It was a great big, gorgeous, seam-bursting, improbable, scintillating decade.
Montreal was the centre the universe, at least in Canada, the unquestioned capital of finance, sports and culture.
Johnny Rodgers was the Ordinary Superstar, complete with Rolls-Royce and fur cap. Gary Carter, André Dawson and Steve Rogers were putting the Expos on the baseball map. The fact then-Mayor Jean Drapeau was spending the city into ruin went almost unnoticed as the Big O was finished in the nick of time to host Queen Elizabeth and the 1976 Olympics.
At the hub of it all was the 1970s edition of the Montreal Canadiens, the greatest team in the history of the game.
You’ll forgive an old sportswriter for a moment of nostalgia. Frank Mahovlich and I arrived in this town during the same month: January 1971. (For reasons unknown, Frank got more attention.) A few months later, it was Ken Dryden, who helped bring the victory over Bobby Orr’s Bruins and the Miracle Stanley Cup.
The occasion that brought a dwindling group of legends onto the Bell Centre ice Tuesday evening was not that Stanley Cup, or the next in 1973. It was the four-year run between 1976 and 1979 — both the greatest dynasty the game has seen and, in the 1976-77 edition, the greatest team in hockey history.
It seems impossible to young fans today hoping for that elusive 25th Stanley Cup sometime this decade but, between 1971 and 1979, I saw the Canadiens win six Cups — and trailed the parade along Ste-Catherine St. every time.
As though to remind us all how far today’s team is from that dynasty, the visiting New York Rangers put a field goal on the scoreboard almost before the notes of O Canada had faded and (as Martin St. Louis noted) before the first TV timeout. It was 4-0 almost before the young Canadiens could catch their breath.
Before this season began, I wrote about that great tradition, how it can be either dead weight, or inspiration, or sometimes a bit of both. Watching today’s young players stand smiling and thumping their sticks on the boards as the 1970s team was introduced, it was all written on their faces — the exhilaration and the expectation.
The crushing 7-2 defeat at the hands of the Rangers was a reminder of what the Canadiens of the 1970s did in such routine fashion. Early in the 1975-1976 season that ended with a 19th Stanley Cup, I somehow landed good seats in the reds for a 7-2 drubbing of the St. Louis Blues.
What struck me was how businesslike the Canadiens were. Certainly, they had the high-flying stars (Guy Lafleur got his fifth goal that night in the third game of the season, Jacques Lemaire got his fourth and Pete Mahovlich his third and fourth goals), but the approach was methodical and disciplined.
This was a team built to win, night in and night out. In Lafleur, they had the league’s most exciting forward. They also had the best goalie in Dryden, the greatest checking forward in the history of the game in Bob Gainey, the best checking centreman of his time in Doug Jarvis, the most versatile line with Mario Tremblay, Doug Risebrough, and Yvon Lambert to score, defend and fight, the best fighter in Pierre Bouchard and in Serge Savard, Guy Lapointe and Larry Robinson they had three great defencemen, any one of which would have been the stud on most other teams.
It’s pointless to dream of another dynasty like the Canadiens of the late 1970s. It’s impossible in today’s 32-team salary-cap NHL. Instead, you aim to be one of the half-dozen which have a shot, season in and season out.
How do you get there? Piece by piece. Fans who slag the abilities of Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes forget Gorton, as GM, was one of the architects of the Rangers rebuild that laid the groundwork for this powerful team. He knows how it’s done.
One of Red Fisher’s mantras was “show me the players.” He meant someone to match the players he had covered, night in and night out for 60 years, beginning with the Richard Riot on March 17, 1955 — players who were often head and shoulders above the rest of the league.
To that end, note ESPN (which loves nothing more than a list) issued its ranking of the league’s 50 top prospects this week. Heading the list as the No. 1 prospect? One Ivan Demidov, taken by the Canadiens with the fifth overall pick in the 2024 draft.
“Demidov is supremely talented,” wrote ESPN’s Rachel Doerrie, “a true difference maker. His elite skill set gives him the highest probability of becoming a superstar … the most talented player outside of the NHL.”
The Canadiens need scoring, which means elite talents like Demidov. They need Patrik Laine healthy, they need hyper-talented playmaker Lane Hutson to get some seasons of experience under his belt.
This is how you get there, with bona fide stars who can remind you of the glory years of the 1970s dynasty — the greatest of them all.