Some people say that Montreal Canadiens fans have been used to winning and should have higher standards. Former general manager Serge Savard has been quoted saying he was finding it tough to see fans cheering on the team when they are losing, but times have changed, and legendary goaltender Ken Dryden explains:
I know the fans are looking for special, and in almost any other city, being very good is enough and so if you are on the verge of very good and disappoint and you can’t project the fans as to going beyond very good, that’s what gets fans down, when they can’t see on the ice something that will be better tomorrow. You don’t need to win the Cup each year; you need to know that you’re better than you were and you’re foreseeably on the way to something a lot better. And I think that’s what the fans are sensing, they’re sensing the right ambitions and the right ambitions throughout the whole organization.
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About the fact the team hasn’t won the Cup in 31 years, Dryden says:
It’s amazing, that’s the first part, and it’s amazing that there has not been a Canadian team that has won a Stanley Cup in 31 years and that is beyond belief. […] From 1956 to 1979, which is probably 24 seasons, the Canadiens won 15 Stanley Cup in 24 years. Before that time, the Canadiens were not the legendary Canadiens, I mean they were good, very good perhaps in the early 50s, but before that, they were another team and it was really starting in the early 50s that hitting their stride and after 1956 on, that’s when the legendary Canadiens became that. And then 15 in 24 years. So, you come to expect a Cup, you assume a Cup and you certainly don’t assume that it’s going to be a long time between.
But the goaltending legend doesn’t blame the organization for that:
That’s the way the rest of the world works and it’s more that way in every sport, every year of where you have more teams in leagues and you have more parity in all of the sports so it’s harder to win a Championship. It just happened that the Canadiens in particular and the Leafs to some extent had the chance to become extra special at a certain time in the history of the NHL and because there were only two Canadian teams out of six teams you know, you had a pretty good chance of winning
That’s what’s going on in a nutshell. Yes, Montreal fans were treated to a lot of championships, but it just couldn’t happen today. There are more teams, and there are more good teams as well. The days when a GM could dangle a past-his-prime player in front of a salivating expansion team GM to get its first pick are long gone.
Related: Canadiens: The Trade that Changed the Franchise History
Now that there are rules in place to ensure that expansion teams aren’t automatically bad when they join the fold, the established teams can protect fewer players than they could before. The Vegas Golden Knights started their team around a franchise goaltender in Marc-Andre Fleury. In 1992, the Ottawa Senators got Peter Sidorkiewicz and Mark Laforest, while the Tampa Bay Lightning got Wendell Young and Frederic Chabot. Times have changed.
Dryden, Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Rod Langway, Guy Lapointe, Savard, Larry Robinson, and so many more of those great players would not all land on the same team today, and that’s not the front office’s fault. No matter how well you draft, there are still 31 other teams who will draft before you speak again (unless you made a trade, of course), which means that the talent is split 32 ways, not just six ways as it was in the early days or 12 as it was from 1967, then 14 in 1970, 16 in 1972, 18 in 1974 and back down to 17 in 1978.
The point is that those golden 24 years Dryden spoke about started before the expansion era before the goods had to be split so many ways and before a drafting system was in place.
Those days are long gone and no matter how good a GM is, they could never assemble the powerhouse the Canadiens were in the 1970s. Kent Hughes knows he has to build through the draft and acquire complementary players with surplus assets. Alexander Romanov was used to acquire Kirby Dach, and draft picks were sacrificed to land Alex Newhook, giving the Canadiens three of the first 16 players drafted in the first round in 2019.
Related: Canadiens: About the Harris-Laine Trade
While putting together a team heavy on first-round picks seems like a good course of action, it still doesn’t guarantee success. I mean, Joel Armia was a first-round pick (16th overall in 2011), and while he can render useful services to a team, he is not, nor has he ever been, a top-six player.
The Canadiens haven’t won in 31 years, and it seems like an awfully long time, but it’s not as if they are one of only six teams trying anymore. It’s not like they can dip in an untapped source of French Canadian players and sign them when they are still in diapers anymore. While the golden years were fantastic for the storied franchise, they are long gone and will never return. You must suffer to win unless you’re the Golden Knights, but that’s a story for another day.
It’s time to adjust those expectations if you witnessed the triumphs of the 1970s. If you were born in the 1980s or 1990s, you already know what to expect.
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