The triumph of 1971: 50 years ago, the Habs shook the hockey world
The Montreal Canadiens were not expected to go far in the playoffs. Their Stanley Cup win gave the city something to cheer about in difficult times.
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Today, the scene is unimaginable in every detail.
It was May 18, 1971, seven hours before the puck drop for Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final between the Canadiens and the Blackhawks. Two men sat chatting in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Chicago. One had a notebook, the other was smoking a pipe.
The man with the notebook had sideburns as wide as his tie. He was the late Ted Blackman, a Gazette columnist at the time. The man smoking the pipe was Jean Béliveau — captain of the Canadiens, himself winner of nine Stanley Cups and counting, arguably the most respected man in hockey.
Béliveau talked openly about the series and his own future. Would this near-miraculous playoff run be his swan song?
After all, the Canadiens weren’t expected to be anywhere near where they found themselves on that day in May. They were supposed to have been sacrificial lambs for the mighty Boston Bruins of Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito in the first round of the playoffs. By rights, they should have been honing their golf games by now.
A team with a lesser captain might have folded much earlier that season. The Canadiens were still winding up their exhibition season on Oct. 5, 1970 when the terrorist Front de libération du Québec kidnapped the British consul to Montreal, James Cross, and made a lengthy list of demands for his release, then kidnapped and murdered Quebec Justice Minister Pierre Laporte.
There were military convoys all over the city and armed soldiers on the corners on Ste-Catherine St. If the players somehow managed to keep their heads through it all, it was in large part because of the quiet presence of Béliveau. “What his presence meant to the flock of youngsters on that club,” Blackman wrote, “cannot be fixed in figures.”
Even so, the Canadiens season was supposed to have ended in April. They had finished with 97 points, good for third in the East, 24 points behind the Boston Bruins — their first-round opponent in the playoffs.
When the playoffs began April 7, the Canadiens were given little or no chance, even with rookie Ken Dryden in goal. The first game went pretty much according to form, with Boston winning it, 3-1. Dryden was superb, making 39 saves on 42 shots, but it wasn’t enough.
Going into Game 2, Boston coach Tom Johnson made a fateful decision. Gerry Cheevers had started Game 1 but the Bruins had rotated goalies all season. Johnson went with Eddie Johnston for the second game.
The Canadiens got off to a good start with Yvan Cournoyer scoring the opening goal — but it was 2-1 Boston at the end of the first period and in the second, the Bruins began piling it on as John McKenzie, Wayne Cashman and Derek Sanderson scored to make it 5-1. Henri Richard got an unassisted goal late in the period to make it 5-2 but it didn’t seem to matter.
As the period ended, my friend John X. Cooper and I made our own fateful decision. We decided to leave the glum Mountain St. tavern where we were watching the game and head to the Esquire Show Bar on Stanley St. to hear Buddy Guy. We caught the end of a set and waited for another to begin, fiddling with our beers in the almost empty club. When the musicians returned to the stage, Guy took the microphone and said, “Congratulations, you Montreal fans. Your team won.”
We were stunned. Early in the third period, Béliveau had scored twice to pull the Canadiens within a goal at 5-4. Jacques Lemaire got the tying goal at the 9:59 mark, John Ferguson put the Habs ahead with an assist from Béliveau and Frank Mahovlich iced the cake with 1:20 left: Montreal 7, Boston 5.
If they hadn’t known before, the Bruins did now: they were in a dogfight. The Canadiens won Game 3, 3-1 at the Forum. The Bruins battled back to take Game 4, 5-2, then crushed the Habs 7-3 back in Boston.
The Canadiens returned the favour with an epic 8-3 beatdown at the Forum on April 15, with Richard getting two goals, setting up a Game 7 at Boston Garden. Even the great Orr couldn’t save the doomed Bruins: Frank Mahovlich scored twice, Dryden made 46 saves on 48 shots in a 4-2 win and mighty Boston was eliminated in the first round in one of the great upsets in the history of the game.
After that stunning feat, the semi-final series against the Minnesota North Stars didn’t have the same appeal — it has faded from memory. The Canadiens won it, four games to two, to set up a brilliant final against the Chicago Blackhawks of Bobby and Dennis Hull and Stan Mikita, champions of the West.
It was another series Montreal was supposed to lose. The Blackhawks had taken a three-games-to-two lead in Game 5 in Chicago, when rookie coach Al MacNeil, who had replaced Claude Ruel at mid-season, had benched the fiery Henri Richard for a few shifts as he juggled lines.
Richard exploded. After the game, he called MacNeil “the worst coach I’ve ever played for.”
The remarks roiled a city still recovering from the trauma of the October Crisis. MacNeil received death threats and police had to take them seriously. MacNeil was given police protection everywhere, 24 hours a day for seven days — even behind the bench.
Richard would say later that the incident had been blown out of all proportion. MacNeil, for his part, never wanted to talk about it.
A team that had already been through so much was not to be distracted by the incident or the police protection. MacNeil even had a cop behind the bench with him as his team took Game 6 to set up that pivotal final in Chicago, on the day Béliveau met Blackman with retirement on his mind.
“It would be an easy decision to make if I was fed up with it all,” Béliveau said. “But I still enjoy the practice, the travelling with the fellows, the family atmosphere we have on our team. Nothing has changed in my life in a year that would change the decision I made last year to come back. One thing is different. I’ll be 40 at the end of August. There comes a time. When is it? Does anyone know for sure?”
His GM had already said that he didn’t believe his captain would step down. “He was the first at practice, the last to leave,” said the brilliant Sam Pollock of Béliveau’s season. “He had all the time for hockey. I don’t think Jean has ever given a thought to retirement.”
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“I almost made a decision to retire nine years ago when things were going rough and that would have been a terrible mistake,” Béliveau told Blackman. “When you retire, it’s for a long time. And when you stay, do you know how long you can go? I don’t want to leave halfway through a season or ever have the Canadiens carry me.”
No one, least of all Béliveau himself, knew what would happen as the Canadiens took the ice at Chicago Stadium that evening. They were facing an uphill battle: Chicago was at home, and its stars, the Hull brothers and Mikita, could match anything Montreal could throw at them. And their goalie, Tony Esposito, was no Eddie Johnston.
The game started true to form, with Dennis Hull putting Chicago up late in the first period. Danny O’Shea made it 2-0 Blackhawks in the second period — but then came one of the more glorious shots in the history of the game.
Canadiens centreman Lemaire took the puck in his own zone, skated to centre ice, let rip a slapshot from 75 feet out — and beat Esposito. The Canadiens were back in it and Richard would do the rest. First, he pounced on an odd deflection off the base of the net to tie it at 2-2. Late in the third period, he broke in alone past a falling Keith Magnuson, sent Esposito the wrong way with a deke — and scored the Stanley Cup winning goal.
When the parade was held along the usual route (on Ste-Catherine St., heading east from the Forum), Westmount matrons, wandering hippies, downtown businessmen and fiery separatists were all linked, for one sun-splashed May afternoon, in cheering on their heroes, who were notable for their pallid winter complexions and the welts and bruises visible on their faces, necks and forearms.
Today, the whole passing-the-torch business is mostly a marketing gimmick — but the 1971 championship marked a renewal and rebirth. First, Dryden won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the outstanding player in the playoffs, marking his own ascendance as one of the league’s premier goaltenders.
On June 9, MacNeil, faced with an untenable situation, resigned — his resignation eclipsed by much bigger news: Béliveau had made his decision. He was retiring. At the Queen Elizabeth Hotel the following day, the Canadiens drafted Guy Lafleur with the No. 1 pick. Richard, the firebrand who had made it impossible for MacNeil to remain as coach, was named captain and Scotty Bowman was hired to replace MacNeil.
The torch had been passed.
