Scotty by Ken Dryden

Scotty by Ken Dryden

Author:Ken Dryden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00


* * *

All the pieces were now in place. The team that had seemed ready for the rest of the decade after its Cup win in 1973, then had taken a step back, was beginning to find another gear by the 1975–76 season. Henri Richard and Jacques Laperrière had retired; Frank Mahovlich had gone to the WHA. Yvan Cournoyer was the new captain—still an explosive goal scorer, if slightly diminished by injuries. After him in seniority came Jimmy Roberts, then Jacques Lemaire, and Serge Savard, who were still finding their best ways to play and still getting better. Then the players acquired in pre-expansion times—undrafted, like Guy Lapointe—and those from the draft of unsponsored-team players, like Pete Mahovlich, Pierre Bouchard, and me. Then Yvon Lambert, who been traded from Detroit. Then those players who had come from the real draft years, beginning with Lafleur, Robinson, and Murray Wilson in 1971, then Shutt, goalie Bunny Larocque, and Nyrop, then Gainey, then Risebrough, Chartraw, and Tremblay. Then Doug Jarvis by trade from Toronto. But more than the strength of this roster, it was a team that needed to win.

For two years they had lost. For two years the Flyers had won. In the second year, the Flyers, Sabres, and Canadiens had all finished the regular season with 113 points. The Sabres beat the Canadiens in the semifinals, the Flyers beat the Sabres in the Stanley Cup final. The Canadiens had been good enough to win, but didn’t. After my year in Toronto in the law office, I wasn’t as good as I needed to be. The team and I had some unfinished business. From the moment we lost to the Sabres in May, our mission to win began.

Two events in the first half of the 1975–76 season shaped the year. The first was in training camp. “We had to play [the Flyers] home-and-home—Saturday night in Montreal, Sunday in Philadelphia,” Scotty recalls. “And they came into Montreal with a pretty aggressive lineup and it was a rough game. I remember Claude saying to me afterwards, ‘We were stupid. We played all our hockey players and they came with all these goons.’ The next night we brought in Sean Shanahan, we brought in Glenn Goldup, we brought in [Gilles] Lupien. We had Pierre Bouchard, and we had Chartraw. We brought in a pretty hefty lineup into Philadelphia. Players that could fight, and there was a big brawl. And ohmygawd it was a wild game. I remember [Gary] Dornhoefer, he was not a big fighter for the Flyers, but he was an instigator, and he ended up at our bench with Shanahan, and he knew me from Peterborough because he played in Niagara Falls, and he was sort of pleading with me to get this guy off of him.” Scotty pauses, “After that, when we played them, the games weren’t that rough.”

The second event came late in December. “I always felt that the team was on its way to winning against Philadelphia after that ’75 New Year’s Eve showdown against the Russians,” Scotty says.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.