It’s Been 50 Years Since The Sabres Fog Game In Buffalo

As the 2024/25 NHL Season inches closer to its end, eight teams started the playoffs with the ultimate task of trying to win Lord Frederick Arthur Stanley of Preston's Cup. As the 2025 playoffs come closer to the NHL Finals, we'll soon find out who will be the champion.

While the 2025 playoffs have been quite exciting so far this year, the last few days have had the eyes of many hockey fans looking back in the past we we're now celebrating 50 years since the 1975 NHL Playoffs and Stanley Cup Finals, which saw the two NHL expansion teams faceoff against each other for the first time in NHL History.

In the 1975 Stanley Cup Finals, the defending NFL champion Philadelphia Flyers took on the upstart Buffalo Sabres in a best-of-seven series.

It's Been 50 Years Since The Sabres Fog Game In Buffalo

While this series was famous for many reasons, one of the main things that stick out in people's memory is what happened during Game 3 when the finals took place in Buffalo's War Memorial Auditorium.

Game three was unusual, to say the least.

It was unseasonably warm in Buffalo during the entire month of May, and considering that you had more than 90 feet of ice inside an old arena that did not have air conditioning, it created conditions that not many folks were ready for: fog—and a lot of it. That fog rendered many parts of the arena with near-zero visibility.

If that wasn't strange enough, somehow a bat got into the arena and flew near ice level for a large part of the game until it was killed by Sabres Center Jim Lorentz, who smacked it with his stick.

READ MORE: 5 Reasons the Buffalo Sabres’ Playoff Drought Hurts More Than The Bills’ Drought

While the Sabres went on to win this strange game in overtime thanks to an amazing Rene Robert goal, the team ultimately lost the series 4-2. If you want to relieve all the drama, you can watch the entire game here on the NHL Archive, and you can see how bad the fog was on the ice below.