The 1980-81 season saw right wing Mark Lofthouse come onto the scene. He had become the fifth Bear to win the AHL's scoring title notching 48 goals and 103 points. On the night of February 7th, 1981, Lofthouse also collected a team single game record eight points (4 goals, 4 assists) as the Bears smothered the Rochester Americans at Hersheypark Arena, 11 -2, while the team also tied an AHL record for goals in a period that same night with nine in the second frame. Among the new faces on the club that year was a 20-year old rookie center then on assignment from Capitals named Tim Tookey. Over three separate stints with the Bears in the years to come, Tookey would outscore every other man to play for the club but one, Mike Nykoluk.
As had Gary Green in 1979, Bryan Murray left the Bears early in the 1981-82 season to become coach of the Washington Capitals (replacing Green) and was replaced by Gary Inness who took over behind the Hershey bench under most unusual circumstances. Inness had retired as a player a year earlier but wanted to remain in Hershey and keep involved with the Bears. With no coaching position available to offer him -- but in need of a new trainer -- Frank Mathers asked Inness if by any chance he would be interested in that job! While not exactly what Inness had in mind, he accepted -- and with Murray's precipitous promotion to Washington a month later the former Hershey netminder was summarily elevated from sharpening skates to being the eleventh coach in the Bears' history. Inness would remain behind the Hershey bench until December, 1984, when Frank Mathers returned to that post on an interim basis for the first time since 1973 and coached the club until then recently retired Hall of Fame Flyer winger Bill Barber took over for the final sixteen games of the season.
That 1984-85 season was the first in which the Bears had an NHL affiliation with the Philadelphia Flyers who shared the club with the Boston Bruins that year. When the Bruins left at the end of the season, however, the Flyers took over as the sole parent club of the Bears and installed former Flyer right wing John "Too Tall" Paddock (1985-89) as coach of the club in 1985. The 31 -year old Paddock was no stranger to success in the AHL having played on a pair of regular season and Calder Cup championship teams with the Maine Mariners in 1977-78 and 1978-79 when that team was the Flyers' AHL development club and then coaching Maine to another title in 1983-84 as the farm club of the New Jersey Devils.
Over the next four seasons in Hershey Paddock's clubs would average a remarkable 45 wins a year, win two overall regular season titles, reach the play-off finals twice, and bring Hershey a seventh Calder Cup championship in record setting fashion! In fact records of all kinds would be common place during Paddock's highly successful four year tenure in Hershey.
In his first year as the Bears' coach, Paddock led the club to first place overall in the regular season with a 48-29-3 record as the Bears set new AHL marks for both wins in a season (48) and home-ice victories (32)--as well as establishing a still standing league "standard" for penalty minutes with 2,872! Winger Steve Martinson also set a then individual AHL record with 432 minutes in the box that year. (Hamilton's Dennis Bonvie amassed 522 minutes last season to set the current mark.) Six of the AHL's top twenty all-time miscreants, in fact, "earned" many if not most of their career penalty minutes in Chocolate and White including Mike Stothers (5th; 1,887 minutes), Gary Rissling (7th; 1,743), Steve Fletcher (8th; 1,723), Archie Henderson (I0th; 1,650), Larry "The Rock" Zeidel (11th; 1,632), and Don Nachbaur (17th; 1,452).
With four goals in the final game of that 1985-86 season, left wing Ross Fitzpatrick became the third Bear to score 50 goals in a season while rookie goalie Ron Hextall set a team record with three consecutive shutouts at home. Both Hextall and defenseman Kevin McCarthy, later a Bears' assistant and then head coach (and now coach of the Beast of New Haven), were First Team All Stars while linemates Fitzpatrick and Tim Tookey were both named to the second All Star Team. (Tookey also won the Butterfield Trophy as MVP of the Calder Cup play-offs.) With five shut-outs and a 30-19-2 record, Hextall became the first Bear to be named AHL Rookie of the Year as well as winning the Baz Bastien Memorial Trophy as the AHL's top goalie. (As an NHL rookie the following season with the Flyers Hextall would win both the Vezina and Conn Smythe trophies.)
In the 1985-86 play-offs, the Bears reached the Calder Cup finals for the sixteenth time in their history by defeating the New Haven Nighthawks in five and the St. Catherines Saints in seven penalty-filled games which included a memorable bench clearing brawl at the Arena at the end of game two in which Hextall fought and defeated three of the toughest players on John Brophy's Saints. In the finals, however, the exhausted Bears were upset by the Adirondack Red Wings, four-games-to-two, who were led in goal by Mark LaForest. Ironically Hextall and LaForest later became the Flyers' goaltending tandem from 1987 to 1989.
Although the Bears finished fourth in the Southern Division in 1986-87 with 87 points (43-36-1), their top line of Tim Tookey, Ross Fitzpatrick and Ray Allison finished first, fifth and seventh in overall league scoring with 124, 85 and 84 points respectively and accounted for a total of 125 of the Bears' 329 goals. (Center Mitch Lamoureux also finished in the top ten with 43 goals and 46 assists for 89 points good for fourth overall in the league.) Tookey's 124 points (51 goals, 73 assists) also established a new single-season record for Hershey, made him the seventh Bear to win the AHL's scoring title, and just the third to win the Les Cunningham Plaque as the league's MVP.
With the drop of the puck to start the 1987-88 AHL campaign on October 9th, 1987, the Bears became the first pro hockey club outside of the NHL to open a Golden Anniversary season -- and oh what a season it would be! As memorable as the previous half dozen championship Bears' teams had been, for sheer perfection none could ever hope to match the remarkable march of the 1987-88 Bears. After winning a then league record fifty regular season games, Hershey swept all three of its Calder Cup series in April and May, 1988, to post an unblemished play-off record of 12-0 and accomplish what was truly the "Miracle in Chocolatetown."
The unquestioned key to the Bears' success that season was the man who guarded the nets for Hershey -- Wendell Young. After just ten games it looked as if there would not be much to celebrate in Hershey that year as Paddock's club was an unexpectedly dismal 3-7-0 and enemy pucks were finding their way into the Bears' net with uncomfortable regularity. But with former Bear goalie and 1986-87 Vezina and Conn Smythe Trophy winner Ron Hextall sitting out an eight-game suspension to start the Flyers' season as the result of a vicious slash he had delivered in the 1987 Stanley Cup finals, both Young and Mark LaForest had to remain in Philadelphia.
With the drop of the puck to start the 1987-88 AHL campaign on October 9th, 1987, the Bears became the first pro hockey club outside of the NHL to open a Golden Anniversary season -- and oh what a season it would be! As memorable as the previous half dozen championship Bears' teams had been, for sheer perfection none could ever hope to match the remarkable march of the 1987-88 Bears. After winning a then league record fifty regular season games, Hershey swept all three of its Calder Cup series in April and May, 1988, to post an unblemished play-off record of 12-0 and accomplish what was truly the "Miracle in Chocolatetown."
The unquestioned key to the Bears' success that season was the man who guarded the nets for Hershey -- Wendell Young. After just ten games it looked as if there would not be much to celebrate in Hershey that year as Paddock's club was an unexpectedly dismal 3-7-0 and enemy pucks were finding their way into the Bears' net with uncomfortable regularity. But with former Bear goalie and 1986-87 Vezina and Conn Smythe Trophy winner Ron Hextall sitting out an eight-game suspension to start the Flyers' season as the result of a vicious slash he had delivered in the 1987 Stanley Cup finals, both Young and Mark LaForest had to remain in Philadelphia.
Most special of all, of course, was the night of May 12, 1988, when the team completed its unprecedented 12-0 sweep to the Cup by defeating the Fredericton Express, 4-2, in the fourth game of the finals. The Express -- the AHL's top scoring team in the 1987-88 regular season -- poured 37 shots on Wendell Young that night but only two got by the Hershey goalie who had played every minute of every game for the Bears in the 1988 play-offs. Those two goals came early in the game to give Fredericton only their second lead in the series, 2- 1, but then the Bears' power-play took over as it clicked three times to give Hershey the 4-2 Cup clinching win. Veteran Mark Lofthouse scored the first Hershey goal while Mitch Lamoureux, Kevin Maxwell and Ross Fitzpatrick collected Hershey's power-play tallies.
Some 2,000 ecstatic fans were on hand to greet the Bears when their Air Canada charter landed at Harrisburg International Airport at 1:45 a.m. the next morning after a raucous 850-mile flight from the Canadian Maritimes. Two days later another 10,000 lined the sidewalks of Chocolate Avenue for a victory parade. The Golden Anniversary season for this great franchise was officially over and this remarkable group of players would go their separate ways and never all play together as a team again.
In 1988-89, Paddock's fourth and final season behind the Bears' bench, he led the club to 40 more regular season victories and a second place finish in the Southern Division before they bowed in the semifinals to eventual Calder Cup champion Adirondack Red Wings, four-games-to-three. For the second year in a row Bears' captain Dave Fenvyes won the Eddie Shore Plaque as the AHL's top defenseman while winger Brian Dobbin also earned First Team All Star honors and center Don Biggs became the seventh Bear to break the century mark in scoring with a team leading 103 points.
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