The news hit the world of hockey like a thunderbolt. Red Fisher, true to form, broke the story in The Gazette on Nov. 26, 1984:
Canadiens superstar Guy Lafleur, frustrated that his skills weren’t quite what they had been and feeling stifled in Jacques Lemaire’s defensive system, was hanging them up.
Two nights earlier, Lafleur had barely seen the ice in a 6-4 victory over the Red Wings and had spent the third period stapled to the bench. In 19 games, he had two goals and three assists. Lafleur made up his mind: He was done.
Here we are, not years but four decades later, and the Canadiens and their legion of fanatical fans are still waiting for the Next One. The skater who will be one of the half-dozen best players in the NHL, who will deliver performance and charisma in equal measure, who can lift the Bell Centre crowd out of their seats the way Lafleur once did at the Forum.
For the past 40 years and counting, the torch has been a hot potato. Mats Naslund was terrific but not quite the Flower. Naslund, Vincent Damphousse, Pierre Turgeon, Saku Koivu, Alexei Kovalev, Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield — all good players, none of them Lafleur. Kovalev came closest to matching Lafleur’s charisma despite the frequent nights when he vanished, but Lafleur remains unchallenged and the only player who has approached his cult status was Patrick Roy, a goaltender.
(Ironically, Roy would depart under similar circumstances 11 years later, run out of town after a game against the Red Wings because of a former teammate turned coach.)
But on the horizon is Ivan Alexeyevich Demidov, a 19-year-old Russian who plays the same position Lafleur once played: right wing. He was born Dec. 10, 2005, in Sergiyev Posad, Russia, a town 40 kilometres northeast of Moscow, one of a Golden Ring cluster of ancient towns known for the 14th century Trinity Lavra St. Sergius monastery complex — picturesque onion-domed structures, mostly white with blue or gold roofs.
In every way, Sergiyev Posad is about as far as you can get from Thurso, Lafleur’s home town. But it’s a measure of how the game has changed since Lafleur broke into a league that was almost 100 per cent Canadian, at a time when Canada still produced goaltenders.
If not for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent uncertainty, Demidov might have been drafted second in 2024, after Macklin Celebrini. By all accounts, he may already be the better player of the two but he fell all the way to the Canadiens picking fifth, a golden moment with Céline Dion on stage to greet the Next One.
Demidov attracts superlatives the way some players draw penalties. This week, The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler rated Demidov as the only Tier One Player in his ranking of the top 100 NHL drafted prospects.
“Demidov profiles as a point-per-game, first-line, all-star-level winger,” Wheeler wrote. “I truly believe he’s going to mesmerize in the prime of his career in the NHL.”
Elite Prospects describes him as a “cerebral tactician” and a “dangler,” an offensive force and a “dexterous, mechanically sound puck-handler with the sort of fast-twitch wrists necessary to bring his ideas to life. Every move serves a purpose, whether improving the quality of his look as a shooter or creating openings in the defence that he can exploit as a distributor.”
When most of the Canadiens fan base expected the Habs to draft Matvei Michkov, I read a dozen scouting reports on Michkov and not once did the phrase “cerebral tactician” come up. In that sense, Demidov is an excellent fit for a Canadiens rebuild that emphasizes brains and character as much as sheer talent.
The remarkable thing is not how good Demidov might be, it’s how long the Canadiens have gone without such a transcendent player. The top six entries on the Habs season scoring list are all occupied by Lafleur, beginning with his sparkling 1976-77 season when he had 56 goals, 80 assists and finished a plus-89.
The seventh spot is occupied by Peter Mahovlich, who put up 117 points while playing alongside Lafleur in 1974-75. Eighth is Mats Naslund, the last Canadien to break the 100-point barrier with 110 in the Stanley Cup season of 1985-86.
Nothing in sports comes with an iron-clad guarantee. Stanley Cup championships don’t automatically follow superstars, not even Connor McDavid. No one player can turn a hockey team around, especially not a rookie. But it appears that at long last, the talent is there with Demidov, if we can only be patient. Lafleur himself did not begin his career with a bang, although he did score 29 goals and rack up 64 points as a rookie.
Red Fisher, known for not talking to rookies, eventually helped Lafleur believe in himself. “The first year I was with the Canadiens,” Lafleur once told me, “Red didn’t talk to me. The second year, he talked to me a little bit. The third year, first day of training camp, I was the first guy Red wanted to talk to.
“I said to myself, ‘Guy — you’re gonna be a superstar in this league.’”
And he was.