The most unbreakable single season record in sports is one you probably haven’t thought a lot about. People usually point to marks that are unlikely to happen based on current trends. Things like John “Chief” Wilson hitting 36 triples in 1912 or George Blanda throwing 42 interceptions in 1962.
But once upon a time, people also believed that no player would ever average a triple-double over the course of an NBA season after Oscar Robertson did it. But then Russell Westbrook showed up and made the feat look easy. There are plenty of records that are improbable to break, but very few are truly unbreakable. Which brings us to Dave Schultz.
Known as “The Hammer”, Schultz played nine seasons in the NHL and is best known as the enforcer for the Philadelphia Flyers famous Broad Street Bullies teams of the 1970s. His lasting legacy in hockey just may the Schultz Rule which bans players from wearing boxing wraps under their gloves.
During the 1974-75 season, he accomplished something no hockey player managed to do before and has no chance of doing again.
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The most unbreakable single season record in sports
Dave Schultz set the single season record for penalty minutes in 1974-75. He spent 472 minutes in the penalty box season. That’s basically eight full games. He averaged 6.2 penalty minutes per game in this historic campaign. There have been a handful of teams in the past decade that have finished a season under that figure.
In order to understand why this is the most unbreakable single season record in sports, it is important to place it with context. Let’s start with the 1974-75 season. Only four other players that year surpassed 200 penalty minutes. Finishing second in the charts was Andre Dupont who happened to a teammate of Schultz on the Flyers.
Dupont could only muster 276 penalty minutes in 1974-75, nearly 200 minutes less than Schultz. That’s right, The Hammer had three hours more in penalty minutes than anyone else in the league that season.
We need to take a 20-second timeout. Philadelphia won the Stanley Cup this season despite taking an obscene number of penalties. Schultz and Dupont had 748 combined minutes in the sin bin while the Flyers were on the penalty kill 446 times that year. That was 126 more times than any other team in the NHL. The key to being good at hockey in the 70s was to beat the opponent into a bloody submission.
Now back to the story. When you look at the single season record for penalty minutes, no one comes close to Schultz. There have been only two players who managed more than 400 penalty minutes in a season: Paul Baxter and Mike Peluso.
And Schultz still boasts an hour cushion on them both. That’s right, the Flyers winger has an entire game’s worth of penalty minutes over any other single season total. Baxter and Peluso could have gotten into like 12 fights or committed 30 minor infractions and they still wouldn’t have surpassed Schultz.
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What was Dave Schultz doing to get all these penalties?
Basically, Schultz spent most of his career beating the crap out of people. According to Hockey Fights, he found himself in 26 scraps in 1974-75. In 2018-19, the last full NHL season, only one team managed to get into 26 fights.
Dave Schultz’s 472 penalty minutes in a season is the most unbreakable single season record in sports because no player will be allowed to come close to it. The league isn’t letting a guy fight 20+ times in a season, commit more than 100-minute penalties and countless misconduct infractions.
Only three players have mustered 300 or more penalty minutes in a season since 2000. Schultz’s 1974-75 campaign will forever be the zenith of penalties in hockey. It has to be considered the most unbreakable single season record in sports.
