The oldest
active pro hockey team in the world, the Canadiens were founded in 1909, eight
years before the NHL. As part of the National Hockey Association (NHA) it was
set up as the league's French-speaking team for francophone fans and players.
They started out as badly as most expansion teams do but by 1913-14 they were
qualifying for the post-season, capturing their first Stanley Cup in 1916
against the Portland Rosebuds. But the NHA met its end the following year and
this led to the founding of the NHL, made up of the Canadiens, Montreal
Wanderers, Ottawa Senators, Quebec Bulldogs, and the Toronto Blueshirts (who
would later become the Toronto Maple Leafs). After relocating home arenas – upon
the Montreal Arena's burning down in 1918 – the Canadiens, now Montreal's only
NHL team, won the 1918-19 NHL championship. However this was before the NHL
owned the Stanley Cup and the Habs' campaign against the Seattle Metropolitans
was cut short due to the Spanish Flu pandemic, resulting in no Cup winner that
year.
Montreal didn't qualify for the playoffs for the next three seasons but
soon found themselves back in post-season action in 1923 – and would only miss
the playoffs six times in the following 76 years! 1923-24 saw the debut of the
NHL's first true superstar, the high-scoring Howie Morenz who led the Habs to
their 1924 Stanley Cup victory. That same year saw the Canadiens play their
first game against the Boston Bruins starting one of hockey's longest rivalries.
The 1925-26 season did not start well as Montreal's longtime goaltender Georges
Vezina collapsed during the first game and was sent to hospital. He died from
tuberculosis four months later and the league created the Vezina Trophy in his
honour. The Canadiens did not make the playoffs that season. Apart from that,
the late 1920's/early 1930's were good times for Montreal: they found a new home
in the Montreal Forum (where they would stay for the next 70 years), Morenz
became the first ever 50-point scorer (in 43 games), and the team beat out the
heavily favoured Bruins to win the Stanley Cup in 1930 which they would
recapture the following year.
However the Great Depression hit Montreal's
franchise quite hard, with declining attendance and revenue compounded by the
team's sagging performance. Management was forced to trade away Morenz to reduce
costs and the team narrowly avoided being moved to Cleveland when it was put up
for sale in 1935. The new owners were able to get Morenz back in 1936 but he
tragically died later that same year as a result of an on-ice injury. Things
didn't improve for the Canadiens in the next few seasons, with the club
finishing low in the standings, barely making the playoffs. The franchise was
sold again and the new owners decided in 1940 to bring in a new head coach, Dick
Irvin, who had previously coached the Toronto Maple Leafs to great success.
The
impact of the Second World War proved serendipitous for the Montreal Canadiens;
they were one the few teams whose rosters weren't heavily affected by
enlistment/conscription. Under the guidance of Irvin, and the goal production of
the Punch Line – which included the league's top three scorers Toe Blake, Elmer
Lach, and Maurice Richard – the Habs' performance swiftly improved with regular
season dominance and two Stanley Cup victories in 1944 and 1946. Superstar
Maurice Richard famously became the first player to ever score 50 goals in 50
games, a feat that's only been (officially) repeated by four other NHL players
since. Richard had become a hero in Quebec, so much so that his suspension in
1955 caused a riot. The Canadiens remained competitive throughout the late 1940s
and early 1950s as they slowly assembled the pieces of a dynasty team,
introducing goaltender Jacques Plante in 1953, acquiring Jean Beliveau for good
that same year, and assigning Toe Blake as head coach in 1955. The results were
immediate; with one of the best lineups in NHL history the Habs made the Stanley
Cup finals an astounding ten years in a row (1951-60) and won five consecutive
Cups from 1956 to 1960, a record that still stands to this day.
This period also
marked the highpoint of the classic Canadiens-Maple Leafs rivalry. The two teams
faced off in the postseason six times between 1960 and 1967 with three series
wins apiece – including one win apiece in the Cup finals. As the only two
Canada-based NHL teams at the time it was seen as a stand-in for the tensions
between French-speaking and English-speaking Canada, as well as a competition
between the country's two largest cities.
In 1964 Sam Pollock took over as
Montreal's general manager. His strategy of trading away aging players to
expansion teams for draft picks paid off enormously; within a few years his team
had managed to pick up legendary players such as Ken Dryden, Guy Lafleur, and
Larry Robinson. It was during this transitional phase that the Canadiens won six
Stanley Cups in a nine year period between 1965 and 1973, but the best was yet
to come. With coach Scotty Bowman at the helm, impenetrable defence, and with no
less than nine Hall of Fame players on their roster, the Montreal Canadiens of
the late 1970's proved to be the greatest team in NHL history. Not only did they
win four straight Stanley Cups (1976-79) but they set new records for most wins
(60), most points (132), and fewest losses (8) in an 80-game season in 1976-77.
Guy Lafleur led the league in scoring three consecutive years and goaltender Ken
Dryden allowed the fewest goals for four consecutive years. So overwhelming was
Montreal's dominance that Dryden remarked to The Hockey News that he was
starting to get bored at the lack of competition!
By the 1980's many of the
late-70s Habs players had retired or been traded and new NHL dynasties – the New
York Islanders and the Edmonton Oilers – had taken the spotlight, but Montreal
was still a powerhouse team thanks to its shut-down defensive corps and
respectable offence. The team made the playoffs every year that decade and won
the Stanley Cup in 1986 thanks to some top-notch play from rookie goaltender
Patrick Roy who would go on to become a franchise player. The 80's also saw the
emergence of a bitter, often violent, rivalry with the only other
French-speaking NHL team, the Quebec Nordiques who entered the NHL in 1979 as
part of the WHA merger. The two teams met in five playoffs series between 1982
and 1993.
The early 1990's promised more of the same for Montreal fans with
robust playing and consistent playoff appearances. The Canadiens were eliminated
from the first or second round by the Boston Bruins four times from 1990 to
1994, but they managed to win the Stanley Cup against the favoured Los Angeles
Kings in 1993 (which remains to this day the most recent Cup victory by a
Canada-based team). Unfortunately a series of bad trades in the early-to-mid
1990s had gutted the team's core, dealing away such players as Chris Chelios,
Eric Desjardins, John LeClair, Kirk Muller, Patrick Roy, and Pierre Turgeon.
Consequently, the Habs began to sink in the standings. From 1994 to 1998 they
won only one playoff series and failed to even qualify for post-season play from
1999 to 2001. For the first time in 60 years the Montreal Canadiens... weren't
very good.
By 2001-02 the club had a new arena, new owners, a new head coach,
and a new starting goaltender, Jose Theodore, who helped lead the team back to
the playoffs that year. The next few years would see sporadic playoff
appearances until the team finally hit its stride in 2007-08, missing the
post-season only once between 2008 and 2015 with some deep playoff runs in 2010
and 2014. After a brief rebuilding phase in 2017-19, the Habs have qualified for
postseason play in the most recent two years, but just barely so. Time will tell
if this is the franchise that can bring Lord Stanley's Cup back to the great
white north.
So with that out of the way let's take a look at what the best
possible team assembled from Canadiens players might look like. And with a
franchise whose history is as extensive as this, there was quite a lot of
research I had to do here but it was pretty fun. This roster we're about to look
at – even the honourable mentions! – is made up of some of the greatest hockey
players of all time: all 20 guys I've selected here are Hall of Famers. So here
we have what I think are the best Canadiens players by position who have played
at least 240 games with Montreal. Allons-y!
Forwards
 |
| L-R: M. Richard, Lafleur, Geoffrion |
|
Left Wing |
Centre |
Right Wing |
|
Toe Blake (1935-48) |
Jean Beliveau (1950-71) |
Maurice Richard (1942-60) |
|
Steve Shutt (1972-84) |
Howie Morenz (1923-34, 1936-37) |
Guy Lafleur (1971-85) |
|
Dickie Moore (1951-63) |
Elmer Lach (1940-54) |
Bernie Geoffrion (1951-64) |
|
Bob Gainey (1973-89) |
Jacques Lemaire (1967-79) |
Yvan Cournoyer (1963-79) |
This was a difficult one. There's been so many great Canadiens forwards that I could probably make up an entire second all-time team out of all the ones that didn't make this list. Anyways here's the ones who did make the cut. On the first line we've got two-thirds of the Punch Line: Toe Blake – who upon retirement was the second highest scoring player in NHL history – and the legendary Maurice Richard who remains Montreal's goal scoring leader with 544 (including four seasons of 40 or more goals). Centring this line is Jean Beliveau, two-time MVP and the most respected player of his generation. On the second line we have Steve Shutt, a vigilant sniper who was lethal on the powerplay; Howie Morenz, speedy scorer and three-time MVP; and Montreal's all-time leading scorer Guy Lafleur (6x50 goals, 6x100 points). For the third line we have the third piece of the Punch Line, two-time leading scorer Elmer Lach. On his left is sniper and two-time leading scorer Dickie Moore; on his right is “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, a 50-goal scorer and innovator of the slapshot. And on the fourth line there's the speedy Yvan Cournoyer (4x40 goals, 6x70 points) with Bob Gainey, a defensive specialist (4-time Selke Trophy winner for best defensive forward), and Jacques Lemaire, a clean-playing two-way forward, backing him up.
Honourable mentions: Vincent Damphousse, Aurel Joliat, Frank Mahovlich, Pete Mahovlich, Newsy Lalonde, Mats Naslund, Henri Richard, Bert Olmstead
Defencemen
 |
| L-R: Robinson, Harvey |
|
Larry Robinson (1972-89) |
Doug Harvey (1947-61) |
|
Serge Savard (1967-81) |
Emile Bouchard (1941-56) |
|
Guy Lapointe (1969-82) |
Jacques Laperriere (1962-74) |
You may have noticed that half of these D-men are all from the same era: the late 1970's dynasty. That team's defensive corps was a key ingredient to the Habs' success during that period so why not recreate it, right? This group of three includes the jack of all trades, Serge Savard; playmaker (6x50 points) and bodychecker Guy Lapointe; and one of the all-time greats Larry Robinson, who had only one full season with a +/- rating lower than +23. The other three are from earlier decades. First is Doug Harvey, whose fast skating and playmaking ability (6x30 assists) redefined the role of defenceman. Next is the tough, stay-at-home blueliner Emile Bouchard. And lastly is Jacques Laperriere whose shot-blocking and poke-checking skills helped Montreal win the Cup six times in his twelve years on the team.
Honourable mentions: Chris Chelios, Eric Desjardins, Sylvio Mantha, Andrei Markov
Goaltenders
 |
| Roy |
|
Patrick Roy (1985-95) |
|
Jacques Plante (1952-63) |
As usual this was a difficult call to make; the Habs have had a plethora of excellent goaltenders over the past century. I thought long and hard about this and I've decided to go with St. Patrick as the starter because I believe he made the most difference to the teams that he played on. Simply put, Montreal would not have won the Stanley Cup in 1986 and 1993 without him. Easily the NHL's best goalie from the late-80's to the early-90's, Roy won two Conn Smythe Trophies (playoff MVP), four Jennings trophies (least goals allowed), and three Vezina Trophies (best goaltender). And for backup we've got another player whose name often comes up when debating who's the greatest netminder of all time: Jacques Plante. Montreal's backstop for nine full seasons, Plante's innovative stickhandling and pitch-perfect standup play made him a vital component of the late-50's Canadiens dynasty. His seven 30-win seasons and six Vezina Trophies say it all.
Honourable mentions: Ken Dryden, Bill Durnan, Carey Price
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