.
Torrie Robertson helped build stages for local concerts.
Tippett got into real estate and renovation, buying derelict older homes that he and his wife would fix up and then resell. Occasionally, he’d hire some of his teammates to help out.
During the season, the team would often practice outside at one of a handful of local rinks, and that would mean changing in the Whalers dressing room, getting bundled up in Whalers parkas and driving somewhere. Often at high speed.
“There were a lot of races,” Tippett said.
“It probably wasn’t smart in hindsight,” he said. “But back then it seemed like a lot of fun.”
There was at least one fender bender on the return trip to downtown Hartford. That accident featured five or six Whalers standing around in their hockey gear trying to assess the damage.
Samuelsson, if he wasn’t riding with Murzyn, would make the trip to practice in his Saab.
“He would always have his helmet on and his visor and his chin strap done up. Every single time,” Evason said. “You can imagine people driving by him at that point in Hartford.”
One day, Samuelsson got to practice only to realize he’d left his skates downtown. The arena had a skate rental kiosk and Samuelsson rented a pair.
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“I’ll never forget it, the skates had to be 35 years old,” Murzyn recalled. “Even Tex noticed. He was like, ‘What the hell?’ But at least he wasn’t late for practice.”
“There’s a 1,000 Ulfie stories,” Ferraro said. “He is like his own show all by himself.”
Like the night in Toronto when Samuelsson got kicked out of the game.
“He loses his mind,” Ferraro recalled.
No helmet. No gloves. But as he’s leaving the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens, he spies the squeegee they used to sweep away excess water at the end of the arena
“And he beat a hole in the front of the Zamboni,” Ferraro said. “We’re all watching him from the benching going, what is he doing?”
“That was not out of the ordinary for Ulfie.”
Perhaps no single player was as critical to that 1985-86 team than netminder Mike Liut, who was acquired the previous season from St. Louis along with Jorgen Pettersson for Greg Millen and Mark Johnson.
“There was no more galvanizing thing for this young team than getting Mike,” Ferraro said.
In one of Liut’s first games, the Whalers had a 4-2 lead against Vancouver and ended up losing 7-6 in overtime.
“The drink cart in the middle of the room had no chance,” Ferraro said. “He destroyed it. We’d never had anybody like that.”
If players ended up shooting too high at the end of practice, Liut would scream at them to go and shoot at the other end of the ice on an empty net.
“He’d say, ‘When you can hit the net come back,’” Ferraro said.
When the dust cleared at the end of the 1985-86 regular season and the Whalers were playoff-bound, it was on Liut who led them there.
“There’s no way our team would have taken that jump without Mike,” Ferraro said.
From Liut’s perspective, the cumulative hockey intelligence on the Whaler roster helped define the team’s identity.
“It was kind of their team,” Liut said. “They took ownership of it. You have to.”
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Francis, Turgeon, Ferraro, MacDermid, Anderson and Dineen made up the top six of the group by the time the season was heading into the stretch, providing a dynamic one-two punch offensively on a team that finished fifth in goals scored.
“Kevin was a dynamic player,” Quenneville said. “He could change the complexion of a game.”
“One thing about it, man, Andy could pass,” Ferraro added.
The bottom two lines were different but equally important. Lawless, Gavin and Evason provided energy, skill and youthfulness and were a great complement to the team’s hard-working shut-down pair of Tippett and Jarvis.
“They weren’t huge but they played hard all the time,” Anderson said of the team’s role players.
Anderson said the Whalers had a “bunch of real good hockey guys,” players who just process the game differently.
On the back end, there was Dave Babych, who arrived via trade with Winnipeg and played mostly with Quenneville.
“Just give Babber the puck and let him go,” Quenneville said.
Quenneville was a reliable, calming force.
During his call-up during that 1985-86 season, Shaw remembers the Whalers locker room as a casual place.
“Just do your job and be a pro and everything’s going to work out kind of thing,” Shaw said. “The simplicity of that was shocking for me.”
Shaw recalled how Quenneville often employed a move when it looked like an opponent was about to beat him wide, turning at the right moment and flicking his stick to send the puck into the corner.
“He called it the lizard tongue,” Shaw recalled.
“I really learned the NHL game by watching these guys,” Shaw said.
The sheer hockey brainpower that showed up for work every day might have been the absolute best fit for the low-key head coach, Evans, and his assistant, Claude Larose.
Evans was not from Texas but in fact had been born in Garnant, Wales, in 1928. A defenseman, he played 753 NHL games and hundreds more in the minor pros.
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His coaching gig with the Whalers lasted almost five seasons and was the only NHL head coaching job his career.
Evans’ practices were, well, consistent. Every one the same. Some players referred to him as “Groundhog Jack.”
“Every day it was the same thing,” Lawless said. “It was frigging hilarious. It was just a simple way of coaching. He wasn’t a technical guy but let me tell you, it worked.”
Evans’ pregame addresses to the team were equally minimalist. “It would literally be anywhere between three and five words,” Gavin said.
“Let’s go” or “Work hard” or “Go get ’em.”
But it was a team that didn’t require a lot of coaching. As their careers evolved, it turned out “we had a boatload of coaches,” Ferraro said. “We had smart people that were playing.”
Today, special teams groups almost always meet as a unit. The Whalers’ special teams meetings were a little less structured, usually consisting of a bunch of guys standing around listening to Tippett and later Jarvis explaining how Peter Stastny liked to play low or how they could take Guy Lafleur’s one-timer away when they played the Canadiens.
“Those were our penalty killing meetings,” Tippett said. “I don’t even know if we had white boards.”
The Whalers finished fifth in penalty killing efficiency that season.
“His ability to think the technical part of the game was something that was very natural to him and was a great ingredient for our team,” Quenneville said of Tippett. “He took relentless to a whole different level. Jarvy’s the same.”
On the other side of the puck, Francis was the focal point of the power play. “Everything we did on the power play went through Ronnie’s hands,” Ferraro said.
As the playoffs approached, Evans subtly changed tactics, sometimes matching lines against opponents. His signal to change lines for the matchup he wanted was to touch his nose with a rolled up program or roster.
“So we’d have to look back to see if Jack was touching his nose,” Tippett said.
Still, through the first half or even two-thirds of that season, it looked as though it would be more of the same for the luckless Whalers franchise.
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Ferraro recalls being in the team’s travel agency office trying to book a trip into Hartford for his father and saw that a teammate had booked a trip to Florida the day after the regular season.
Hartford went winless in 10 games at one point in late January and into February (0-9-1), tumbling to last place in the Adams Division, six points behind Buffalo for the last playoff spot. But they went 12-4-2 in their last 18 games and ended in fourth place, four points ahead of Buffalo. That set up a first-round matchup with the talent-laden, first-place Quebec Nordiques.
Ferraro has a distinct impression that early on in the best-of-five series it looked ugly.
“My recollection is we didn’t touch the puck. And Lutie (Liut) was amazing,” Ferraro said. “None of us had been in an NHL playoff game.”
Liut made 37 saves in Game 1 and Sylvain Turgeon scored the OT winner to give the franchise its first postseason NHL win.
The next night, the Whalers took a 3-0 lead into the third period and won 4-1.
The Whalers dominated Game 3 at home, winning 9-4 with Anderson collecting six points. It was the franchise’s first and ultimately only playoff series win in the NHL.
That set up a second-round series against Montreal. It was epic.
“We played our hearts out and so did they,” Anderson said.
The Whalers won the opener at The Forum in Montreal 4-1, but the Canadiens bounced back to win Games 2 and 3.
Dineen scored 1:07 into overtime in Game 4 to make it a best-of-three.
After a Montreal win in Game 5, it was Dineen who was again the hero, scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win in Game 6 at home, setting up a deciding game at the legendary Forum against the sparkling rookie netminder Patrick Roy.
The Habs took a 1-0 lead late in the first period and that’s the way it stayed for much of regulation. But with 2:48 to go in the third period, Dave Babych hammered one over Roy’s shoulder to tie send Game 7 to overtime.
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“It stunned them,” Anderson said. “They were on the ropes for a bit.”
“It was like a lightning bolt,” Ferraro said of Babych’s goal. “We were, ‘Oh my God, we’re in it.”
Early in overtime, Ferraro had the puck in the Montreal slot with Anderson breaking for the net on the right side.
Anderson opened up, ready to take a shot.
But just as the puck got to Anderson, a backchecking Chris Nilan broke up the play.
A few shifts later, with 5:55 gone in overtime, Canadiens forward Claude Lemieux came out of the corner with the puck and beat Liut with a wicked backhander from in close to end the series.
“That was the end of it,” Anderson said.
Francis would go on to win back-to-back Cups in Pittsburgh in 1991-92 after a trade that many observers believe was a death knell for the Whalers franchise. But the ’86 loss still brings with it a sense of regret.
In Game 3 of the opening round, Francis crashed into the boards and broke two ribs against the Nordiques.
He was able to play in the Montreal series, but needed a flak jacket. “So there’s a lot of frustration … not being able to contribute maybe at the level that I could,” Francis said. “How well we were playing. How much we cared for each other and how much we believed in each other. You always kind of have those ‘what-ifs’ when you lose.”
Ferraro called the loss devastating. “I remember thinking that this team is really good. We’re going to be good,” he said.
By the time the Whalers got back to Hartford, plans were in place for a parade.
So what if the Whalers’ playoff run ended halfway to a Cup? That didn’t seem to matter to the people who lined the streets of downtown Hartford.
Players wondered if it was some kind of a joke. “Guys were a little embarrassed, but I’m telling you, there were 50,000 people out on the street,” Anderson said.
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“Amazing,” Lawless added. “It was six, seven people deep in downtown Hartford. It was unbelievable. … To this day, people are still coming up to me and saying, ‘we miss you guys so much.’”
No one knew then that this would be as good as it would get for the Whalers.
They finished first in the Adams Division with a franchise-record 93 points the following season. But the Nordiques exacted revenge in the first round, winning in six games.
They made the playoffs the next five years, from 1988-92 but didn’t win a single series.
They missed the playoffs the next five years and in the summer of 1997 they were gone to Carolina where they became the Hurricanes.
Gone but not forgotten.
One summer a few years back Quenneville’s in-laws hosted a weekend gathering of friends and former teammates that morphed into a major Whalers reunion.
As the weekend wound down, there was a public gathering where a lot of the former Whalers signed autographs and mingled with fans.
Some 5,000 people showed up. “We were kind of floored by it,” Murzyn said.
That spring of ’86 remains a singular moment in the star-crossed franchise.
Coach Evans passed away from prostate cancer in 1996. He still lived in Connecticut.
Scot Kleinendorst died as a result of injuries sustained in an accident at a paper mill in Minnesota last December.
The real-life losses add a sense of melancholy when those that remain convene and the discussion turns, as it always does with this group of players and their extended families, to the Whalers.
What happens if Nilan doesn’t thwart that golden scoring chance in overtime?
What if the Whalers and not the Montreal Canadiens had won a Cup that spring?
Does it change everything? Or nothing?
Questions without answers.
“People didn’t know how good we were,” Anderson said. “It’s kind of what if? What if? It always sticks in your mind.”
(Top photo of Quenneville: Graig Abel Collection/Getty Images)