Canada Ice Hockey vs USSR Ice Hockey

Date
Tue 5th September 1972 (UTC)
Mon 4th September 1972 (Local)

Timestamp
1972-09-05T00:00:00

Time

00:00:00 UTC (20:00:00 Local)

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League
Summit Series

Season
1972

Round
2

Status
Match Finished

Location
Toronto, ON
Canada
Maple Leaf Gardens

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Description

The second game was played at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on September 4. Sinden scratched several players from the first game, including Dryden, Awrey, Ratelle, Red Berenson, Rod Gilbert, Vic Hadfield, Mickey Redmond and Rod Seiling. Hadfield took the scratch hard, as he was from the Toronto area and felt he was being embarrassed in front of his hometown. On defence, Serge Savard, Pat Stapleton and Bill White were added, as were forwards Mikita, Wayne Cashman and J. P. Parisé. Tony Esposito, Phil's brother, took over goaltending duties. Sinden's changes were made to get "the diggers into the game and try to grind the Russians down. We had went for speed and quickness in our first lineup, yet the Russians were still faster and quicker."

Team Canada responded to their previous defeat with stronger play in this game. The first period was scoreless, but the Canadians used the period to intimidate the Soviets with hard body checking, especially from Cashman, Gary Bergman, Peter Mahovlich and Parisé, to throw the Soviets off their game. In the second period, Esposito again scored the first goal of the game, this time from a feed from his regular Boston Bruins' linemate Cashman, who had retrieved the puck deep in the Soviets' zone after colliding with USSR defenceman Vladimir Lutchenko. In the third period, Yvan Cournoyer wheeled around Alexander Ragulin and beat Tretiak to give Canada a 2–0 lead. Yakushev got the Soviets on the board after teammate Yevgeni Zimin missed on a breakaway. Yuri Lyapkin pounced on the rebound and fed it out front for Alexander Yakushev to bury the puck behind Esposito. Peter Mahovlich then scored a critical shorthanded goal, deking out the Soviet defender one-on-one, then Tretiak, to again give Canada a two-goal lead. His brother Frank then finished the scoring on a feed from Mikita, who had circled around a Soviet defenceman. Team Canada's 4–1 win tied the series at one game apiece.

The Soviet coaches blamed the loss on the officiating. Bobrov complained that the pair of American referees, Frank Larsen and Steve Dowling, let the Canadians get away with everything. After the game, the head of the USSR Hockey Federation, Andrei Starovoytov, charged the door of the officials' dressing room and kicked chairs over, exclaiming: "American referees allowed Canadian hockey players to act like a gang of outlaws." The two referees, scheduled to work game four in Vancouver, were replaced by the pair who had refereed games one and three, Gord Lee and Len Gagnon. Team Canada agreed to the Soviets' request to change referees, apparently not aware of Starovoitov's tantrum after game two.