Vic Hadfield Legendary Moments No. 4: Hat Trick vs. Hawks in '71 Playoffs

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Vic Hadfield describes himself this way: "I am a Ranger through and through."
He was the captain of the Rangers in the 1970s, the first 50-goal scorer in the history of the franchise, the ultimate teammate - and on Dec. 2, his No. 11 will take its place among the Rangers legends in the Garden rafters.
NYRangers.com will present 11 of the great moments of Hadfield's career, 11 snapshots of the Blueshirts' legendary left winger, 11 for No. 11 - counting down to the celebration of Vic Hadfield Night presented by Budweiser before the Blueshirts take on the Winnipeg Jets on Dec. 2 at Madison Square Garden.
Vic Hadfield played in those days when wearing a helmet in a hockey game was unheard of. But on one playoff night on Broadway in 1971, Hadfield and a raucous Madison Square Garden crowd thought it would be just right if he put on a hat.
The 1971 Rangers had amassed a 49-18-11 record over the regular season, and began the playoffs with a six-game ouster of the Toronto Maple Leafs (more on that series later) for the franchise's first series victory since coming within one win of the Stanley Cup in 1950. They moved on to a matchup in the NHL semifinal with the Chicago Black Hawks, and went into it brimming with confidence.
"We really had the confidence that we could beat any team," Vic Hadfield told NYRangers.com. "We knew what it took to win."
Pete Stemkowski scored the overtime winner in the series opener at Chicago Stadium - his first of two overtime goals in the series - but Chicago's Tony Esposito blanked the Blueshirts, 3-0, in Game 2, sending the series to Madison Square Garden knotted at a game apiece.
And that's when Hadfield and the rest of the GAG Line started penning their names in the Rangers' record books - April 22, 1971, at the Garden, a 4-1 victory over the Black Hawks.

Hadfield put the Blueshirts in the semifinal's driver's seat that night by scoring his first career playoff hat trick, becoming only the fourth Ranger with a hat trick in the postseason and the first since Pentti Lund in the 1950 semifinal against Montreal. It was the third hat trick of Hadfield's career, and it couldn't have come at a better time.
"Oh did we need it for sure," Emile Francis told NYRangers.com. "If I remember, we didn't play well in the game before. He had really developed into a good goal scorer by that time, sure as hell did. He gave us a big lift."
Hadfield got the scoring started 3:05 into the game, and after Stan Mikita and Rod Gilbert traded first-period goals, Hadfield took it the rest of the way. He scored on a dish from Gilbert at 13:37 of the first, then after his third goal, which came with 4:10 left in the game, he picked up one of the dozens of hats that had been thrown from a delirious Garden crowd and wore it on his head as he skated back to the bench. The fans did not stop cheering for a full two minutes.
Ratelle set up all four Ranger goals that night, a club record for a playoff game. Gilbert's goal gave him 16 in his career in the playoffs, tying Frank Boucher for the Rangers career mark. And Hadfield's hat trick, tying a single-game Ranger playoff record, accounted for three of the eight goals he would score in the 1971 playoffs, matching Cecil Dillon's franchise best from 1933.
"Every game was a great game, that was a hell of a series," Francis said.
In an interview with NYRangers.com, Bobby Hull brought up the series before he could be asked about it.
"One of the greatest series that I ever played in was in '71, when we were in the semifinals against New York," said Hull, the Black Hawks' Hall of Famer. "They were all great games. Up and down and back and forth. They had a wonderful hockey team, a really great skating team that could move the puck. A tough team, a tough team to play against. Vic played very, very well for them - him and that whole line."
Hull had finished third in the NHL with 44 goals in the regular season that year; the Rangers held him to just two goals in the series - but they were monumental goals. His first was the overtime winner in Game 5 in Chicago, two nights before Stemkowski's own monumental goal, the triple-OT winner in Game 6 back at the Garden, keeping the Rangers alive and forcing a seventh game.
"Then we got to Chicago, the score's 2-2 with not very long to go in the game, and the puck goes right back to Bobby Hull on a faceoff and it was in the net before you knew what happened," Francis said. "That was a good series, a good tough series. It was just so tough to lose that one like we did."
Hadfield and the rest of Francis' team would regroup for 1971-72 and go a step farther: Hadfield, for one, would have the first 50-goal season in Rangers history in his first season as the Rangers' captain, and the Blueshirts, missing Ratelle to a broken ankle, would reach the Stanley Cup Final and come within two wins of the championship.
Hadfield set a Rangers record with 13 points in the '71 playoffs, and his hat trick against the Hawks remains one of the signature moments of his playoff career. But in speaking about it, Hadfield steers the conversation to what mattered to him all along: team goals. "Any personal goals that we were able to achieve, or pats on the back, they didn't mean anything," Hadfield said, "because we were all in this to win."
That's not just empty rhetoric or revisionist history years after the fact - in the moments after his hat trick and the Rangers' victory on April 22, 1971, Hadfield was asked about the prospect of catching Dillon's 38-year-old record for playoff goals.
"That would be a nice record to break," Hadfield said that night, "as long as we win the Cup first."
READ MORE: Vic Hadfield Legendary Moments No. 5: Borrowed Blade From the Golden Jet