Sittler’s 10-point night for Maple Leafs stands test of time

TORONTO -- Darryl Sittler had the last laugh.

A chuckle that has lasted 50 years.

Prior to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ game against the Boston Bruins on Feb. 7, 1976, Harold Ballard, the team’s bombastic owner, had whined to reporters that the Maple Leafs couldn't find the proper center to click between wings Lanny McDonald and Errol Thompson.

“We’d set off a time bomb if we had a sensational center,” Ballard told the press.

Tick, tick, tick …

“I knew it was a dig at me,” Sittler recalls now. “I just tried to ignore it.”

As such, Sittler decided to take the high road and not get into a war of words with Ballard.

Instead, he let his play do the talking.

And, five decades later, his mystical performance still speaks volumes to this day.

When all was said and done, Sittler had gone out and racked up 10 points (six goals, four assists) against beleaguered goalie Dave Reece and the Don Cherry-coached Bruins in a wild and wacky 11-4 Maple Leafs victory. It was a single-game offensive performance that had never been seen before.

Or, for that matter, since.

“It was a magical night,” he says now. “Everything I touched, worked. I can’t explain it. It was nuts.

“And now, here we are all these years later, and people are still celebrating it.”

On Tuesday, prior to Toronto’s game against the Buffalo Sabres at Scotiabank Arena (7 pm. ET; TSN4, MSG-B), the Maple Leafs will honor Sittler for the 50th anniversary of that feat, a single-game points mark that has endured to this day. It will be a party that lasts all evening, even after the opening puck is dropped.

With his No. 27 banner dangling from the arena rafters, the 74-year-old will be joined, weather and health permitting, by former teammates McDonald, Thompson, Dave “Tiger” Williams, Inge Hammerstrom, Claire Alexander, Rod Seiling, Pat Boutette, Ian Turnbull, Jack Valiquette and Bob Neely. There, they will celebrate a record that has survived the test of time, even with the subsequent inventions of composite sticks, feather-light skates and the removal of the center-ice red line.

Chicken wings will be sold at arena kiosks in 10 pieces in tribute to the number of points Sittler racked up in that game. Current Maple Leaf players will have special patches on their jerseys marking the event.

“To share it with the fans, my teammates, my family, it’s just special,” he said.

Much like his record.

It’s especially so when you consider he ranks 68th on the NHL’s all-time points list with 1,121 (484 goals, 637 assists) in 1,096 games with the Maple Leafs, Philadelphia Flyers and Detroit Red Wings in a truncated career that lasted from 1970-1985. He was the epitome of a leader and a dogged competitor, traits that deservedly got him elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.

In the ensuing years, he admits watching generational talents like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux take the League by storm. Surely, he thought, one of these guys will eclipse it one day.

It has not to be.

Eleven players in NHL history have had eight points in a game. That’s the closest anyone has ever come. Lemieux and Gretzky each did it twice.

“I thought if anyone was going to catch me, it was them,” Sittler said. “They could carry a team. They were so dynamic.”

Obviously not enough. At least not like he was in one glorious 60-minute span.

Sittler’s historic night started with a pair of assists in the first period, a goal by McDonald goal at 6:19 and one by Turnbull at 7:01.

The second period was even more impressive. He scored his first goal at 2:56, assisted on a goal from Borje Salming at 3:33, scored his second goal at 8:12 and completed his hat trick at 10:27. Before the period would end, he would assist on another goal from Salming at 13:57. Five points (three goals, two assists) in one period and seven points (three goals, four assists) through two periods.

As the players were resting in the second intermission, Maple Leafs publicity director Stan Obodiac busted into the dressing room and told Sittler that he was just one point shy of the then-NHL record of eight, held at the time by Montreal Canadiens great Maurice “Rocket” Richard.

“There was no internet then or anything like that,” Williams said. “No one had a clue. We just knew Darryl had just scored a hat trick in one period. Back then, goals were a big deal. “When Stan told us he was close to Rocket’s record, well, any time you approached one of Rocket’s records, it was a big deal.”

The best was yet to come.

Sittler went out and scored the only three goals of the third period, the first 44 seconds into the period. He scored his fifth goal at 9:27, much to the glee of his teammates and astonished fans at Maple Leaf Gardens.

A hat trick in the second and third periods? Such a thing was unheard of.

Until it wasn’t.

“It was so great,” McDonald said. “We were just all on the bench, looking over our shoulders, hoping (coach) Red Kelly would tap us to go out and play with Darryl. There were points to be had out there.”

The final one was perhaps the most telling. It came on his sixth goal of the night when his centering pass from behind the goal line deflected off the skate of Bruins defenseman Brad Park and into the net at 16:35.

“That’s when you knew everything you touched that night pretty well went in,” Sittler said.

Reece’s story was interesting unto itself. With goalie Gerry Cheevers having just rejoined the Bruins after a brief stint in the World Hockey Association, Reece, having been told he’d be returning to the minors later in the week, admitted to the Boston Globe that he went out with teammate Johnny Bucyk the night before the game for some fun and frivolity.

The game would prove anything but for him.

“Part of the reason for Darryl’s big night was Cherry’s stubbornness,” Williams said. “He could have pulled (Reece) but he didn’t. He left him in there to take it.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

In a cool twist to the story, Sittler will be donning his game jersey from that night to the ceremony at Scotiabank Arena. The fact that it went missing for the longest of times makes him embrace its return even more.

“We played 78 games in our schedule back then,” he said. “We wore the same jersey the whole freaking year, right? Ripped and cut and whatever. And then, at the end of the season, I never thought to keep the thing. That wasn't kind of in our mindset back then.

“Ballard must have given the thing away.”

Decades later, it was tracked to a warehouse in New Jersey in 2018, Sittler said. Then, last year, his pals Mark Shapiro and Joey Arfin located it at an auction in the U.S. and shelled out an estimated $200,000 for it, as first reported by the Toronto Sun last week.

“It came back to Toronto where it belongs,” Sittler said.

Much like Sittler’s name does in the NHL record book.