About 15 years ago, Denis Potvin’s neighbors headed up from Florida to New York to see his kids and take in a Rangers game. As the neighbor relayed to Potvin, the young man seated next to him began to whistle soon after the puck dropped, leading the crowd into a loud chant that everyone who’s been to Madison Square Garden in the last 40 years knows well.

Advertisement

“Potvin Sucks!”

The neighbor played dumb and asked the Ranger fan, “Who’s this Potvin guy?”

“Ah, he played a long time ago,” the man replied. “I think he’s dead now.”

Potvin, now 66, laughs as he tells this well-worn story from his collection of memories. After 15 years as a Hall of Fame defenseman for the Islanders and 20 more as a broadcaster for the Panthers and Senators, he splits his time between Florida and Ontario and reminisces about the game and his place in it.

To Islanders fans, he’s the greatest captain their team ever had. He put the “C” on his sweater before the 1979-80 season and led the team to four straight Stanley Cups; in an era of legendary defensemen, he’s right up there with Bobby Orr, Paul Coffey and Ray Bourque, one of eight defensemen ever with more than 1,000 points.

To Ranger fans … well, the chant kind of speaks for itself. It began after a hit in the 1978-79 season and it hasn’t stopped, even though everyone associated with the New York rivalry from those days is long retired and moved on.

Potvin remains the villain of the Garden, the emblem of a time when the new kids from the Island surpassed the older franchise from the big city.

“I think he kind of gets a kick out of it,” Clark Gillies said. “I know I would. All these years gone by, the fans still chant your name — it’s almost respect at this point.”

Ulf Nilsson remembers a lot about the magical 1978-79 season with the Rangers, but he has a harder time recalling what happened the night of Feb. 25, 1979. It was Nilsson’s first season in the NHL after four terrific years in the World Hockey Association, where he centered countryman Anders Hedberg and legendary scorer Bobby Hull for the Winnipeg Jets. Nilsson and Hedberg played for rival Stockholm teams growing up, and once teamed up with Hull, were among the first in North America to play a high-flying, European style.

Advertisement

Hull scored 77 goals their first season together, in 1974-75. Nilsson had 85 and 89 assists, respectively, in his final two years in the WHA. He also got the crap kicked out of him by a slew of unhappy Canadians who saw the two Swedes as the unwelcome wave of the future.

“I was bruised from my toes to my forehead every year there,” said Nilsson, 70, now retired and living in Stockholm. “Hull sat out a game in protest, I remember, for the way Anders and I were treated. I think we were bringing a bit of a new game to North America, not that a lot of people saw it because the WHA games weren’t on TV much. We were excited to join the Rangers, but I was pretty beat up before I even got there.”

In spite of that, Nilsson and Hedberg gave the Rangers a jolt. Under new coach Fred Shero, the Rangers were competitive again after three dismal years — nowhere near the league-leading Islanders, but far better than they’d been. Nilsson led the way with 66 points in his first 58 games; he and Hedberg put their stamp on the NHL as they did in the WHA.

“The Garden was a lot of sellouts that year,” Nilsson said. “It always felt full, especially when it was the Islanders or the Flyers. I loved those games. In Sweden, I played for AIK and Anders played for Djurgardens — it was a lot like Islanders-Rangers. And I think Anders and I, we didn’t take much bullshit, we just worked hard, played. We got some respect for that.”

On Feb. 25, the Islanders came into the Garden 14 points clear of the Rangers, with both teams headed toward the playoffs. Nilsson went to the corner in the Islanders’ zone to retrieve a puck and got his skate caught in a rut. In the next second, Potvin delivered a clean hit on Nilsson that left him crumpled on the ice, his ankle broken. Nilsson was helped off the ice, the Rangers won the game 3-2 and there was no chanting to be heard that night.

Advertisement

“I’m not even sure it started that season at all,” Nilsson said. He missed the last 20 games of the regular season and all but two playoff games, the first two games of the Cup final in Montreal after the Rangers upset the Isles in six games in the semifinals. “I tried to play, but the tendons were too weak,” Nilsson said. He can’t remember if his ankle broke from his skate getting caught in the rut or from the hit, but Nilsson said then and maintains that the Potvin hit was clean.

The Rangers did not end their Cup drought that year, and fans felt Nilsson’s absence was the main reason. So the chant began the next season, when Potvin had taken the captaincy from Gillies and the Islanders began their march to a dynasty.

Over the course of the next eight years, before Potvin retired, trips to Manhattan and MSG were a bit more fraught.

“Oh, it wasn’t difficult — it was scary as hell,” Potvin said. “We used to stay at the Statler Hotel across the street from the Garden and I would walk over at around 3 instead of the usual 5 or 5:30. I just didn’t want to deal with anyone seeing me. But I also felt like I channeled a lot of that negative energy into something positive. The hatred in the building was real, but I became so focused on the task at hand, I think it helped me in a way.

“Living in the New York area then, you had the Yankees and Red Sox and you had Rangers-Islanders. So I understood where all those emotions came from. Ulf got hurt and they blamed me. Then we went on and won four straight Cups, and every year it seemed like we went through the Garden to get there.”

“It wasn’t just anybody they were chanting about,” Nilsson said. “He was such a great player, the leader of the best team, and Ranger fans maybe saw their best chance to win a Cup go away when I got hurt.”

Nilsson played only two more seasons before retiring, but he stayed in New York for another 15 years. Every time he showed up to a game, he would be introduced to the Garden crowd to cheers that were quickly followed by a round of “Potvin Sucks.” “Or maybe a few rounds,” he said. “It felt like they got some extra ones in when I was there.”

Advertisement

The same was true for Potvin, who began his two decades in broadcasting with the new Florida Panthers team in 1993-94.

“Before the Garden was renovated, the visiting broadcast booth was pretty easily accessible from the stands,” Potvin said. “The first couple years we needed security on either side because we just weren’t that high up. There were a couple times it got out of hand — Jeff Rimer, my good friend and broadcast partner back then, had to hold me back once or twice.

“After a couple years, they moved us up a level, next to where Sam (Rosen) and JD (John Davidson) were. That was a lot safer.”

Not only has the chant endured — when the Rangers would come to South Florida, all the snowbird Ranger fans would get the chant going — it’s spread. “I’ve heard it in Yankee Stadium,” Potvin said. “Bobby Nystrom was at Wimbledon and he heard that familiar whistle. Wimbledon! My daughter lived in New York for a while and she called me one time to say she was at the Garden and heard the chant. I told her, ‘I know, honey. It happens every game.’

“And she said, ‘But Dad, I’m at a rodeo.’”

After Potvin retired and before Nilsson returned to Sweden, they were invited by a mutual friend to a shooting club in Westchester. It was a charity event attended mostly by Ranger fans.

“They were all saying, ‘You can’t give Potvin and Nilsson guns!’” Nilsson recalled. The two men whose incident years earlier brought about the most enduring chant in New York hockey history became friends.

“I told him I would take that chant for all those Stanley Cups,” Nilsson said. “It was nice camaraderie to be friendly after all that time. No hard feelings.”

Potvin is looking forward to hockey returning after the pandemic. And he knows the chant will return as soon as there are fans in the Garden.

“There was some real hatred there for a time, you could feel it,” he said. “But now, it’s 40 years. Think of all the people who have heard ‘Potvin Sucks’ by now?”

(Top photo: Jared Silber / NHLI via Getty Images)