In these Stanley Cup Finals, the 2010 Philadelphia Flyers look to carve out their place in franchise history alongside the back-to-back Stanley Cup Championship teams of ’73-’74 and ’74-’75; the Flyer hockey teams better known as the Broad Street Bullies. It’s a term of endearment in Philly, a pejorative everywhere else. Broad Street Bullies is also the title of a must-see HBO documentary that premiered this spring.
“They showed it to us a couple weeks before it came out, so it was cool to see what it was like back then and see how those guys did their thing,” Flyers left wing James Van Riemsdyk told me at Stanley Cup Media Day.
By Paul M. Banks
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“I’m sure the average sports fan would enjoy it,” Van Riemsdyk said of Broad Street Bullies.
“It kind of went behind the scenes, showed some pretty fool footage, gives you that extra pride for what’s it like to wear the Flyer uniform, there’s a lot of tradition here and those guys did some great things in winning the cup twice, it gave us a little inspiration going into the playoffs playing for the pride of Philadelphia,” he continued.
Indeed it was a very informative and entertaining documentary. Both hockey gurus and non-sports fans alike will appreciate the history it conveys. The Flyers were born in 1967, when the NHL doubled in size from original 6 to 12 whole teams. At first, no one even wanted to invest in Philadelphia hockey. But the Flyers found a financial backer, and eventually built a team that won back-to-back Stanley Cups just six years after the franchise began play. 
The Broad Street Bullies won through intimidation. They literally beat the snot out of you and kicked your teeth in. But they were more than just goons and thugs.
They had great scoring in Bobby Clarke, a three time league MVP and 8 time All-Star. And they had superlative goaltending in Bernie Parent, whose personal eccentricities took the common archetype of goalie as weirdo to new and insane proportions. In between the pipes he was crazy good, posting 47 wins in one season, an NHL record that stood for 33 years.
Of course, the most memorable aspect of this documentary wasn’t the ’70s mullets, horrible leisure suits and porn star mustaches (although all those attributes were pretty sweet).
It was the general anarchy, brute tactics, inherent brawling and genuine thuggery that defined this team. They had four guys who would be called “enforcers” today, the biggest and baddest being Sgt. Schulze, a.k.a. Dave “the Hammer” Schulze.
They were so violent and aggressive that the NHL eventually re-wrote the rule book. “A lot of the stuff they did back then, we’re not allowed to do anymore, said Flyers forward Jeff Carter, the team’s leading goal scorer. It’s true, in the Bullies’ day there were no “3rd man in” or “instigator” rules.
The 2010 Flyers aren’t much like the Bullies, but they do get physical on occasion. “Yeah we got guys that play tough and play hard and try to get under each other’s skin,” Carter continued.
Not on the level of Schulzie of course, who racked up 8 total games worth of penalty minutes in one season, a record that today looks unbreakable. In this Finals, the 2010 Flyers are looking to create their own legacy, just like the Broad Street Bullies have.
“Absolutely. You want your own book written about you, your own story, we got three chapters. Now we gotta get a fourth,” said Flyers defensemen Chris Pronger, the team leader in assists.
“It’s tough to compare generations and teams like that, it’s difficult. I try not to do that,” Pronger responded when I asked him about 2010 to 1976 similarities.
In the Delaware Valley, the Broad Street Bullies are forever regarded as local demigods. In the rest of the world, they’re nothing short of Satan’s henchmen. Decades later, the infamy of the Broad Street Bullies lives on.
Check out this clip from a mid ’90s The Simpsons Halloween special. The 1976 Flyers starting line qualifies as for “the jury of the damned,” pure evil in the same cohort as John Wilkes Booth, Lizzie Borden, Benedict Arnold and Richard Nixon.
I have no clue why their uniforms are drawn incorrectly in both color and logo though.
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