Sittler's single-game points record still untouched

Records are made to be broken. But the mark Darryl Sittler set on Feb. 7, 1976, continues to stand the test of time.

On that early February night, Sittler shattered one of the most famous marks in hockey -- Maurice Richard's record of eight points in a game, a record set by "The Rocket" in December 1944 and matched only once in the next 32 years -- by Bert Olmstead in 1954. Richard had five goals and three assists; Sittler had one more of each, scoring six times and setting up four more goals as the Toronto Maple Leafs routed the Boston Bruins 11-4.

Sittler's 10-point night came out of nowhere. The Maple Leafs entered the game in a 1-4-2 funk that had led owner Harold Ballard to call him out for a lack of production. They were barely over .500 at 21-20-11. The Bruins, on the other hand, came to Toronto 20 points ahead of the Leafs in the Adams Division standings, having won seven in a row and riding a 15-1-1 surge. Boston had gotten a boost from the goaltending of rookie Dave Reece, who posted a 7-4-2 record while backing up Gilles Gilbert before the Bruins announced that longtime goaltender Gerry Cheevers was returning from the World Hockey Association.

That meant Reece would be headed back to the minors, but not before he was on the wrong end of history.

Good points, but I have to disagree with you on big one. The "defensive systems" you refer to actually go back a long ways. It was the Montreal Canadiens who adopted the neutral-zone trap and then worked it to perfection in the 1970s. It's really a European approach to hockey, built around the challenges of defending a larger ice surface with less restrictive offsides rules (the elimination of the red line under current NHL rules that allow longer passes into the neutral zone was adopted by the NHL to match international rules).

The Edmonton Oilers were actually the exception in a lot of ways, not the norm. There's been a swing back and forth in the NHL between the "Montreal style" and the "Edmonton style," and as others have pointed out, the expansion of the last two decades has spread a limited talent pool over a larger league and made it more difficult to get a lot of talent concentrated on one team.

I don’t know....teams are scoring at a pace from the 1940’s. Most sports progress in records being broke...athletes being more skilled etc..but the NHL seems to be going backwards. I noticed it in 1995..when the New Jersey Devils “trapped” and swept a powerful Red Wings team...then it seems all the teams went that way...thats when the Wings finally won the Cup in 1997...Yzerman was told he’d have to play a more “defensive” game. Now they are kinda panicking with all these bizarre rule changes..trapezoids..move the net back,,,then move it front...if the Oilers played with 2 line passes allowed...geez, Wayne would have scored 2000 goals. Theres no more end to end rushes..the neutral zone is constantly clogged up..most goals seem like garbage goals..theers just no flow to the games like there used to be. The Montreal teams were very good defensively,,,but also a very high scoring team..one of the best ever. The stars cant do their thing it seems..and that’s not a good place to be.

I've said for a long time that one of the biggest factors in the decline of scoring in the NHL -- along with: (1) the dilution of talent that came with expansion, and (2) the emergence of highly-skilled athletes at the goaltender position (Patrick Roy was really the first of these) -- has been the increase in the size of players. The skilled players have a much harder time playing the game to their level simply because they don't have the room to do it anymore. The rink looks smaller these days because it sort of is smaller. The ten-year period from the mid-80s to the mid-90s probably saw the most dramatic time for this. And by bigger players I don't just mean bigger in size; I'm talking about bigger highly skilled players. Look at a guy like Mark Messier. Back in the 1980s he was a giant. And yet in the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals against Philadelphia he was getting owned like a rag doll by Eric Lindros -- who was at least three inches taller than him and 25-30 pounds heavier.

You see the same thing in basketball, by the way. The giant players who dominate the game have effectively shrunk the court. The only two major team sports where scoring has increased considerably in recent decades have been baseball and football. Baseball's story is well documented -- between steroids, altering the physical composition of the baseball, and the shrinking of the strike zone. In the case of the NFL, all of the offensive numbers you see are basically the result of rule changes that were deliberately aimed at enhancing passing statistics.

Something else to remember is that those New Jersey teams from the era you mentioned were much more offensively skilled than they ever get credit for. The team that lost to the Rangers in the 1994 Eastern Conference finals was #2 in the NHL in scoring -- trailing only the Red Wings. They won the Stanley Cup the next year in a shortened season with almost the same roster. The 1999-2000 Devils who won the Cup were also #2 in scoring (again, after the Red Wings), and the 2000-2001 team that lost to Colorado in the Stanley Cup finals actually led the NHL in goals scored.

Those great New Jersey teams were much closer in their composition to the Montreal teams of the 1970s than most hockey fans may realize. That shouldn't come as a surprise, considering how much of their coaching staff could trace their roots to those Montreal teams (Jacques Lemaire and Larry Robinson in particular). The Devils of the late 1990s are often mistakenly viewed as a low-scoring team simply because they never had any high-profile offensive stars. They got offensive production from all four forward lines, and rarely had any individual players score more than 40 goals.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.