The Stanley Cup playoffs start this week and, for the third straight spring, there are no Montreal Canadiens. The last time this happened was 23 years ago. The last time before that was ’22.
That’s 1922.
So this is just the third time in more than a century that hockey’s most hallowed franchise, the one that won more Stanley Cups than any other, is on a three-year roll of no playoffs. Add that to 31 years without drinking champagne from and getting their names engraved on a mug they used to own, and the result is it has become okay not to win in Montreal. Or, at least, it has become tolerable.
The game’s mecca is Montreal, where great players wanted to play because it was expected they would win…also the place many players didn’t want to play, for precisely the same reason. Making the playoffs was a given. Stanley Cup droughts were unacceptable. The pressure was so great that two coaches, Claude Ruel and Bernie Geoffrion, resigned when it affected their health.
And how tolerable is losing now?
Put this way:
St. Louis has been Montreal’s coach for 26 months. He has presided over the three straight non-playoff seasons. His winning percentage is .438, which ranks him 24th of the 27 men who have coached Les Canadiens. One of the 23 ahead of him, Claude Julien, had two cracks at the job and his teams had losing records just twice in eight seasons, combined. Like half a dozen others who coached the Canadiens twice, it wasn’t good enough. Julien was fired, both times. A more “successful” Montreal coach, Al MacNeil, was fired right after winning the Stanley Cup. He’s the only one with a perfect record: one season, one Cup.
It’s many years since I worked in Montreal, but my spies tell me that the current coach, Martin St. Louis, is much revered. He was a great player (mostly with Tampa), he’s French-Canadian and he’s a local, born in the suburb of Laval. He’s on the front page of the newspaper many, many times during the hockey season, for all the right reasons…and that’s just the English newspaper. He is frequently mentioned in the same sentence as the Canadiens’ greatest coaches: Scotty Bowman, Toe Blake and Dick Irvin Sr.
They are the three amigos of coaching the Canadiens. Blake guided them to eight Stanley Cups, Bowman to five and Irvin to three. That’s 16 of the Canadiens’ 24 Stanley Cups. Like Al Arbour in Long Island, Toronto’s Punch Imlach, Edmonton’s Glen Sather, they won multiple Cups not because they were loved by players and/or fans, but because they were respected.
Together, these three amigos coached the Canadiens for 36 seasons — Irvin (15), Blake (13) and Bowman (8). Montreal made the playoffs 35 times; Irvin’s 1947-48 team the lone exception.
Martin St. Louis has yet to coach in a playoff game. That’s okay now, in Montreal, where bad times have sweetened the stigma of losing. Only one other Canadiens coach has experienced three consecutive non-playoff years: the first one, Newsy Lalonde, who was also a player.
St. Louis may become a great coach, worthy of being a fourth amigo. But not yet.
