Ed Olczyk, a member of the New York Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup championship team and a longtime NHL player and broadcaster, was one of two former players named to the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee last week.
Olczyk and Hall of Famer Jarome Iginla are replacing Mike Gartner and David Branch. Gartner, a teammate of Olczyk’s with the Rangers in the early 1990s, will transition to Chair of the Board in June 2025.
The Rangers acquired Olczyk from the Winnipeg Jets on Dec. 28, 1992, in return for forwards Tie Domi and Kris King. He had 40 points (18 goals, 22 assists) in 103 games for New York before being traded back to the Jets on April 7, 1995, for a fifth-round pick in the 1995 NHL Draft. The Chicago native played 1,031 NHL games for six teams, finishing his career with 794 points (342 goals, 452 assists) – and one Stanley Cup ring.
Olczyk had the fourth of his six NHL hat tricks with the Rangers, scoring three goals in a 5-4 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers on March 24, 1993. But coach Mike Keenan didn’t like him, and Olczyk spent much of the 1993-94 regular season watching from the press box. The same was true during the run to the Cup; he dressed only once — in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Final against the New Jersey Devils, a night better known for Mark Messier’s victory guarantee and third-period hat trick in a 4-2 victory at the Meadowlands.
In “The Wait Is Over,” published in 2014, Olczyk remembered his one playoff appearance in the Cup year.
“That day was pretty surreal,” he said. “I hadn’t played since the trade deadline in March; it had been 2 1/2 months or so. In typical Keenan fashion — we’d had some injuries, guys had been taped up for a period of time in the playoffs. I was standing by the stick rack at the old Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands and Keenan comes up to me and kind of looks at me and says, ‘What was your best year in the NHL scoring goals?’
“I looked at him and I was thinking, ‘Really? You’re asking me that question, like you don’t know that or you don’t have access to a media guide?’ I told him I had scored 42 goals one year in Toronto (in 1987-88) and had five straight 30-goal seasons. I pretty much thought it was an interview or an audition, like I was going in for a job interview.
“He said, ‘You scored 42 goals one year?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I scored 42 goals with Toronto.’ He looks at me, he looks at my sticks, and says, ‘You’re playing tonight. You’re going to play. We need you. The guys trust you, the guys love you. I trust you.’ — he wouldn’t say he loved me, but that was OK. He said, ‘You’re playing tonight.’”
Ed Olczyk recalls his one appearance in 1994 Rangers’ run to Stanley Cup championship
The Rangers entered the night trailing 3-2 in the series, and Olczyk said the pregame atmosphere in the locker room before the game was “pretty tight and tense.”
“That’s the one thing I remember — it was very quiet. We had our guys who would talk — me and ‘Heals’ (goalie Glenn Healy). We had the yappers, the guys who would keep everybody loose, and then Esa Tikkanen would say a few things but no one could understand him because he was speaking seven languages—you really couldn’t understand him. I don’t want to say ‘tight,’ but we were tense. We really were.
“I just remember it was really quiet, no one had said anything for a period of time — I don’t know if it was three minutes or five minutes—and Kevin Lowe just saying, ‘Well Mess, I guess we’ve got to win this one.’ Everybody just kind of broke up into a giggle and ‘Mess’ had that smirk on his face that he likes to have every once in a while. It was one of those situations where this is it, Mess said what he said. We had plenty of confidence.”
Messier backed up his victory guarantee, but the unsung hero that night, according to Olczyk, was goaltender Mike Richter, who kept the Rangers within two goals before the offense woke up late in the second period
“Probably the greatest goaltending performance I’ve ever seen in a playoff game ever was Mike Richter in that game,” Olczyk says. “Mike Richter was incredible in that game. If not for ‘Ricky,’ we don’t win at all. He was absolutely incredible. He gave us a chance to win.
“He made a couple of big saves when it was 2–0. [Alexei] Kovalev scored late in the second to make it 2–1, and then the rest is history.”
Even though he didn’t play much of a role in winning the Cup, the member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Class of 2012 remembered 20 years later that Rangers fans hadn’t forgotten him and some of the other lesser lights on the team.
“People appreciated the skill and the way that we played,” he said. “We also could play that hard-nosed [style] where the role players were important; guys like Greg Gilbert, Mike Hudson, Joey Kocur, Brian Noonan, Stephane Matteau, all those guys. People appreciated it, and we could play pretty much any way that you wanted. “I think people were proud of the way we handled ourselves both on and off the ice. We had a lot of fun. People knew the pressure we were under, and it still is much appreciated, as it has been over the years.
“It’s really amazing—I’m honored and humbled. There are so many people, all walks of Rangers fans, from the Blueshirts to police officers to firemen to people that work in the Garden. It makes you feel really good. They’ll tell you stories line, ‘My dad never thought he’d see a Cup and he saw it in ’94. I’m glad he was able to be on this earth and have seen a Stanley Cup.’ It just makes you feel really good.”
