1961 Stanley Cup Final
1961 ice hockey championship series
The 1961 Stanley Cup Final was the championship series of the National Hockey League's (NHL) 1960–61 season, and the culmination of the 1961 Stanley Cup playoffs. It was contested between the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Black Hawks. Chicago was making its first Finals appearance since 1944, and Detroit its first appearance since 1956; both had lost to the Montreal Canadiens in those previous appearances. The Black Hawks won the best-of-seven series, four games to two, to win their third Stanley Cup, their first since 1938. This was the last time Chicago won the Cup until 2010, a 49-year drought.
This was the only title not won by the Canadiens, Red Wings or Toronto Maple Leafs during the Original Six era, and the only title won by a U.S. team between 1955 and 1970.
Paths to the Finals
Detroit defeated Toronto in five games and Chicago upset Montreal, the record five-time defending champion, in six, setting up the first all-American-team Finals since 1950, when the Wings beat the New York Rangers in a seven-game series.
Game summaries
This was the only Stanley Cup championship in the 1960s not to be won by either the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Montreal Canadiens or feature either team.
Game one
Bobby Hull scored two goals in game one, giving the Black Hawks a 3–2 victory and a 1–0 lead in the series.
Game two
With Terry Sawchuk being pulled in the first period of game one, Hank Bassen started the second game and provided the Red Wings with a win, making 26 saves in the victory.
“1961 Stanley Cup Final” enters the record as 1961 ice hockey championship series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stanley, Final and hockey can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4570469. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1960, 1944 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “1961 Stanley Cup Final” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.