A fan’s mind tends to remember only what it wants to. It will remember their favourite player’s hat trick, but not that one time when they scored in their net. It will remember their favourite goalie’s best saves, but not that one time when they left the net unmanned to handle a puck and that an unfortunate rebound off the boards sent the puck in the net. Similarly, it will remember a player’s time on their favourite team but will somehow delete the time that same player spent with another club. Here are two players who got to play on both sides of the classic Montreal Canadiens – Boston Bruins rivalry.
Chris “Knuckles” Nilan
Somehow, this Massachusetts-born-and-raised player was drafted by the Bruins’ worst enemy, the Canadiens. While some may only remember Nilan as an enforcer, he played pretty well for Montreal. In one of his best seasons, in 1985-1986, Nilan scored 19 goals and helped the team win its 23rd Stanley Cup.
In the 1986-1987 season, he was one of the main actors in the “Brawl in the Hall” at the Boston Garden when both teams fought in the hall behind the Bruins’ bench. However, it’s not so much the fight that I remember. It was the way he antagonized his opponents. The next day, he said in an interview that the Canadiens had taught Boston a lesson, and the way they were consumed by stupid penalties was why the Bs weren’t all that successful in the playoffs. That cracked me up.
Nilan was traded to the New York Rangers following a conflict with head coach Jacques Lemaire during the 1987-88 season, and, in turn, the Rangers sent him to the Bruins. He only stayed in Boston for two seasons (80 games) before he found his way back to the Canadiens in 1991-1992, playing 17 games in the Sainte-Flanelle before he retired. For many Canadiens fans, he was never part of the Bruins.
Mark Recchi
Recchi arrived in Montreal in February 1995 from the Philadelphia Flyers. The Canadiens received Recchi, a third-round pick at the 1995 NHL Draft in the trade, while the Flyers made out like bandits, receiving John Leclair, Eric Desjardins, and Gilbert Dionne. Leclair would form the “Legion of Doom” line with Eric Lindros and Mikael Renberg, while Desjardins would stay in Philadelphia for 11 seasons as the Flyers’ anchor on defence. To this day, this trade remains a sensitive subject for former general manager Serge Savard. In his biography “Canadien jusqu’au bout” he explains:
[Translated from the original French] …In Recchi, I obtained the best player of the trade. Today, he’s a member of the Hall of Fame and he won the Stanley Cup with three different teams. […] I gave too much to the Flyers in that trade. I didn’t think Eric was indispensable for us. I made a mistake. As a general manager, I made some good moves and some not-so-good moves. Giving Desjardins was part of the second category (from “Canadiens Jusqu’au bout”, KO Éditions, 2019, p. 402).
Meanwhile, when Recchi arrived in Montreal, he seemed less than thrilled in the press conference, but he still performed well for the Canadiens. He stayed in Montreal for three full seasons and featured in five, playing 346 games and scoring 322 points.
Related: 7 Things about Mark Recchi
In the end, Recchi loved his time in Montreal and remembered it fondly, especially the ceremony that closed the Montreal Forum. In the last game held in the storied building, he scored two points in the Canadiens’ 4-1 win over the Dallas Stars. A reliable player who was rarely injured, it took pneumonia to keep him out of the lineup on December 12, 1998, to end his streak of 570 consecutive games. In his time with the Habs, he won the Molson Cup twice as the team’s player of the season.
Canadiens fans fondly remembered Recchi until he joined the Bruins in 2008-09. Playing for an archrival is one thing, but when Recchi commented on Max Pacioretty’s health following the now-famous Pacioretty-Chara incident, he crossed a line.
On March 8, 2011, Bruins captain Zdeno Chara hit Pacioretty into the Bell Centre’s stanchions, leaving him with a severe concussion and a fractured fourth vertebrae. Days later, when Recchi was asked if Pacioretty had embellished his injury, he replied:
When there’s an injury that’s…you know, he does have a fractured vertebra, but the concussion was obviously really a non-factor. Maybe a day or two. Maybe a day he felt it and then he was fine a couple days later. I believe, yeah, they were trying to get Zdeno suspended, and they embellished it a little bit.
From then on, fans nicknamed him Doctor Recchi, and when he raised the Stanley Cup wearing the Black and Gold before being inducted into the Hall of Fame, this is what the Montreal faithful remembered, not that he had been a great player for them in parts of five seasons.
These two players wore both the CH and the Spoked B and are remembered very differently. Nilan is remembered for bleeding the Red, White and Blue, while, for some, Rechhi is just Doctor Recchi, who dared to minimize one of the worst injuries the Montreal crowd had ever seen.
