The Flames played a home game in Cincinnati in 1993

Since entering the National Hockey League as an expansion team back in 1972, the Calgary Flames have played a lot of hockey in their two home cities.

Since their inception in 1972, they’ve played 2,057 regular season home games. 308 were in Atlanta, all at the Omni. 1,736 have been in Calgary: 120 at the Stampede Corral, 1,615 at the Saddledome and one at McMahon Stadium.

That leaves three home games that were played at neutral sites.

These are their stories.

Did you know that the Flames played a home game in Cincinnati, Ohio’s Riverfront Coliseum on Feb. 16, 1993?

The background

Let’s flash back to 1992. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association had expired prior to the 1991-92 season, and NHL president John Zeigler and new NHLPA head Bob Goodenow attempted to hash out a new deal while the season began without a CBA. Months later, with the league and the players still at odds over several issues, the players voted to strike.

After a three day strike, which lasted Apr. 1-10, 1992, a new, one year CBA was agreed upon. (The regular season games that had been disrupted by the strike were rescheduled, followed by the 1992 playoffs.) As part of the new CBA, the NHL season was expanded from 80 to 84 games starting in 1992-93, with each club playing two games per season in cities without NHL teams in an effort to test out new markets for potential expansion.

And so, the Flames ended up playing a home game against Eric Lindros and the Philadelphia Flyers on Feb. 16, 1993… in Cincinnati, Ohio. It ended as a 4-4 tie, and by all accounts it was a very weird game. (Their neutral site road game in mid-October was in Saskatoon against Minnesota and was said to be a very normal game.)

The game

The Flames got off to a great start. They scored four goals on 13 shots in the first period, with the snipes from Joe Nieuwendyk, Theo Fleury, Ron Stern and Gary Roberts chasing Flyers netminder Dominic Roussel. Eric Lindros and Pelle Eklund responded for the Flyers.

Tommy Soderstrom replaced Roussel in net for the second period and the Flyers spent the remainder of the game trying to chip away at the Flames lead. Rod Brind’Amour scored late in the second period to cut the lead to 3-2, and Brent Fedyk scored a third period power play goal to tie the game at 4-4.

Neither team scored in the five-minute overtime and the game ended as a tie. The outcome got even worse for the Flames after Roberts was hurt in overtime off a collision with Garry Galley.

The Flames played the game with an odd configuration of eight defenders and 10 forwards, and forward Brian Skrudland dressed but barely played after suffering an injury in warm-up.

The game was widely criticized as… bad. The Calgary Herald‘s Eric Duhatschek filed a game story that included the phrases “no-hitter” and “sloppy,” noted that the puck hardly settled down, and reported a 27-minute delay to start the game due to difficulty figuring out how to install the pegs to secure the nets. (His gamer also noted the nets were set a foot too far back at either end.)

In a separate piece by Duhatschek, the way the boards and glass were set up in the arena were called “dangerous” by several players due to the presence of steel plates and protruding bolts holding the glass in place. Oh, and the game was attended by just 7,900 fans.

The aftermath

Roberts missed the next 26 games due to his leg injury. There was no supplemental discipline on the play, in part due to the poor quality of the set-up in Riverfront Coliseum making video review extremely difficult.

Neutral site games returned in 1993-94, but not to Cincinnati.