The 4 NHL Teams That Came Back From 3-0 In A Playoff Series

The Four Teams That Climbed Out Of A 3-0 Series Hole

Falling behind 3-0 in a best-of-seven series is, for all practical purposes, the end. Out of the 211 NHL teams that have done it, only four ever climbed out. The other 207 went home. The math is brutal and the trick has only been pulled four times in nearly a century of Stanley Cup playoffs. Here's how each one happened.

1942: Toronto Did It First (And Nobody Has Done It In A Cup Final Since)

Detroit jumped on Toronto early. The Red Wings took the first two games on the road in Toronto by 3-2 and 4-2 scores, then put a 5-2 finishing touch on Game 3 in Detroit to grab a 3-0 series stranglehold. At the time, the idea of a comeback was so far outside the realm of possibility that nobody bothered to imagine it. There was no precedent. The Leafs were done.

Then coach Hap Day did the thing every panicked coach has tried since but few have made work: he benched his veterans. Out went Gord Drillon and Bucko McDonald. In came youngsters Don Metz and Ernie Dickens. The lineup shake-up cracked the door open in Game 4, where Toronto trailed 2-0 early, fought back to a 2-2 tie, fell behind 3-2 in the third, and then scored twice late, the Nick Metz winner coming with seven minutes to play, to take the game 4-3.

Then the wheels came off Detroit. Coach Jack Adams got into a fistfight with referee Mel Harwood at the end of Game 4 and was suspended indefinitely for the rest of the series. (Funny enough, the NHL's Coach of the Year award would later be named after him anyway.) Without their head coach, Detroit lost Game 5 by a stunning 9-3, then dropped Game 6 on a 3-0 Turk Broda shutout. Game 7 went back to Toronto in front of a record 16,218 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens. Final score: 3-1 Leafs. Sweeney Schriner had two of the goals and finished with a series-leading five. Syl Apps put up seven points across the comeback.

To this day, the 1942 Maple Leafs are the only team in NHL history to come back from a 3-0 deficit in a Stanley Cup Final. Eighty-four years and counting.

1975: 33 Years Later, The Islanders Finally Pull Another One Off

For 33 years after Toronto pulled it off, no NHL team did it again. Then the New York Islanders, a franchise that had only existed since 1972, did the impossible to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the quarterfinals.

The Penguins won the first three games of that series in convincing fashion, scoring 13 goals in the process. Lowell MacDonald and Bob "Battleship" Kelly were each on a tear, and Pittsburgh looked, frankly, like a team that was about to coast into the next round.

Coach Al Arbour did almost the exact same thing Hap Day had done three decades earlier. He changed his goalie. After losing the first three games, Billy Smith came out. In came Glenn "Chico" Resch. (Smith would get over the demotion. He'd win four straight Stanley Cups as the Islanders' starter from 1980 through 1983.) But in 1975, it was Resch who saved the season. Across Games 4 through 7, Chico went on a tear: four wins, four goals allowed, a .969 save percentage.

Game 7 in Pittsburgh was the smallest game of the entire series. After five wide-open games where the two teams averaged over six goals between them, the deciding game at the Civic Arena produced exactly one goal: a backhand from Islanders captain Ed Westfall with 5:18 left in regulation. Resch shut the door. Penguins season over.

That single goal haunted Pittsburgh for decades and remained the only 3-0 series comeback in the NHL between 1942 and 2010.

2010: The Flyers Beat Boston Twice In One Game

I don't think any comeback on this list is more dramatic than this one. The 2010 Flyers didn't just come back from 3-0 in the series. They came back from 3-0 inside Game 7 itself.

The Bruins took the first three games. Marc Savard ended Game 1 with an overtime goal for a 5-4 Boston win. Milan Lucic broke a tie late in Game 2 for a 3-2 Boston win. Then Tuukka Rask stopped 34 shots in a 4-1 Bruins win in Game 3. Philadelphia was dead in the water and missing Simon Gagne, who had broken his toe in the first round against the Devils.

Gagne came back for Game 4 and scored in overtime to keep Philadelphia alive. Game 5 was a 4-0 Flyers shutout, but starter Brian Boucher got hurt in the second period and Michael Leighton came in to finish it off. Game 6 was a 2-1 Philadelphia win, with Leighton stopping 30 shots. Suddenly it was Game 7 in Boston with the comeback hanging by a thread.

Then Boston scored. Then Boston scored again. Then again. By 14:10 of the first period, the Bruins led Game 7 by a 3-0 score. The series, for all practical purposes, looked over twice.

But Philadelphia clawed back. The game was 3-3 by the midway point of the second period. With about seven minutes left in the third, Boston was hit with a too many men on the ice penalty (a Bruins postseason horror story you've heard before). Gagne, of course, scored the power-play winner. Final score: 4-3 Flyers.

Daniel Briere finished the series with five goals. Coach Peter Laviolette, asked about Gagne's heroics, said it best: "He's got a gift, and that gift helps us win hockey games."

The Flyers rolled into the next round, dispatched Montreal in five, and lost the Cup Final to Chicago. The Bruins, for their part, would win it all the very next season and exorcise some demons.

2014: The Kings Did It And Won The Cup

The most recent comeback on this list is also the most consequential. Los Angeles ripped the season out of San Jose's hands in the first round and rode the momentum all the way to a Stanley Cup. Nobody else on this list, other than the 1942 Leafs, won the Cup in the same year they pulled off the comeback.

San Jose came out of the gate looking like they were going to roll the Kings out of the playoffs. 6-3 in Game 1. 7-2 in Game 2. 4-3 in overtime in Game 3. The Kings looked old, slow, and finished. They had given up 17 goals in three games, and the Sharks looked like the better team in every category.

Then Jonathan Quick remembered who he was. The 2012 Conn Smythe winner shut the door. The Kings took Game 4 by a 6-3 score in San Jose to halve the deficit, and then, across Games 5 through 7, the Sharks scored exactly twice. That's it. Two goals over three games. Los Angeles won those three games by a combined 12-2, including a 5-1 Game 7 spanking on enemy ice.

Mike Richards put his name in a strange piece of trivia: he became the only player in NHL history to play through two 3-0 series comebacks, having been a Flyer in 2010 and a King in 2014. Teammate Jeff Carter was on both rosters too, but watched the 2010 Boston series from the press box with a broken foot.

The Kings then beat the Ducks in seven, the Blackhawks in seven, and finally the Rangers in six in the Cup Final. They didn't take the easy way to anywhere that year. By the time they hoisted the Cup, they had played 26 playoff games. Seven of them came after being one loss away from going home.

The Four Comebacks At A Glance

The Five Other Teams That Forced Game 7 And Lost It

Five other clubs in NHL history have rallied all the way back to force a Game 7 only to fall short. The 1939 Rangers (lost the seventh to Boston in the semifinal). The 1945 Red Wings (lost Game 7 of the Cup Final to Toronto, somehow the second time in four years that a 3-0 comeback nearly happened in the Final). The 2011 Blackhawks lost Game 7 in overtime to Vancouver. The 2011 Red Wings lost Game 7 by a single goal to San Jose.

And most recently, the 2024 Edmonton Oilers came back from 3-0 down to the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Final and lost Game 7 by a 2-1 score. Stuart Skinner allowed only seven goals across Games 4 through 7 and posted a .935 save percentage. The Oilers got within 60 minutes of the most improbable championship in modern hockey history. They came up one goal short.

What All Four Comebacks Had In Common

The pattern is clearer than people give it credit for. Every one of these comebacks involved either a goalie change or a goalie playing at a Vezina level for four straight games. Every one involved a coach willing to make a real lineup decision (Hap Day benching his veterans, Al Arbour benching Billy Smith, Peter Laviolette adjusting on the fly with Boucher hurt). And every one involved the trailing team winning Game 4 by a single goal or in overtime, which gave them one slim, shaky reason to keep believing.

Two percent of teams have done it. Four out of 211. It's the rarest feat in playoff hockey, and the next one always feels further away than the last. It has been twelve years since the Kings did it, but the list went 33 years between Toronto in 1942 and the Islanders in 1975, then another 35 years before the Flyers in 2010. The fifth team is out there. It just might not show up for a while.