Interesting Canadiens Trivia, Facts And Numbers While You Wait For Game 5

Here's some past and present Habs tidbits to amuse and titilate you until the game five puck drops.

Not bad, for a whole four games into a playoff career!

Of all the goaltenders who have started at least one game in the 2007-98 playoffs, Carey Price leads or is tied for the lead in several categories. Most wins (before last night), our boy Carey with 3. Shutouts? Carey tied with one. Best save percentage? Price again at .956. Price also has the best goals against average, at 1.19. What other stats categories are left? Assists? He'll get one, but no one has any yet. Price was second in time on ice at 251:21, second most for goalies playing the first 3 games and about a dozen minutes behind leader Jose Theodore at 263. Price has stopped 110 shots in four games, 4 less than Martin Gerber has stopped in 3 games.

Oddly, Price has the best career save percentage of all goalies in Canadiens history with a .920 stat for 2007-08. How'd he manage that you ask? Well, they have only been doing the math since 1984, so Dryden, Durnan, Vezina, Plante, and Hainsworth don't figure in. Cristobal Huet is tied with Carey at .920 as well. Patrick Roy, the father of a fighting goalie in the Q sits 12th since 1984 with a .904 rate. Two Habs stoppers that made brief third period appearences in the Canadiens goal stopped everything. Olivier Michaud made 14 3rd period saves against the Oilers in 2002, and Randy Exelby stopped the one shot he faced in 1989. More on Exelby in a bit.

There are 13 former Montreal Canadiens playing in the present playoffs. They are: Chris Chelios, Theodore, Stephane Robidas, Cristobal Huet, Mike Ribeiro, Dainus Zubrus, Aaron Asham, Donald Brashear, Mathieu Schneider, François Beauchemin, Radek Bonk, Craig Rivet and Sean Hill. The Habs also have 3 former coaches in the playoffs ( one who's summer they are about to fast track ), one brother, and a son in law.



















In the 1915-16 season, when the Canadiens first won the Stanley Cup, their coach was Newsy Lalonde, who also happened to be the team's captain and the NHL's leading scorer that season. Years later, another former Canadien won a major NHL award ( no, not the Jack Adams Trophy, smart guy!) while coaching his team. I'll put the answer to that bit of trivia at the bottom of the page while you old timers wrack your brains. A clue would be: this player won the award while coaching a team other than the Habs.

Some round numbers: Matt D' Agnostini became the 700th player to wear a Habs jersey in the NHL on April 3, 2008 against Buffalo. After 71 goaltenders, D' Agnostini was the 629th skater. Gregory Stewart became number 701 one game later. Michael Ryder's next regular season goal in a Canadiens uniform will be his 100th. It will tie him with Serge Savard at number 54 on the Habs all time list. Alex Kovalev's next regular season point will be his 200th in a Habs jersey. He currently sits 70th all time, tied with Mathieu Schneider. Larry Robinson's career plus minus with Montreal is a fat plus 700. Wow!

Former Canadiens defenseman Guy Lapointe was a major prankster and general all purpose comedian. The Gazette's Red Fisher once said that Guy was his own biggest fan. Lapointe, in addition to being a power play specialist from the blueline, was vital to his team as well by being a clown and keeping things loose and stress free. Players would return from practice and find their shoes nailed to the dressing room floor or filled with shaving cream.

One time during the 1973 playoffs, the Canadiens were preparing to face the Philadelphia Flyers in the midst of their terrorizing Broad Street Bully era, and on the morning of one game, a group of Habs players were gathered together and staring off silently from a hotel balcony, an obvious sign of tension for what lay ahead. As visions of brawling fights and high sticks swinging filled the players minds, Lapointe sensed the impending feeling of doom while quietly looking around for a few seconds. Seeing the fear in his team mates eyes, lapionte dropped to his knees, cupped his hands together and raised them skyward. "Let us now pray", said the defenseman, as his brothers in arms buckled beside him in laughter. Players had tears streaming from their eyes and the laughs lasted a good while. Lapointe's goof had done the trick and the tension was erased. After losing Game 1 of the series, the Canadiens came back to win the next four, on their way to Stanley Cup number 18.


















Patrice Brisebois ranks 9th on the Habs all time list of most seasons played. He is 17th in most career games with 834. Saku Koivu is 23rd in games played with 727, and 34th in season with 12.

I'm a big fan of watching the annual NHL Entry Draft. I like all the trade drama, the talk of future stars and the wheeling and dealing of draft picks in the later non televised rounds. Each draft has over 200 chosen players, most of which you will never hear from again.

In 2000, Canadiens GM at the time, Andre Savard was involved in a couple of deals wherein teams swung multiple picks one team's way in order to move up in the draft order and select a player they coveted. The Mighty Ducks had it bad for Ilya Bryzgalov that year, and gave the Canadiens 3 draft choices in order to take the Habs 44th overall pick and select the goalie. In return, Montreal received Anaheim's picks for rounds 3, 4, and 5, or 78th, 124th, and 145th overall, who respectively became Josef Balej, Michel Ouellet, and Ryan Glenn. Balej was the player Bob Gainey dealt to the Rangers for Alex Kovalev. Ouellet, who is now with Tampa, was not chosen by the Canadiens in the 124th slot. Montreal traded picks number 124 and 145 to Pittsburgh in order to move up 10 positions and select Christian Larrivee, a big center with Chicoutimi in the QMJHL. Larrivee didn't exactly pan out. After a whole 11 games with the Hamilton Bulldogs over 2 seasons, he is now a member of the Rodovre Mighty Bulls in Denmark. The Habs in the end, might have been best off staying put, but it's strange sometimes how these things work themselves out. Just another proof that drafts are often crapshoots.

Mikko Koivu, Saku's younger brother, was drafted one position ahead of Mike Komisarek in 2001. Had the Wild not taken Mikko, one wonders who the Habs would have taken if presented with the choice?

Jacques Plante played 33,226 regular season minutes for the Montreal Canadiens from 1953 to 1963. If you break that total down it becomes 7 months, 20 days, 10 hours, and 46 minutes. That would be like going between the pipes on October 1st at midnight and staying there until May 20th of the following year, at a quarter to 11 in the morning! Former Habs goalie Randy Exelby spend a whole 3 minutes in the Montreal net in 1989. It was long enough for Exelby to be credited with having an NHL career stat as a Canadien player and slightly longer than it took Habs starter Patrick Roy to run to the Habs dressing room and relieve himself. They are not called relief goalies for no reason!

Answer: Doug Harvey coached the 1962 New York Rangers while winning the Norris trophy for best defenseman.
.

Gainey's Plan Coming Through

Translated from Bertrand Raymond's column in Thursday's Le Journal De Montreal

When Bob Gainey took over the GM's chair from Andre Savard in 2003, the Canadiens had just ended a season well below the established high standards of the organization: a meagre 77 points, a fourth place finish in its division, and out of the playoffs.

Gainey had nowhere to go but up. Even though the team had begun to draft better over the course of three seasons, the talent wasn't yet there. Gainey needed to start from scratch.
The new GM made no predictions. He did not proclaim 100 point season upcoming. The Stanley Cup was never mentioned. He merely said that it is a must that the Canadiens make the playoffs each year.

The road from there to here has been a rough one. There was a lock out season mixed in with two playoff appearances in three years. This season we are finally witnessing the breakthrough of talent often promised by Gainey, and his predecessors Rejean Houle and Andre Savard.

Five years after his arrival, Gainey can now unveil the vision he has had all along as he sits back in his easy chair - the always ejectable seat of general managers.

"The Canadiens were the last canadian team to win the Stanley Cup", Gainey says. "I want them to be the next team from Canada to win it."

Gainey admits he sweated that notion over the last three years, as Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa respectively lost in the finals to Tampa, Carolina and Anaheim.

"We're improving, we're on the right track", he tells. "In regards to experience and competitiveness, we represent a young team still. We possess good young players who are inexperienced and we have others, while being less talented, have a great deal of experience. It's the mix that we need."

Gainey noted on Tuesday that glory is ever so fleeting in Montreal. After being showered with adulation only three days earlier in the context of his jersey retirement, he was now being raked over the coals for trading his number one goalie for kindling.

Come to think of it, no one can recall the last time a GM parted with his starting goalie in return for a vague second round draft pick, even though at this time, the market for such a goalie was inexistant.

Gainey surely isn't surprised by the reaction. He knows full well that the emotions of fans rise and fall like the arcs of Russian mountains.

"Over the years, people have helped us by continuously supporting the team and demanding improvement", he states. "The fans represent the soul of the organization. This is their team. Us, we simply try to make it better. They tell us when things are going good, and when they are less so. We don't always give them the impression that we are listening, but we are."

Up until now, the team's performance has been positively stunning considering most observers didn't see the Canadiens in the playoff picture. Gainey, to the contrary, never once stated that he was convinced that his players would be snapping at Ottawa's heels by this time of the season and that they'd be a mere 9 goals scored behind the powerhouse Senators despite the loss of Sheldon Souray's cannon blasts.

"At the start of the season, I saw us as finishing anywhere between fifth and tenth", he admits. "Optimistically, I would have anticipated fifth."

That is quite a stunning declaration. It signifies that Gainey was well aware of the chance that his team could miss the playoffs a second year running.

"I would never have predicted us moving by the Senators into first place", he takes care to note, "There were still to many unknown factors and unanswered questions. Our immediate goal was as it always was: make the playoffs, gain experience, and in consequence, build up our confidence."

Gainey has been in five Stanley Cup parades as a player. He knows how crazy with joy the city gets in such times. Asking him if he'd like to relive such euphoric moments is kind of like asking him whether he enjoyed himself last Saturday night.

"One of the big advantages of playing in Montreal is the response that the team elicits from its public, the support they give us, they joy they feel when the team does well and the profound deception that manifests itself when it doesn't", says Gainey. "That parade is the ultimate expression of the fans happiness."

At the moment, the fans might be in that latter mood, but two or three wins in a row, and the events of the week will be forgotten.

Kovalchuk Was Almost A Canadien

Back in the summer of 2001 at the annual NHL Entry Draft, then Canadiens GM Andre Savard swung for the home run fence and pulled out all stops to aquire the Atlanta Thrashers first overall pick Ilya Kovalchuk.

Savard had offered a package of 5 players that included the team's two first round pick, with which they'd yet to use to select Mike Komisarek and Alexander Perezhogin.

At the draft table Thrasher's GM Don Waddell admitted that the Canadiens had come closest in luring him into a deal, and later confided that if the Habs had included one player over another he would have gone for it. Savard has never let on who the deal did include, but it was once reavealed that the player he refused to part with was goaltender Mathieu Garon.

Over time, it has slipped out that the players on the table included Richard Zednik for certain, and surprisingly Andrei Markov, who was just beginning to round out and was having adaptation problems to North American lifestyle at the time. Goaltender Jose Thoedore was the stumbling block in it all! Benoit Brunet's name was also mentioned as Savard levied to make it a 6 for 1 deal, but Waddell wouldn't budge in that direction.

As with many Canadiens fans, I ended up adoring the player Jose Theodore became, while considering the possibility that Garon, due to his size, might have the better upside.

Hindsight does blur perspective, Theodore being the Hart Trophy winner the very next season, must have made Waddell second guess himself some.

Foresight is an altogether different beast. How could anyone have known in 2001 that in less than six seasons, Garon would outshine Theodore in the long haul?

The whole once upon a time scenario makes for some interesting backwards speculation. It took Atlanta six seasons to achieve a winning record and seven to make the playoffs, where they have yet to win a game. Montreal in that time, have never had a sniper near the prowess of Kovalchuk. He would not only have lifted fans from their seats in that span, he might have made the seats lift by themselves.

As it stands now the Thrashers have failed consistently due to the lack of a decent backline. Markov and Komisarek, had Atlanta chosen him, would surely have rectified this area.

Montreal is still in search of a gamebreaker the likes of Kovalchuk. Had they sacrificed such depth to aquire him, would they be any better off today?

Needless to say, the complexion of both teams would have been drastically altered had the deal gone down.

When one looks beyond this trade that never happened at teams like Tampa and Atlanta and their current standing, it could be underlined that one player does not make a team successful.
Waddell should have made the deal, in hindsight.

In the same perspective, it might be a good things for Habs fans that Savard was so fussy in his upside assessment of Garon. Despite the fact the he, and Theodore are no longer on the scene, it's hard to perceive that the Habs would have been better off in the long run.

Looking back and placing oneself in that timeline, Savard had he made the trade, might still be the Habs GM - hardly a hellsih scenario!

Whether Andre Savard and his staff would have drafted well enough since then to surround Kovalchuk well enough to make the team a contender within six seasons is guesswork beyond comprehension. Perhaps the Habs fate would have had them take steps back before turning things around. Those back steps might have led to better draft picks, and then again maybe not.

I guess it all comes down to which team one would rather have. One currently resembling the Thrashers - all punch and no pile, or the Canadiens, whose future has a future!

Crosby In Montreal - Behind The Scenes

Some news and notes on the Crosby visit to Montreal, translated from Le Journal De Montreal.

The atmosphere in and around the Bell Centre spoke volumes to the fact that this was no ordinary Saturday night game.

For the Penguins morning skate, a few hundred young boys and girls were gathered in the lower reds. At one point they all began chanting "Cros-bee, Cros-bee." The scene put a smile on everyone faces, those in attendance unable to help themselves at the though of sights they'd witness if Crosby, a boyhood Habs fan, were to one day don the red, white and blue.

After the skate, Crosby was interviewed (in French no less!) and said that he didn't feel all that different from the player he was last season. Of course, much of the questioning revolved around the fact that he has launched to the league's scoring lead with an amazing run this week.

"I'm a little surprised to be there", said Crosby, "I'm just trying to do things the same way as last season."

"Over the course of last summer, I put a lot of emphasis on improving my skating and my speed."

No kidding! One just had to see him fly during the morning practice - he looked like a Formula 1 racecar on skates!

His agent, Pat Brisson was present, and was especially proud that his client now had a +18 rating.

Crosby said that the fans chating his name during the morning skate warmed his heart. "It was a real nice feeling", he added.

"I became a Habs fan at a real young age, and it's always very special to play here. It reminds me of when I came to watch games here as a kid. Nowdays, I just try to come here and do my best and set the right example."

Crosby was quite generous with his media time. As usual, everyone wanted some time with the Kid.

The attention hardly phases him. "I accepted this part of the job a long time ago", he said."It's part of what is the life of a hockey player. I've had lots of experience with this."

Like listening to a veteran.

Crosby was interviewed between periods after the first, on the french RDS channel. While Crosby has spoken french for quite a while, the language sometimes necessitates extra concentration he cannot manage during a game. He answered his questions in English, asked the host to explain this to fans. A respectful gesture from an always accomodating young gentleman.

Penguins assistant coach and former Habs GM Andre Savard was also on hand for the morning skate. Savard is well travelled in the corridors of hockey intelligencia, having worked in practically every facet of the game. Impressing him is not an easy thing to accomplish. He had no shortage of acolades to pin on Crosby.

"Even a blind man can see the talent within him", he said. "I've never seen a player work so hard at improving himself constantly. In that sense, he is exactly like Bobby Orr and Guy Lafleur. He always has the pedal to the medal. For two years in Rimouski, he did the same things."

This is no small offhand compliment from Savard, who saw firsthand the work put in by Lafleur while they were teammates with the junior Quebec Ramparts. He also played alongside Orr with the Bruins. He knows of what he speaks.

"Again this morning, he was out hitting the ice. He's a player who performs with high levels of energy, intensity and passion. I never fail to be impressed with his work habits."

Tickets for the game were reaping large paybacks for the multitude of scalpers lining La Gauchetiere St. prior to the game. A pair of seats in the reds going for as much as $1,250.00. One fan came hundreds of miles, from La Beauce, and paid $2,500.00 for four reds - the scalper not even blinking at the initial offer of two grand.
Most seats were garnering four times the sale price. The whites went for $250.00, the blues for $200.00, and the greys for $160.00.

One fan, decked out in a Crosby jersey, plopped down $375.00 for three whites, and was thrilled as anything to be getting inside the building.

Evidentally, this isn't the Columbus Blue Jackets! Sidney Crosby was purely Santa Clause for the scalpers on this day.

Close to game time, two seats in reds were remaining for the sum of $500.00. The writer of the piece for Le Journal was tempted to grab them himself, when they were quickly snatched up by a pair of fans with faster wallets.

In Guy Lafleur's weekly column, titled "Droit Au But" (roughly translated - "Shooting For "), he spoke of Crosby with unparrallelled adjectives.

"He's the most complete hockey player to come on the NHL scene in 20 years", said Lafleur.

"He has a ball playing the game and his love for it shines through everything he does on and off the ice. He can improvise in any facet of the game with uncompromising ease. He's sure of himself. He sets up his players with a rare smoothness and has an instinct for ending up in the right places at the right times. Everything he does, speaks of him as a team player, first and foremost. His goals are to make the Penguins better which each thing he accomplishes."

"I'm hardly surprised to see him leading the league in points, even at 19 years old."

"He has the immense quality of wanting to surpass himself with each new game. He is hockey's best

ambassador and the perfect role model for any player of any age. He is gold for the NHL."

I haven't heard it summed up better!