Pure greatness, frozen in history
No team will ever come close to the 1976-77 Canadiens
Forget about the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s.
Ditto for the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings in the ’90s, or the current edition of the Chicago Blackhawks. They’re not even close. Forty years on, the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens still reign as the National Hockey League’s all-time lords of the rink — the most dominant team ever assembled. And if transcending eras is the truest measure of immortality, those Habs will never be challenged.
Steve Shutt, the Hall of Fame left winger who led the team with 60 goals in 80 games, is in Beijing this week to coach at a series of youth clinics hosted by the Canadiens Alumni China Project and CTC Group Ltd. He will also share memories of that historic season in meet-andgreet sessions at local schools and the Canadian Embassy (see sidebar).
So just how good was that fabled Montreal squad?
• In the first of a string of four straight Stanley Cup championship seasons, the Canadiens posted a record of 60 wins, 8 losses and 12 ties, becoming the only team in 113 years to play more than 60 games and lose fewer than 10. In 40 home games, they lost just one.
• Nine players from the team are now in the Hockey Hall of Fame: forwards Shutt, Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Jacques Lemaire and Bob Gainey; defensemen Larry Robinson, Guy Lapointe and Serge Savard; and goaltender Ken Dryden. Coach Scotty Bowman and GM Sam Pollock are also Hall of Famers.
• Shutt, Lafleur, Robinson and Dryden were named to the First All-Star Team, and Lapointe was a Second AllStar selection. Lafleur won the Hart Trophy (league MVP), Conn Smythe Trophy (playoff MVP) and Art Ross Trophy (scoring champion), while Robinson was voted the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenseman and Dryden and Michel Larocque shared the Vezina Trophy as the best goaltending tandem.
• The team’s goal differential of 216 is by far the best in NHL history, 40 ahead of the next-best mark, achieved by Montreal the following year.
• Over the 80-game regular season, the Habs outscored the rest of the league by an average of 2.7 goals per game and played with a lead an astounding 87 percent of the time. In 21 games, they won by five goals. Sixteen times their margin of victory was six goals, nine times it was seven and four times they won by eight or more. On the other side of the scoresheet, Dryden and Larocque recorded 14 shutouts and combined for a miniscule 2.12 goals-against average.
• Robinson set an all-time record for plus-minus rating at +130, while Lafleur was +89 and Shutt was +88. To put that in perspective, last season’s league leader was Max Pacioretty, at +38.
But more than awards and numbers, it was attitude and elan that made the ’76-77 Habs the greatest assemblage of talent the NHL has ever seen. Of the 24 starters, all but one (Pete Mahovlich) was drafted by the Canadiens or developed in their farm system, and the players’ youthful enthusiasm (average age of 24.5) was kept in check by Bowman, a no-nonsense disciplinarian.
“My biggest challenge with that team was just keeping them from getting bored,” the winningest coach in NHL history recalled in a 2012 interview at the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.
“They were so good, so supremely talented, that their only real competition was themselves. That’s why I worked them so hard in practice — our scrimmage games were usually better than what the rest of the league could throw at us.
“The trick was to keep them at that level for the entire season and the playoffs ... and our practices reflected that. Players like Lafleur and Shutt and Robinson never took their foot off the pedal, whether it was a scrimmage or a real game.
“Every game, we had two or three players watching from the press box that would have been stars on any other team, and that helped keep the guys motivated.
“Nobody wanted to lose their spot in the lineup.”
Perhaps the best perspective was offered by Lafleur, the mercurial right winger who became the first NHLer to reel off six consecutive 50-goal seasons during those dynasty years.
On Jan 17, 1977, after Montreal’s seventh loss in 48 games (7-3 in Boston), a livid Lafleur told a Hockey Night in Canada interviewer: “We can never accept losing. Never. For us, it is not an option. The law of averages might catch up sooner or later, but that’s no excuse for a bad performance. We have to get back to being dominant.”
Nobody did it better.