HABS' WORST TRADE EVER
Hopes left with Roy: Todd
This is the final chapter in our series looking back at the five worst trades in Canadiens history.
When Patrick Roy left the Canadiens, greatness walked out the door. A quarter-century later, it hasn't returned.
Roy was it. The last in that long line of players stretching back from Guy Lafleur, Jean Béliveau and Rocket Richard to Howie Morenz and Newsy Lalonde, athletes who possessed both great skill and that indefinable something that made it possible for one man to put a team on his back and drive it all the way to a Stanley Cup.
To know how great Roy really was, you need only to have watched him play. With Roy, the only numbers that matter are these: Four Stanley Cups, two with the Canadiens. Ten straight overtime wins during that miracle run in 1993, a record that will never be broken. And nine goals — the number he let in the night of Dec. 2, 1995, when head coach Mario Tremblay deliberately chose to humiliate his superstar in an 11-1 loss to the Red Wings at the Forum.
You know the rest. Roy striding to team president Ron Corey behind the Canadiens' bench to say he had played his last game for the Canadiens. And four days later, rookie general manager Réjean Houle pulling the string on the worst trade the Canadiens ever made, sending Roy and captain Mike Keane to Colorado for 20-year-old goalie Jocelyn Thibault and wingers Martin Rucinsky and Andrei Kovalenko. Of the group the Habs acquired, only Rucinsky would really pay dividends, and not nearly enough to make up for the loss of Roy and Keane.
Twenty-five years on and you could still start a pub fight by siding with or against Patrick Roy. With him, we're always dealing with extremes. The Canadiens never had a bigger prima donna, a worse hothead, a more fiery competitor, a more spectacular talent between the pipes or a goalie more capable of closing out a playoff series.
Roy could be a prince of a fella and a total jerk, sometimes in one sentence. He was (and is) all things. He contained multitudes. He inspired love and hatred to almost equal degrees.
I loved the man. He was great copy, a quality that would endear him to any ink-stained wretch. He was quick-witted and funny in both official languages. He was meteoric and unpredictable, but he was never dull. In hockey dressing rooms, where clichés are more plentiful than toe fungus, Roy always had something to say.
People blame Houle for the trade, but it was Mario Tremblay's incendiary temper that lit fire to the gunpowder stored in the Forum basement, and Corey who failed to cut the fuse before it exploded. It was Corey who had panicked four games into the 1995-96 season and fired GM Serge Savard and coach Jacques Demers in order to hire the utterly inexperienced duo of Houle and Tremblay.
And it was Corey who failed to exercise the necessary leadership by telling Roy to calm down and fulfil his contract and Tremblay to apologize for leaving his superstar goaltender in to endure that withering barrage from the Red Wings.
Corey was not alone. With the exception of Demers, the Canadiens brass appear not to have understood what they had in Roy — or how to handle him. “Patrick was the best player in Montreal since Guy Lafleur,” Demers said at the time. “Your best athletes, not your fourth-liners, win Stanley Cups for you. Roy is the guy who won 10 straight games in overtime to get us the Cup in 1993.”
Savard has said that he was close to dealing Roy to the Nordiques prior to that fateful season in exchange for goalie Stéphane Fiset and power forward Owen Nolan. Could the Canadiens have won a Stanley Cup with Fiset? Of course not.
Savard's rationale doesn't cover it. “Patrick had gotten too big for the team,” Savard said in his book, Serge Savard Forever Canadien.
“He took up too much space in the locker room, and he had too much influence on the coach. In previous years, I'd had to deal with him with kid gloves. I still admired him just as much as I had during our Stanley Cup runs in 1986 and 1993 … but a change had become necessary. The team revolved far too much around him.”
But did it? Go back to the basic question: Were the Canadiens of that era capable of winning a Stanley Cup without Roy? The answer is no, meaning the team did not revolve too much around the guy they called St. Patrick. When he's the guy who can win you the Cup and the only player who can, how much is too much?
Roy's departure was typical of the entire jittery Ronald Corey era, when maintaining the image meant more than winning championships. Chris Chelios was dealt to Chicago for Denis Savard amid rumours of crude off-ice behaviour. Guy Carbonneau, the Patrice Bergeron of his time, was traded for the eminently forgettable Jim Montgomery after he flipped the bird at a Journal de Montréal photographer on the golf course. Keane was thrown into the Roy deal after he said he didn't think it was necessary to speak French to be captain of the Canadiens.
They all hurt, the Chelios trade in particular, but the Roy deal was the killer.
After Roy's first game with Colorado, Gazette colleague Mike Farber and I shared a hotel shuttle with Keane to the airport, where we were hopping the Avalanche charter to Ottawa for their next game.
On the long ride to Denver International Airport, Keane vented his frustrations with the trade. The shuttle dropped us on the tarmac for the short walk to the plane, which bore the logos of the Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets. Keane was still complaining about the deal when he glanced up and saw the aircraft. “Hey,” he said, “this might not be so bad after all.”
Six months and an Avalanche Stanley Cup later, Keane's words were prophetic.
The Canadiens? Twenty-five years on, they're still waiting.