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Post by blny on May 28, 2018 18:36:15 GMT -5
Well, Sportsnet aired a special tonight that recapped the 24th Cup victory in 1993. Savard, Brisebois, Muller, Damphousse, Leclair, Leeman, Carbo were all interviewed. Brisebois visited Demers in hospital on the 18th of this month.
Healey, Hrudey, and May also interviewed. They sat down with Melrose and McSorley as well. I hate to spoil it, but those two are bitter to this day. Hrudey brushed it off.
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Post by folatre on May 29, 2018 0:05:31 GMT -5
Good stuff. Melrose can pontificate all he wants that he would never ever make such a challenge even if with his own eyes he knew his whole bench was looking at a rival with an illegal stick. But that is silly for one to suppose if he was down and smart enough to discern an obvious infraction that he would bow his head and take the path of losing nobly.
That team was so clutch and it always felt like none of the four rivals on the road to the Cup had anything even close to Patrick Roy in net. It is hard to believe this happened a quarter century ago. I was a kid at university.
I was having a couple of cold pops with a buddy before one the games in the Winnipeg-Nashville series and I was saying how the Jets reminded me a lot of the Habs teams of the late '80s. He is a long-standing, long-suffering Sabres fan but he watched countless Montreal games in that era and he was like sure there are similarities. Then because we can, we start looking up stuff from that era and he says to me Max you're a Serge Savard fan so grade this summer of work. He rattles of laundry list of player personnel decisions from the summer of 1990, I recalled just about all of them but honestly had forgotten in which off season most of them of had happened: Nasland returns to Europe because Savard could/would not meet his contract expectations; Rick Green gone for a bag of pucks; Chelios and a second for Denis Savard; Bobby Smith for a cooler full of Lake Superior Whitefish; Ludwig for a kid no one ever heard of; Claude Lemieux for a very mediocre NHLer.
My buddy was like hey man seems about right the Habs were transitioning for another run and you guys got your payout in '93. I still like Serge Savard a lot to this day for the awesome work he did drafting and developing as GM of Montreal and Sherbrooke, but the more I thought about I was like that is one God awful summer (1990) of decision-making. I get it that Savard knew there were some good kids ready to make the jump in Sherbrooke and Fredericton but in my opinion the decisions he made that summer greatly reduced the Habs chances of beating the Bruins in '91 and '92; and moreover trading Chelios and Lemieux weakened the club both in the short-term and longer-term.
I know that there are no answers to counter-factual histories. But I really feel like if Savard had preserved the core of the teams of the '85-90 period the Habs would have been more deeply in the mix for more silverware (Prince of Wales trophies if not also Stanley Cups) than was ultimately won in the early to mid 1990s.
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 7:00:19 GMT -5
There were some younger players that got moved out for poor return - Lemieux for example. However, I think Savard shrewdly moved out guys at peak value just as they were on the down turn - Muller.
What got me about McSorley and Melrose was that the stick story always was that someone affiliated with the Habs went over to the Kings locker room and looked at each stick. Now these two are saying that some security guard took the sticks to an area under the stands where someone from the Habs physically measured each stick. Silly. Even if it were true, as Damphousse pointed out, you shouldn't be using an illegal stick at that point in the game. Vinnie said, "I always had 2 illegal sticks and 2 legal ones. If we were up with 15 minutes to play, the legal stick came out." Or something like that.
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Post by Disgruntled70sHab on May 29, 2018 7:15:21 GMT -5
24 Together BY RYAN DIXONA quarter century after Canada's last Stanley Cup, the men who lived through a
record 10 overtime wins remember Montreal's amazing 1993 playoff run and Canada's last Cup.Twenty-five years ago, I spent an entire spring rooting for a hockey team. As an adult, it was interesting to learn that, for one night in 1993, I was also cheering with them. To borrow from a popular sports media personality, the Montreal Canadiens were the team of my youth. And as any adult who has recently dug out a once-cherished Motley Crüe album can tell you, revisiting opinions formed at a time when you viewed the world in unconditional terms can be illuminating. Take a team winning 10 consecutive overtime games in one post-season, for instance. While skeptics’ hands were likely growing callused from raising red flags over the Canadiens’ credibility, mine were clapping louder and louder with every extra-time win, each victory confirming the unassailable logic that Forum ghosts could always be counted on to deliver the goods. Storming back to win four straight against the Nordiques after falling behind 2–0 in the series? Sure thing. Three of four wins in a sweep of Buffalo coming in OT? Sounds about right. Link
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Post by seventeen on May 29, 2018 11:56:27 GMT -5
I still can't help feeling there's a correlation between Bettman's tenure (25 years) and the last time a Cdn team won a Stanley Cup. Part of that is the Canadian teams have not had great managements through that time, but Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver had decent teams in the finals. The commissioner of the league is fixated on expanding the game in the US, which means pleasing the US fan and improving tv ratings, which would drop like a rock if a Canadian team is involved in the finals or wins the Cup. US ratings are highly regional, though. If a Boston team isn't involved, many Boston fans don't give a damn.
Sure...it's just a coincidence....I know.....25 years of it.
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Post by NWTHabsFan on May 29, 2018 12:06:19 GMT -5
That was a good show, albeit it felt a tad rushed. Funny listening to the bitterness from Melrose and McSorley to this day, and conversely the sheer joy from our lads. It has been 25 years and it shows how big a deal the Stanley Cup finals are.
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Post by Disgruntled70sHab on May 29, 2018 12:59:15 GMT -5
Anyone have a link to this ... I missed it last night ... oddly enough, by the time le Club had traded Patrick Roy and Mike Keane, they had only 4 players left from the '93 Cup winner (*Pat Hickey) ...
Cheers.
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 13:20:27 GMT -5
Anyone have a link to this ... I missed it last night ... oddly enough, by the time le Club had traded Patrick Roy and Mike Keane, they had only 4 players left from the '93 Cup winner (* Pat Hickey) ... Cheers. if you have cable, check your listings. They may air it more than once. I don't see it available on the website. |
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 13:21:03 GMT -5
I still can't help feeling there's a correlation between Bettman's tenure (25 years) and the last time a Cdn team won a Stanley Cup. Part of that is the Canadian teams have not had great managements through that time, but Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver had decent teams in the finals. The commissioner of the league is fixated on expanding the game in the US, which means pleasing the US fan and improving tv ratings, which would drop like a rock if a Canadian team is involved in the finals or wins the Cup. US ratings are highly regional, though. If a Boston team isn't involved, many Boston fans don't give a damn. Sure...it's just a coincidence....I know.....25 years of it. I think we're still paying for that run. Used up a lot of ghosts in that. |
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 13:22:13 GMT -5
That was a good show, albeit it felt a tad rushed. Funny listening to the bitterness from Melrose and McSorley to this day, and conversely the sheer joy from our lads. It has been 25 years and it shows how big a deal the Stanley Cup finals are. There was a definite focus on the regular season woes, the first round, and the final. So much so that the series against Buffalo and NYI were almost after thoughts. Perhaps it was a result of who they could get to sit down to talk about it. |
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Post by CentreHice on May 29, 2018 13:50:33 GMT -5
I laughed when Melrose said the illegal stick call "losted" them the Cup....
For me, that Final took the sting out of being swept 3-0 (prelim round) by Gretzky's Oilers back in 1981.
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 18:42:35 GMT -5
I laughed when Melrose said the illegal stick call "losted" them the Cup.... For me, that Final took the sting out of being swept 3-0 (prelim round) by Gretzky's Oilers back in 1981. That got a snort from me too. Hrudey said some guys were peeling paint of walls before the OT in game 2. They never got refocused. I think losing both home games in OT had more to do with them losing the series.  |
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Post by CentreHice on May 29, 2018 19:25:58 GMT -5
I laughed when Melrose said the illegal stick call "losted" them the Cup.... For me, that Final took the sting out of being swept 3-0 (prelim round) by Gretzky's Oilers back in 1981. That got a snort from me too. Hrudey said some guys were peeling paint of walls before the OT in game 2. They never got refocused. I think losing both home games in OT had more to do with them losing the series. Agreed. Hrudey also said that HIS reaction to the illegal stick penalty was, "Okay, let's kill it..."--which should be the mindset for every penalty....but especially up 1-0 in the Finals and up 2-1 in the waning minutes of Game 2. Good on Hrudey for saying that. No excuses. Everybody else sounded like Cherry after Game 7, 1979. Waaahhhh! I remember Gretzky also complaining about Carbonneau not being called for smothering (or closing his hand on) the puck in his own crease in Game 3 or 4. Wayne should be reminded that he got away with quite the stick infraction on Gilmour in Game 6 the round prior. Instead of being in the box for 4 minutes (and likely losing the series), he got the OT winner. |
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Post by blny on May 29, 2018 19:44:05 GMT -5
That got a snort from me too. Hrudey said some guys were peeling paint of walls before the OT in game 2. They never got refocused. I think losing both home games in OT had more to do with them losing the series. Agreed. Hrudey also said that HIS reaction to the illegal stick penalty was, "Okay, let's kill it..."--which should be the mindset for every penalty....but especially up 1-0 in the Finals and up 2-1 in the waning minutes of Game 2. Good on Hrudey for saying that. No excuses. Everybody else sounded like Cherry after Game 7, 1979. Waaahhhh! I remember Gretzky also complaining about Carbonneau not being called for smothering (or closing his hand on) the puck in his own crease in Game 3 or 4. Wayne should be reminded that he got away with quite the stick infraction on Gilmour in Game 6 the round prior. Instead of being in the box for 4 minutes (and likely losing the series), he got the OT winner. I remember Cherry that year, on CC, talking about Melrose. He didn't mince words. "He was candy-assed when he played, and he's candy-assed now." There were enough vets in that locker room that they should have been able to say what had to be said and still had plenty of time to refocus on the task. Hrudey was right. |
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Post by jkr on Jun 8, 2018 7:05:57 GMT -5
I couldn't believe that Melrose is still whining after 25 years. Hey Barry, it's called putting your team in a position to win. How come no one gives Demers credit for pulling Roy so they would have a 2 man advantage for the entire PP? A very gutsy call.
Things broke right that year for a very good team with a great goalie. I'm not going to apologise for it.
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Post by Disgruntled70sHab on Jun 8, 2018 16:33:56 GMT -5
It was on again the other night and I enjoyed it ... I remember thinking you need some luck to win it all and the Habs got their fair share of luck in 1993 ... mind you, LA should never had made it to the final in the first place ... unless there's a major league reorg, we'll never see another Montreal/Toronto final, ever ... '93 was the last time that could happen and the officials botched it when they failed to call Wayne Gretzky's high stick on Doug Gilmour ... and like Marty McSorely and Barry Melrose, I know of a few Leaf fans who are still bitter about that one ... that blown call took the series away from Toronto ... would have been a final for the ages ...
Cheers.
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Post by jkr on Jun 8, 2018 17:00:03 GMT -5
It's on Sportsnet tonight at 7PM.
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Post by Dschens on Jun 10, 2018 20:40:42 GMT -5
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