By the spring of 1984, the New York Islanders had won four consecutive Stanley Cup championships. No team in NHL history had done that since the Montreal Canadiens of the late 1970s. The question on every hockey fan's lips was simple: could they make it five?
The answer, ultimately, was no. But the story of how it ended — and what it meant — is as compelling as any of the four championship runs that preceded it.
The 1983–84 Islanders were older. The core that had won four Cups was entering its mid-thirties in some cases. Mike Bossy's back, which would eventually end his career, was a growing concern. The team still had the talent, the experience, and the championship pedigree. But they were no longer the force that had swept Vancouver in 1982 or Edmonton in 1983.
They still reached the Final, surviving tense playoff series against the Rangers, the Capitals, and the Montreal Canadiens. But the Edmonton Oilers they faced in the championship round were a different team from the group the Islanders had swept a year earlier. Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, and Paul Coffey had learned from watching the Islanders in 1983. They understood now what playoff hockey demanded — the sacrifice, the defensive responsibility, the willingness to absorb pain to win.
The Oilers won the series in five games. Wayne Gretzky, held scoreless in the 1983 Finals by Billy Smith, exploded for 13 points. The torch had passed. The Oilers would go on to win four of the next five Stanley Cups, building a dynasty of their own — one that, by Gretzky's own admission, was modeled on what they had seen in the Islanders' dressing room.
After Game 4 of the 1983 Finals, Gretzky and his Oilers teammates had walked past the Islanders' locker room and seen the champions sitting exhausted, battered, covered in ice packs — not celebrating, just surviving. "That's what it takes to win," Gretzky said he thought in that moment. A year later, the Oilers were ready to pay that price themselves.
The Drive for Five had fallen one short. But the 19-game playoff series winning streak that the Islanders built across five seasons remains the most remarkable sustained run of playoff excellence in professional sports history. No team has come close. And every spring, when the playoffs begin, that record stands as a monument to what the men of Nassau Coliseum accomplished in those four extraordinary years.