Ghosts of Calgary and Edmonton's NHL glory days seen in epic modern-day Battle of Alberta

National Post, 21 May 2022

What we had in the glory days of the rivalry between the Flames and Oilers will not return — ever

A teenage boy in Calgary in the 1980s knew two things about the city’s place in the global sports scene: first, thanks to the Hart family, Cowtown was the global capital of professional wrestling (that would change soon enough); and second, that the Calgary Flames were the second-best hockey team on the planet.

The problem — though we were loathe to admit it — was that the best team on the planet was in Edmonton, our NHL Smythe division rival. For eight straight years, 1983-1990, either Edmonton or Calgary was in the Stanley Cup finals. The balance favoured Edmonton 3-1; six times the Oilers appeared, the Flames just twice.

That too would change. Before this week’s Battle of Alberta hit the ice, the last time the two Alberta teams met in the playoffs was 1991. Like professional wrestling, Alberta ceased to be the home of the best hockey anywhere in the world. The glory of the 1980s would not return.

The epic Battle of Alberta was all the more stunning given that the Oilers only joined the NHL in 1979 (from the defunct World Hockey Association) and the Flames moved from Atlanta to Calgary in 1980. Within a few years, Alberta became host to a rare level of excellence.

How good were they? The tale is expertly told in a book that, remarkably, was not published until 2015. Mark Spector’s “The Battle of Alberta” bears re-reading in these days, long after that high-scoring, high-intensity, high-violence era has passed.

“Was the hockey better?” asked Spector in 2015. “Well, if you grew up watching 5-4 hockey games with two or three fights, as I did, you are likely going to say that there was more entertainment in a night of the Battle of Alberta than when those same teams play a fightless, 3-2 game today — at four times the ticket price.”

Spector did not quite write “once upon a time,” but came close in relating those fairy tale days.

“It was a time when the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames combined for 780 goals in a season (those same two teams might hit 420 today),” wrote Spector in 2015. “It was less about defensive systems and Department of Player Safety videos and more about scoring goals and throwing down, when two of the NHL’s best teams were also two of the league’s toughest teams.”

Spector argued that the two teams made each other better. The Flames had to vastly improve just to keep up with the Oilers; the Oilers were made better by the Flames constantly being in hot pursuit.

“One of the reasons the Oilers went from being a collection of good players to a championship team of the highest order was because of the Flames and the level of play required just to get out of the Smythe,” wrote Spector.

Spector titled his first chapter “Iron Sharpens Iron.” The biblical reference is to Proverbs 27:17: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”

True enough. Excellence is rarely a solitary achievement. The Battle of Alberta was not a biblical epic, but it had plenty of comparable grime and glory, treachery and triumph.

And tragedy, too. The height of the Battle of Alberta was the seven-game 1986 divisional final. It ended in Edmonton on Oilers’ defencemen Steve Smith’s 23rd birthday, April 30. In the third period, Smith, rounding his own net, banked his clearing attempt off the goaltender’s leg, a momentous, marvellous, miraculous own goal. Flames won.

The late Diego Maradona claimed that the hand of God intervened in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. A few weeks earlier in Edmonton, Flames fans learned that God had legs, too.

My National Post colleague Colby Cosh was at the Northlands Coliseum that night for the Oilers defeat.

“For us, and for the other 17,000 or so people who attended a particular hockey game in Edmonton on the evening of April 30, 1986, no accumulation of events is capable of eradicating old hatreds,” Colby wrote last Monday. “We are hoping for ghosts of former battles of Alberta to rise up from the soil and re-establish the natural order of things, which involves the Calgary Flames getting turned inside out by the world’s best hockey player and marched off to the golf course. But after three decades, does the cosmos still know what it’s doing?”

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