Montreal Canadiens vs Philadelphia Flyers

Crossing
the Line

Seven playoff meetings between the oldest club in hockey and the one that arrived to break its rules. The centre line runs through all of them.

Montreal Founded 1909

3 4

Philadelphia Founded 1967

Every series, on the line

Seven series across forty-seven years. Montreal took the first two meetings and has not won one since 1989.[7][12]
Year MTL Games won PHI Round Winner
1973 4 1 Semifinal Montreal
1976 4 0 Stanley Cup Final Montreal
1987 2 4 Wales Conference Final Philadelphia
1989 4 2 Wales Conference Final Montreal
2008 1 4 Conference Semifinal Philadelphia
2010 1 4 Conference Final Philadelphia
2020 2 4 First Round Philadelphia

Montreal Philadelphia

Bars run outward from the red centre line toward the club that won each series, sized by games won.

The series

Two eras, really. Montreal owned the first stretch, when the Canadiens were building a dynasty and the Flyers were building a reputation. Philadelphia has owned everything since the Berlin Wall came down.

  1. 1973 Semifinal Montreal 4–1

    The first postseason meeting caught the Flyers a season early. Rick MacLeish won the opener in overtime, and then Philadelphia did not win again in the series. Montreal carried on to the Stanley Cup. What the Flyers lacked, and would have within a year, was Bernie Parent in goal.[7][8]

  2. 1976 Stanley Cup Final Montreal 4–0

    The Flyers arrived as two-time defending champions, in a third straight Final. They left in four games. Montreal closed it out at the Spectrum on 16 May with a 5–3 win, Guy Lafleur breaking the tie at 14:18 of the third period and Pete Mahovlich adding the insurance goal inside a minute. Lafleur led every skater in the series with seven points.[1][2]

  3. 1987 Wales Conference Final Philadelphia 4–2

    Philadelphia's first series win over Montreal, and the one nobody remembers for the hockey. Ilkka Sinisalo settled a 4–3 opener in overtime; the Flyers took the series in six and went on to meet Edmonton in the Final. Game 6, at the Forum, is the reason this series has its own section further down this page.[7][4]

  4. 1989 Wales Conference Final Montreal 4–2

    Montreal's most recent series win over the Flyers, now more than three decades old. It was decided in six games and remembered for what happened between Chris Chelios and Ron Hextall rather than for the goals.[7][6]

  5. 2008 Conference Semifinal Philadelphia 4–1

    Montreal came in as the best regular-season team in the Eastern Conference on 104 points. Philadelphia beat them in five, closing the series with a 6–4 win, and R.J. Umberger scored eight goals across the five games.[7][8]

  6. 2010 Conference Final Philadelphia 4–1

    Seventh seed against eighth seed, both of them having already beaten better teams to get there. Philadelphia won in five and reached the Stanley Cup Final. The series is best remembered in Philadelphia for a single Mike Richards shift.[7][8]

  7. 2020 First Round Philadelphia 4–2

    Played entirely in Toronto, in an empty building, under pandemic quarantine. Four of the six games were decided by a single goal and two were shutouts. Montreal forced a sixth game with a 5–3 win, then lost it 3–2 on 21 August. Ivan Provorov, Kevin Hayes and Michael Raffl scored for Philadelphia; Nick Suzuki scored twice for Montreal.[9][10][11]

Four nights

16 May 1976
The Spectrum

The sweep that closed an era

For two years the Flyers had won the Stanley Cup by making the sport uncomfortable, and the league had not found an answer. Montreal's answer was simply to be faster. The Canadiens took the Final in four straight, and the Broad Street Bullies never got back to it.

The lasting oddity of the series is the Conn Smythe Trophy. It went to Philadelphia's Reggie Leach, who had scored a then-record 19 goals across the playoffs, making him one of very few players to be named the postseason's best on a team that lost. Kate Smith sang the anthem for Philadelphia. It did not help. Montreal won the next three Cups as well.[1][2]

14 May 1987
The Forum

The brawl before the anthem

Game 6 of the Wales Conference Final had not started. Both teams had left the ice after warmups. Montreal had a habit of sending a player back out to shoot a puck into the opposition's empty net, a small ritual that also happened to cross the taboo against crossing centre ice before a game.

Philadelphia had decided in advance not to allow it. Ed Hospodar and backup goaltender Glenn Resch waited by the bench door. When Claude Lemieux and Shayne Corson came back out, Hospodar went straight at Lemieux and Resch took Corson. Both dressing rooms emptied. Players arrived still half-dressed, one of them, Dave Brown, without a jersey and wearing sandals. It ran for several minutes with no officials on the ice, because the officials had not come out either.

Hospodar was suspended for the rest of the playoffs. The Flyers won the game and the series. It is commonly described as the last bench-clearing brawl in the NHL, and the rules written afterward are why nothing like it has happened since.[3][4][5][8]

11 May 1989
The Spectrum

Hextall settles an account

In Game 1 of the 1989 conference final, Chris Chelios caught Brian Propp with a hit that drew no penalty and left Propp concussed and out of Game 2. Nothing was resolved in the five games that followed.

With 1:37 left in Game 6, a series Philadelphia was losing and about to lose, play stopped for an offside. Ron Hextall left his crease, skated the length of the zone and attacked Chelios. The NHL suspended him for twelve games, served at the start of the following season. Chelios later said he had it coming.[6][8]

21 August 2020
Scotiabank Arena, Toronto

A rivalry with the sound turned off

The most recent chapter was played in a sealed building in a neutral city with no crowd in it, which strips a rivalry of the one thing it usually runs on. What was left was a tight, low-scoring series: two shutouts, four one-goal games, and Carey Price against a Flyers team that had finished first in the East.

Behind the Philadelphia bench was Alain Vigneault, who had been the Canadiens' head coach twenty years earlier. He eliminated his old club in six.[9][10][15]

Crossings

The line is not a wall. These are the people who ended up on the other side of it, and one trade that reshaped both clubs at once.

  • The 1995 trade

    Three players to Philadelphia, one to Montreal

    On 9 February 1995 the Flyers sent Mark Recchi and a third-round pick to Montreal for Éric Desjardins, John LeClair and Gilbert Dionne. Recchi was coming off seasons of 123 and 107 points, so the Canadiens appeared to have won it outright. They had not.[13][14]

  • John LeClair

    Montreal → Philadelphia

    Won a Cup with Montreal in 1993, scoring overtime winners in consecutive games of the Final. Moved to Philadelphia in the Recchi trade, was put on a line with Eric Lindros and Mikael Renberg, and became the first American-born player to score 50 goals in three consecutive seasons.[14][17]

  • Éric Desjardins

    Montreal → Philadelphia

    The other half of what Montreal gave up. He became the best defenceman Philadelphia had, winning the club's Barry Ashbee Trophy seven times over eleven seasons.[14]

  • Mark Recchi

    Philadelphia → Montreal → Philadelphia

    The rare player to cross the line twice. Ten seasons in Philadelphia in two spells, five in Montreal in between, including an 80-point season for the Canadiens. He returned to the Flyers in a trade that sent Dainius Zubrus and two picks the other way.[13][14]

  • Daniel Brière

    Philadelphia → Montreal

    Six seasons as a Flyer, then a single season in Montreal after signing there as a free agent in July 2013, traded to Colorado the following summer. He is now the general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers.[16]

  • Alain Vigneault

    Montreal → Philadelphia

    Head coach of the Canadiens from 1997 to 2000 and of the Flyers from April 2019. In the 2020 playoffs he knocked his former club out in six games.[15]

The numbers

Playoff games
Philadelphia 19, Montreal 18 Thirty-seven games across seven series, a one-game margin.
Regular season
Montreal 94, Philadelphia 86 Plus 30 ties, from the era before the shootout. Reference sites differ slightly on how they split this record, so treat the exact figures as approximate; the direction, a narrow Montreal lead, is consistent across them.[12]

The split tells the story better than the totals do. In the playoffs the two clubs are separated by a single game across half a century, but the wins are not evenly distributed in time: Montreal took three of the first four series, Philadelphia has taken every one since.

Sources

Every factual claim on this page traces to one of the following. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved silently.

  1. NHL.com, This Date in NHL History: May 16. nhl.com
  2. Wikipedia, 1976 Stanley Cup Final. en.wikipedia.org
  3. UPI Archives, 14 May 1987, A pre-game brawl erupted Thursday night as the Montreal… upi.com
  4. NBC Sports Philadelphia, Flyers-Canadiens playoff series reminds us of a brawl that changed hockey. nbcsportsphiladelphia.com
  5. The Globe and Mail, The fight that changed hockey. theglobeandmail.com
  6. UPI Archives, 22 May 1989, Flyers goalie suspended 12 games for attack. upi.com
  7. Broad Street Hockey, A history of the Flyers and Canadiens playoff matchups, thus far. broadstreethockey.com
  8. The Hockey Writers, Philadelphia Flyers' History With the Montreal Canadiens. thehockeywriters.com
  9. ESPN, Flyers 3-2 Canadiens, 21 August 2020, game recap. espn.com
  10. NBC Sports, Flyers eliminate Canadiens, continue incredible run. nbcsports.com
  11. NHL.com, Flyers vs Canadiens, 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs first round. nhl.com
  12. Champs or Chumps, Philadelphia Flyers vs Montreal Canadiens head-to-head. champsorchumps.us
  13. UPI Archives, 9 February 1995, Flyers deal Recchi to Canadiens. upi.com
  14. NBC Sports Philadelphia, Today in Philly Sports History: Recchi for Desjardins and LeClair, 1995. nbcsportsphiladelphia.com
  15. Wikipedia, Alain Vigneault. en.wikipedia.org
  16. Wikipedia, Daniel Brière. en.wikipedia.org
  17. NHL.com, Catching up with John LeClair. nhl.com