24 October 1981: The home-standing Maple Leafs, playing without injured leading scorer Rick Vaive, took a 3-1 lead midway through the second period and then somehow survived a shocking lack of discipline over the final twenty minutes to hold on and defeat the Rangers. The Leafs scored first, five minutes into the game, when Börje Salming slapped one home on the power play just 17 seconds after Barry Beck was sent to the box. The Rangers answered with their own PP marker just three minutes later, Ron Duguay cashing in just before Jim Benning’s minor infraction expired. A first period that was largely played in the neutral zone (13 total SOG) saw one more highlight - Terry Martin jamming a rebound of Darryl Sittler’s shot underneath Steve Weeks halfway through the period to send Toronto to the dressing rooms with a 2-1 lead.
Play was much more wide open in the second, and the Leafs took advantage first when Martin scored again after nine minutes on a pretty tic-tac-toe combination with Sittler and Fred Boimistruck. Don Maloney got the NYR back within a single goal five minutes later, when Salming’s two minutes in the bin allowed him room to get free and tip home a drive from Reijo Ruotsalainen. The second intermission came without further scoring despite a combined 28 shots on the two netminders.
The tight nature of the game came to a head early in the third, when Barry Melrose whacked Mark Pavelich with a high stick and Ed Hospodar took offense; the two defensemen dropped the gloves, but Melrose had already earned the extra two minutes and the Rangers got an early chance on the man advantage. Twenty seconds before that ran out, Stew Gavin took another TOR penalty and New York got a brief 5-on-3 before another spell with the extra man. But, one minute into THAT power play, Ian Turnbull was called for boarding and the Rangers got another 5-on-3 (this time for a full minute) and, again, failed to find a way past Vincent Tremblay despite a couple of opportunities right on the doorstep. In all, Toronto would kill off almost five consecutive minutes playing shorthanded, and you would have thought they would have learned a lesson or two from that but, no - less than two minutes after the last of those penalties ran out, they were back in the box again. The Rangers still could not find the back of the net and, in fact, they were struggling to generate scoring opportunites at all. They got one last bite at the apple when Laurie Boschman went off for the second time with less than four minutes to go, but neither that power play nor 70 seconds with an extra skater at the death led to a result any different than what had come before. New York had a total of almost ten minutes with at least one extra attacker on the ice in the final period, yet somehow only managed a total of 7 shots on goal in the stanza. When Tremblay had to come up big, he did, but the visitors spent far too much time passing the puck around the perimeter.
Barry Beck and Mike Rogers had five shots each for NYR, Tom Laidlaw had three hits and Pavelich had two assists. For the Leafs, Martin had six shots to get his two goals and Salming had four shots and three hits. FINAL: Toronto 3, New York Rangers 2.
Contribution to the Facebook co-op replay . . .
| Terry Martin scores twice to lead Leafs |
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