Remembering Glen Sather, Edmonton Oilers’ dynasty-builder

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There’s no point in reinventing the wheel, nor is there in rewriting history, at least when that history has already been written to the best of one’s ability. Today Glen “Slats” Sather has announced his retirement from the New York Rangers at age 80. We remember him here at Cult of Hockey by republishing, with slight revisions, the piece we posted back on 2015 July 21 when the Oilers announced a banner would be raised in his honour.

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Remembering Glen Sather, Edmonton Oilers’ dynasty-builder

Some long-unfinished business will finally be attended to in the final season of the old barn currently known as Rexall Place when the Edmonton Oilers will raise a banner acknowledging the contributions of Glen Sather before the NHL team’s game vs. New York Rangers on December 11.

Sather was the architect of all five of Edmonton’s Stanley Cup champions from 1984-90, the first four of which he was both head coach and general manager of the NHL club, the fifth as GM and club president.

The degree of Sather’s involvement with hockey in Edmonton can be seen in the banners that already grace three sides of the building. We can start with the oldest of them all, the Memorial Cup flag that he and his Edmonton Oil Kings teammates won back in 1963, more than a decade before the Coliseum even existed. Of the 23 NHL championship banners the Oilers have accumulated, the man universally known as “Slats” had a hand in 22 of them. He also coached all eight Oilers players who have had their numbers retired, seven of whom are members of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

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As is Sather himself, of course, inducted as a builder way back in 1997 while he was still Oilers’ GM. Three years later he moved on to New York to guide the Rangers, where he served as general manager for 15 years and club president for another 9.

But before all that he was a hockey player. After a successful NHL career that spanned parts of 10 seasons, Sather returned to Edmonton in 1976 to play for the World Hockey Association Oilers in the still-spanking new Edmonton Coliseum. Serving as the team’s captain, he had a credible season, connecting for 19 goals and 53 points for a decidedly mediocre squad. With the club foundering in early March, coach Bep Guidolin stepped down as the club’s coach and Sather was promoted to his first hyphenated title in Edmonton, that of player-coach. He continued to play the final 18 games of the season, scoring the first goal just 1:11 into his coaching debut, a 5-4 home win over the WHA’s flagship franchise, the Winnipeg Jets. The club responded to his leadership, posting a credible 9-7-2 record after going 25-36-2 under Guidolin.

Ever-dapper Glen Sather took over the Oilers bench in 1977. Note the WHA-era logos.

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Still just 34, Sather stepped away from his playing career to become a full-time coach in the fall of ’77 — coincidentally my first as a season ticket holder so I watched the sequence unfold from there. Sather was literally the first piece of the Stanley Cup puzzle, starting without a single player from his future dynasty before signing over-age junior Dave Semenko from Brandon Wheat Kings at the end of October. The following season, the Oilers would lure Montreal Canadiens first-round pick Dave Hunter, then make the key acquisition of 17-year-old Wayne Gretzky in November, 1978. The Oilers took a massive leap forward, winning the final regular season championship of the WHA (the “missing” banner at Rexall Rogers Place) before losing to the Jets in the Avco Cup finals.

The Oilers, Jets, and two other WHA clubs would go on to join the NHL that summer. The roster would take a massive hit from the onerous terms of the “reverse expansion draft” the league imposed on its newest members, especially along the blue line where key players like Dave Langevin, Joe Micheletti and “kaptain” Paul Shmyr were lost to various NHL clubs. But they did manage to retain some key pieces, notably Gretzky and of course Sather himself.

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Sather gets into it with former NHL referee Greg Madill.

The rest is of course history. The expansion Oilers were The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight in their opening season but made a late surge to make the playoffs, keyed in part by a deadline trade that brought Ron Low to Edmonton in exchange for captain Ron Chipperfield, solving the club’s goaltending shortcomings in a single phone call.

The GM’s duties were formally added to his portfolio that summer of 1980, and the club followed a steep learning curve into contention. They upset the mighty Montreal Canadiens in a memorable opening round sweep in 1981, soaring to third place in the overall standings the following season, and into the Stanley Cup Finals the next. One year after that, Sather’s crew would finish first overall by a staggering 15 points, then roll to the Stanley Cup. Four more Cups would follow in the next six years before financial issues involving owner Peter Pocklington eventually resulted in the demise of the dynasty.

Much of the credit for those powerhouse teams deservedly belongs to the superstars whose banners also hang high at rogers Place, and to many excellent supporting players who have not been recognized in such a manner. But Glen Sather deserves his share of the kudos as well.

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It was no mean feat to harbour such an array of talent at such a young age and to allow them to play to their strengths, a free-wheeling, fast-skating game that was loosely modeled after the WHA Jets of the Bobby Hull-Ulf Nilsson-Anders Hedberg days. A lot of NHL coaches would have tried to harness those talents at a younger age, but Sather let them loose to skate and score. There were some harsh lessons to be learned along the way, but in time the Oilers became a devastating scoring machine unlike any the NHL has seen before or since.

Around the core group Sather amassed some solid supporting pieces, whether developed internally or through cagey wheeling and dealing. His own combative persona behind the bench was part of the club’s identity of a brash young group that wasn’t beholden to the staid traditions of the NHL. Sather and the upstart Oilers made a few enemies along the way, but such is the price of success.

Sather’s last decade in Edmonton was much quieter. He left the bench in 1989, turning the job over to long-time assistant John Muckler who promptly won the surprise fifth, Gretzky-less Cup. The other pieces of the dynasty soon slipped away and the club entered an extended down period, missing the playoffs for four consecutive years. But in the late ’90s, Sather made a few more smart deals to bring aboard key players like Doug Weight, Todd Marchant, Mike Grier, Boris Mironov and Curtis Joseph, and the Oil returned to respectability if not full-fledged contention. When he departed for New York in 2000, he left behind a decent core group that would continue to compete for a few years, thriving despite the tight budgets of the era.

Glen Sather works the phones and his cigar in equal measure in this file photo from the 2009 Entry Draft. No doubt the guy on the other end of the line is also getting worked.

Today Glen Sather retires as one of the most accomplished men in hockey. He turned 80 last in September, with over 60 years in the professional game. 24 of them came in Edmonton plus another three seasons with the junior Oil Kings. He left an indelible imprint on the game, especially in this city.

Congratulations, Slats, on an extraordinary career and life in the game.

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