Battered Into Submission

On his first shift, Clark Gillies, New York's 6'3", 220-pound left wing, ran a Toronto player into the boards. By all previous officiating standards. Gillies' hit would have been acceptable. But Ron Wicks, refereeing his first game in the series, whistled Gillies to the penalty box for high-sticking. When he came out. Gillies rammed another Toronto player into the boards. Wicks, not wanting the game to become a replay of the earlier debacles, sent Gillies to the penalty box again, this time for charging.

Defenseman Ian Turnbull, Toronto's best player during the series, put the Maple Leafs ahead 1-0. Denis Potvin tied the score for New York, and the teams went into overtime. Moments after McDonald rolled a backhander off the post to Resch's right, Bob Nystrom won the game for the Islanders 2-1 when he beat Palmateer from 25 feet following a spectacular fake-out of Defenseman Brian Glennie.

Did Palmateer feel badly about Nystrom's goal—and the defeat?

"Nah, why should I?" he said. "I played my normal great game. One time I stopped three straight shots with my mask."

Palmateer also was stopping unsuspecting Islanders with his stick, swinging it machete-style on whoever skated too close to the Toronto net. "He keeps the stick up and you expect him to drop it down," Nystrom said, "but if he doesn't, you're going to get it in the teeth."

New York's Bob Bourne offered a simple analysis of how the Islanders really had won the game: " Gillies banged those two guys early, Garry Howatt punched five guys in the nose, and Nystrom hit everything that moved."

The next day in Toronto, Neilson seemed mystified by the fact that the Maple Leafs were trailing three games to two. "We wanted to do three things," he said. "Contain their big line, contain their power play and outhit them. We've done all three things, and yet we're still losing."

Indeed, the Toronto checkers—particularly Jimmy Jones, Bugsy Butler and Darryl Sittler—had so harassed the line of Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy and Gillies, the highest-scoring unit in the NHL, that the three had scored just three goals in five games. The Toronto penalty killers also had checked the Islanders' power play—which was the second-best unit in the NHL—with three goals in 27 attempts. And the Toronto hitters outnumbered the Islander belters by about 15 to three. "Howatt, Nystrom and I do most of the hitting for us," said Gillies. "All their guys seem to hit."

Toronto's two leading hitters, Dave (Tiger) Williams and the newly acquired Dan Maloney, agreed with Gillies' assessment. "Not all their guys hit, and most of their guys don't like the hitting," Maloney noted. Williams, who seems to have borrowed the face of George Chuvalo ("Tiger's face is the beer can you just stepped on," Ballard says), showed no respect for the Islanders. "This is a pansy series and they're a bunch of fairies," he said, scratching his chin just below the jagged marks made by the teeth of the Islanders' Nystrom during one of their tussles. "This series is over. The Islanders are dead. Believe me, they don't have any guts."

That exact sentiment was expressed by a number of the New York players the following night after the Maple Leafs had tied the series at three games apiece with a 5-2 victory. Toronto drove Resch from the nets with a four-goal barrage in the first 15 minutes, and the teams spent the rest of the night trading cheap shots. Six players in all were penalized at least five minutes each for fighting. The Islanders' Garry Howatt waged three fights on his own. "I'm mad," he said later. " Williams can't even put two sentences together and here he is calling us a bunch of fairies."