Dave Brown already was settled into the cramped visitor’s dressing room at the Montreal Forum after warmups for Game 6 of the 1987 Prince of Wales Conference finals when word filtered in that Flyers teammate Ed Hospodar was involved in a pregame fight with the Canadiens’ Claude Lemieux.
Hospodar had warned Lemieux not to disrespect the Flyers by firing a puck into their net at the end of warmups, as the Montreal pest was wont to do. The Canadiens’ radio broadcast team reported that Hospodar then speared Lemieux as a prelude to one of the most infamous bench-clearing brawls in NHL history.