The Montreal Canadiens were hardly
seen as a playoff threat when they crept into the 1985-86 Stanley Cup
Playofffs. In fact, players of their playoff opponent Boston Bruins flat out
said that they assumed that the key to beating
“I read what they said about me,”
Patrick remembers, “that our goaltending was a problem. That stimulated me,
motivated me to play well.”
A new teammate of Patrick’s at this time, was a young Claude Lemieux who had joined the
Canadiens from the farm team in time for the playoffs. He was a feisty winger
who upon hearing that he was to leave for
And the pressure on Patrick was
enormous. Patrick and the Canadiens dispatched of the Boston Bruins and the
Hartford Whalers as they put their heads to the storm and pushed forward.
Patrick stood out game after game, showing a maturity and polish in his play
that had only been glimpsed at during the regular season. By the time they had
reached the conference finals against The New York Rangers, the entire NHL
world had their eyes focused on Patrick Roy. He was a twenty-year-old boy headlining
a team that simply should not have been this far into the playoffs.
“Who is this Patrick Roy?” was the
questions from the mouths of sportscasters and reporters.
The Canadiens struck quickly at the
Rangers taking both games one and two. After the game two loss,
Rangers forward Wilf Paiment sniffed about
What happened next is considered by
many to be Patrick Roy’s greatest game.
“I can’t recall the exact players,”
Patrick made forty-four saves to
secure a game three win, including thirteen in overtime until Claude Lemieux
scored the gamewinner on only the Canadiens’ third overtime shot. Paiment’s comments
had no doubt irked the goalie to brilliance.
Game four was a loss but Patrick,
unperturbed, left the ice whistling cheerily. It was a move that surprised and
amused his teammates, warming them up to him. “I wanted to show them I would be
back for the next game,”
At this point, the press on Patrick
was at a fever pitch and they began to look for all the information and stories
they could to report on him. One of the most enduring they discovered was a
rumor of the goalie’s rather odd habit of conversing with his goalposts. It was
a habit that teammates tried to ignore something that an organization would
sweep under the covers to avoid undue attention. But Patrick was quite frank
about it when asked by a reporter if he did indeed talk with them. “Yes,” he
replied. “They are my friends.”
Amused, perplexed, the reporter
asked, “Do they talk back?”
“Yes,” Patrick replied.
Of course came
the expected question. “Are you crazy?”
“Crazy?” Patrick repeated. “Nah. Not me. Just because I talk to goal posts, does that
make me crazy?” Then with a wink, he added, “Hey, they’re my friends, it’s not
polite to ignore your friends, right?”
Patrick noted later that this
“relationship” with his goal posts began during the regular season against
Boston when a perfectly good Raymond Bourque goal was disallowed and Patrick
felt that somehow his mystical goalposts had a thing to do with it.
Whatever
works, right?
Also noted was the young goalie’s
apparent fear of touching the red and blue lines on the ice. He would hop over
them at all costs.
When the Rangers were disposed of
and Montreal was revved for a Stanley Cup Finals match against the Calgary
Flames, a mystique had flowered around Patrick. Aside from a game one loss,
Patrick held his ground and the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in the next four
straight.
The third string goalie from
training camp, the kid Mario Tremblay had hissed at calling an animal, the
twitchy kid called “Goose” had now become at age twenty, the youngest winner of
the Conn Smythe trophy ever. As he had done in the Sherbrooke playoffs, Patrick
had shaved almost two entire goals off his GAA making it a stingy 1.92. He had
taken more than just that one bad goal per game off his numbers. All doubts
about the state of Montreal’s goaltending were of course erased.
“He was incredible for us,” Claude
Lemieux said. “We wouldn’t have had a chance all year without him.”
“He loves a challenge,” Coach Jean
Perron added. “He says to me, ‘The more pressure there is, the better I like
it.’”
The euphoric city was quick to toss
the old nicknames they had for him, and they dubbed him “St. Patrick.” They
were enthralled with him. Not since the rookie Ken Dryden won the Conn Smythe
for goaltending the Canadiens had the team seen such a performance.
On top of that, there was a
different appeal to the city from Patrick than there was from Dryden. Dryden
had always been a bookish, serious, young man who described goaltending as a
“grim, humorless job, devoid of imagination and one that gives little physical
pleasure in return,” and who left the game early in his career because he had
become, just too bored of winning.
Patrick on the other hand, temperamental, and
quirky. All of the habits he had that had infuriated the Montreal fans,
suddenly became cute, intriguing and essential for the Montreal Forum’s legacy.
He was like Jacques Plante and Bart Simpson rolled into one. This was a kid who
stripped on the Stanley Cup float going down St. Catherine’s street and was now
hosting a show on Montreal’s MTV channel called Musique Plus.
It would have been easy for Patrick
at that time to simply read the press written about him, to listen to the
adoration from fans, and just fall in love with himself. But as countless
interviews with reporters revealed, Patrick didn’t take that road.
“The Conn Smythe trophy is a bonus,”
Patrick replied. “Nothing more. You could take a whole bunch of names on this
team, throw them in a hat, pick out one and he would be just as worthy of the
Conn Smythe, maybe more.
“It’s really something. I’m just
sitting here and the Conn Smythe is beside me. The Stanley Cup is in the other
room. I am happy about the trophies and right now I still can’t believe it. But
I also know that we’re talking about two trophies and about only one year. The
trophies and one year don’t make a career.”
Upon hearing those comments, Lucien
DeBlois responded. “No matter what he said about the other players, he’s the
only guy who should have won it. We would not have been in the playoffs without
him. We wouldn’t have come out of our division without him.”
That summer Patrick Roy was the
toast of Montreal and former Canadiens’ goalie Ken Dryden stood back and coolly
watched the Roy-mania. “When you’re new,” he finally said of Patrick, “Anything
you can provide a team is unexpected, special. So you can get judged as a
prodigy with people overlooking the things about you that aren’t so great.
“But eventually, the fourteen year
old becomes the seventeen year old and then a twenty-six year old and you’re
not looking for the prodigy anymore, you’re looking for an artist. You have to
grow and meet new standards. And the standards for a goalie are not occasional.
It’s not the spectacular game but the routine, good performance day after day.”
Ken Dryden had thrown down a gauntlet
of sorts for Patrick. Could the lad prove himself to be more than a flash in
the pan of Habs history?
In the celebrations of the Stanley
Cup winning room, a tipsy, euphoric Patrick had declared to reporters, “In a
few days from now, I’m going to start thinking about the next season. The first
thing I’m going to promise myself is that I’m coming to training camp with only
one thing in mind: to work really hard and keep my job.”
Perhaps Patrick was carried on too
high a celebrity float that summer, too enwrapped with a new girlfriend to
remember what he had said. At any rate, he arrived at Training camp for the
86-87 season, a day late.
TBC