A fan favourite became Canucks’ first star
Boudrias helped new expansion team carve out its own identity
The first year the NHL came to our city, teenager John Shannon would line up for a $3.25 standing-room ticket, then sprint to centre ice where he’d watch the game come to life which had existed only in his dreams.
In those early days it was mostly about the visitors — Bobby Orr came in with Boston in the Canucks’ third-ever home game — but the new team carved out its own identity.
The original Canucks — who were competitive until the moment Orland Kurtenbach blew out his knee in Toronto on Dec. 23 — were a motley assortment of journeymen, has-beens and never-quite-weres. But there was one player who captured the fans’ imagination that first year — one who rose above the expansion detritus and gave fans something to cheer about.
“He was ours,” says Shannon, now working for Sportsnet in his fourth decade of covering the game. “He was our star.”
And if the star is gone, his memory endures.
Andre Boudrias wasn’t the best player in Canucks’ history. He wasn’t the most productive, the most exciting, the most charismatic or the most popular. But he was the franchise’s first star, an undersized playmaking centre who led the team in scoring four of their first five seasons while playing with a style and flair that captivated this market.
The city and the province lost its original star Tuesday when he died while skiing at his beloved Whistler. But in his time he would win five Stanley Cups: two with the Montreal Canadiens as assistant GM to his former junior teammate Serge Savard, then three more as a scout with the New Jersey Devils who were coached by another teammate with the Junior Canadiens, Jacques Lemaire.
He also left behind something in B.C., something for which he’ll always be remembered by those who saw him when the Canucks took their first uncertain steps.
“With expansion teams there usually isn’t a lot of skill,” says Nashville GM David Poile, whose father Bud was the Canucks’ GM that first year. “But Boud stood out. He was the guy you wanted to be like.”
“The way he played he took as much joy in watching other people succeed,” says John Grisdale, Boudrias’ teammate with the Canucks for two seasons. “That’s what defined Andre for me. This market was looking for someone to cheer for and he gave them that.”
Boudrias arrived in Vancouver as a 27-year-old who’d bounced around the hockey world like a bad cheque after starring with the Junior Canadiens in the mid-1960s. He led the OHL (yes, the OHL, don’t bother asking) in scoring in 1963-64 and played a handful of games with the parent club before the NHL’s first expansion.
But in Montreal he only had Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard and Ralph Backstrom playing ahead of him and when the expansion draft came along in 1967, Sam Pollock flipped him to Minnesota for a first-rounder.
Is it any wonder the Habs won nine Cups with Pollock as the GM?
Boudrias spent two seasons with the North Stars before he was moved to Chicago and then St. Louis where he played for the Blues and Scotty Bowman, another Habs’ alumnus, in the 1970 Cup final.
Alas, he’d be on the move again that summer when the Canucks offered the Blues’ cash and two late draft picks for the centre. And Boudrias finally found a home.
In those early years, Canucks fans could count on two things: Boudrias would put up points; and whoever he played with would score a lot of goals. In successive seasons the Montrealer recorded 66, 61, 70, 75 and 78 points. That first season Rosaire Paiement scored 34 goals playing with the slick centreman. Bobby Schmautz had 38 two seasons later. Dennis Ververgaert had 26 the next season.
As the great broadcaster Jim Robson notes, all were righthanded shots playing with the left-handed centre.
“The crowd loved him,” says Robson, the Canucks’ original play-by-play man.
Boudrias’ time with the Canucks reached its apex in 197475 when the expansion team finished first in the newly formed Smythe Division and made the playoffs for the first time. Boudrias recorded 62 assists that season, a Canucks’ record that stood until Henrik Sedin broke it in 2006-07. Gary Smith also played 72 games in goal that year and the young Canucks seemed to be building toward something. Except of course, they weren’t. Two seasons later, they were out of the playoffs and Boudrias was on his way to the WHA’s Quebec Nordiques where he won an Avco Cup. Robson says Phil Maloney, then the Canucks’ coach and GM, got wind that Boudrias was defecting to the WHA and made him a frequent healthy scratch that season.
Of course, that was also the year Boudrias was named the team’s captain. Canucks’ history, yeesh.
In retirement, Boudrias worked with Central Scouting before Savard offered a scouting job with the Habs, then promoted him to assistant general manager. In Savard’s first two drafts as GM, the Canadiens laid the foundation of their 1986 Stanley Cup team, and that 1984 draft — Petr Svoboda, Shayne Corson, Stephane Richer, Patrick Roy — ranks as one of the greatest.
With a regime change in Montreal, Boudrias moved on to scout with New Jersey where the Devils won Cups in 1995, 2000 and 2003, largely on the strength of their drafting. Makes you wonder why the Canucks never offered him a job.
“He wasn’t always popular with (Canucks) management,” says Robson. Maybe because he knew more than they did.
In Montreal, Boudrias worked with longtime Habs scout Elmer Benning, the father of Canucks’ GM Jim Benning. Elmer Benning died in late December but, over the years, his son got to know the Canucks’ first star.
This is what he saw.
“He was a gentleman, a quiet guy but very knowledgeable and understood what winning teams look like,” Benning says. “He loved Vancouver and he loved going up to Whistler.”
It seems this city and province found a place in his heart. And that’s how it should be because he found a place in ours.