Gerry Meehan once took a shot heard, if not around the world, then at least across Western New York.
And all of Pennsylvania.
His long-range shot in Buffalo, 50 years ago, knocked the Philadelphia Flyers out of the Stanley Cup playoffs and put the Pittsburgh Penguins in.
“I knew that time was almost up,” Meehan says of his off-balance wrist shot from the top of the left circle. “So my only thought was to get across the blue line and get the puck on the net.”
He pauses, as though what he says next remains hard to believe, even now.
“And it went in.”
The Flyers came into Memorial Auditorium on Easter Sunday 1972 – the last day of the NHL’s regular season – needing a win or a tie to clinch a place in the playoffs. The Buffalo Sabres, in their second season, were out of contention. The Flyers raced out to a 2-0 lead, but goals by Gilbert Perreault and Rene Robert tied it. And that is how it stood as the game’s final seconds ticked down.
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Meehan is one of the seminal figures in Sabres history, as their second captain and fourth general manager. The Sabres selected him in the 1970 NHL expansion draft, an arrangement by which Buffalo and the Vancouver Canucks chose players left unprotected by the league’s other teams. The Sabres acquired Meehan from the Flyers with the 29th choice. But he didn't think of his goal, two years later, as any kind of revenge.
“That sort of thing happens all the time in sports – a young guy gets his chance with a couple of other teams,” Meehan says. “And, finally, I found my niche in Buffalo after tries in Toronto and Philadelphia. So I don’t remember any sort of resentment toward them other than, you know, trying to get the game over with and not lose.”
Meehan got the puck at center ice as the clock clicked under 10 seconds. What happened next was of little consequence to the Sabres themselves, but remains one of the most consequential regular-season goals in Sabres history.
Meehan released his shot from about 40 feet away. Flyers goalie Doug Favell could see it all the way, but somehow the puck got by him.
“I don’t remember it being a blistering shot,” Meehan says. “I remember it being on net and finding a corner.”
The capacity crowd of 15,360 erupted. Favell slumped to the ice. Flyers captain Bobby Clarke knelt with his stick across his knees. Only four seconds remained: Sabres 3, Flyers 2.
Following a faceoff at center ice, Meehan fired one last shot at an empty net. It missed, and by the time he tapped in a rebound off the boards, time had expired. That left him with 19 goals for the season, one shy of a $10,000 bonus.
“Was I expecting it to go in?” Meehan says of his game winner. “Probably not necessarily. It wasn’t one of those, what we call, high-percentage chances.”
Meehan’s memory of that night remains vivid all these years later, though he admits it helps that he can still see it on YouTube. (You can, too, at this link.)
That was the first season in Philly for coach Fred Shero. He had coached the Buffalo Bisons when they won the Calder Cup in 1970 in their last hurrah in the American Hockey League.
Ray Shero was in fourth grade when Meehan’s shot spoiled his father’s season. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer some years ago how his mother reacted, watching on TV in the Philadelphia suburbs: “She kind of screamed, and her coffee cup went up, and coffee went all over the wall. I cried. And I still remember going to school the next day, and it was one of the most devastating days of my life. The kids were saying the Flyers and your old man suck.”
The judgment of these fourth graders proved wrong: Fred Shero’s Flyers reached the conference finals the next year, won the Stanley Cup against the Boston Bruins the year after that, and then won another Cup against the Sabres the year after that. Ray Shero, too, would grow up to win a Stanley Cup of his own, in 2009, as general manager of the Penguins – the team that was the beneficiary of Meehan’s long-ago long shot.
Remember, in 2017, when the Buffalo Bills ended their interminable playoff drought? That, of course, came courtesy of Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton, who threw a last-minute, fourth-down, 49-yard touchdown pass that knocked the Baltimore Ravens out of the NFL playoffs. And put the Bills in.
Meehan’s shot was hockey’s version of that – a last-gasp play that defied the odds and snatched playoff position from one team, giving it to another.
But don’t think of Meehan’s shot of 50 years ago as his Andy Dalton moment.
Better to think of Dalton’s pass as his Gerry Meehan moment.
