Tales from the Montreal Canadiens Locker Room by Robert S. Lefebvre

Author:Robert S. Lefebvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2012-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Dark Horse Phoenix

From all appearances, no one involved with hockey in 1942 could have predicted that it would be the Montreal Canadiens, of all teams, who would come to rise to supremacy in the Original Six Era. The lone reason they made the playoffs at all was the existence of the perennially dismal Brooklyn Americans below them and the seven-team format that allowed six teams a chance in the post season. There were certainly no precedents to indicate that the Habs would find a method to work the fifty-mile territorial rights rule to their benefit. But that is exactly what they managed to do.

Contrary to popular perception and myth, the course taken by the Canadiens was not one the team itself had plotted out for their ultimate gain. The situation was one imposed upon them by the territorial radius ruling, which came to benefit them in numerous ways. In part, it had something to do with players in the province of Quebec cropping up latently, due to the QAHA’s tardy arrival as a governing body. The 1919 establishment of the QAHA framework, mainly in the Montreal region, only now began paying dividends a few seasons into the Original Six Era. The team was also about to benefit from the first generation of locally born players who grew up as Canadiens fans. Players in their late teens and early twenties had surely learned a thing or two from Morenz, Joliat and company, and the two Cups won at the start of the Great Depression.

History had so far revealed that Tommy Gorman and Frank Selke were the smartest, shrewdest and hardest working of all hockey thinkers. Without ever having worked together with the Canadiens, their visions coalesced. Gorman had started a process to enable a better system of junior clubs for the Canadiens, and Selke took that ball and ran with it. Proverbially speaking, that same ball would one day be handed off to Sam Pollock, who would learn of moves and maneuverings known to no previous student.

Gorman’s efforts proved to be just one of a number of things to come to fruition to impact the Canadiens’ growth. Between the time of the Maroons’ demise and the Habs’ resurgence, he was charged by the CAC to manage the Forum. Ever the taskmaster, Gorman had filled the building with junior and senior league matches that not only drew large crowds, but also heightened the profiles and expectations of the players. The framework of highly competitive junior league games helped school the previously undisciplined players into the greater conscience of teamwork. What the QAHA struggled to regulate over twenty years, Gorman happened upon by implementing a simple form of showcase structure. Once the radius rule came into prominence and the players learned of its existence, it heightened the stakes even more. In essence, the structure that the QAHA itself alone could never impose got a kick in the pants with the application of the radius rule. The thousands of Quebec kids playing hockey and wandering in the wilderness now had a compass.

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