Late Hall of Fame goalie helped lead Montreal to 6 Stanley Cup championships in 1970s

MONTREAL — Friends, teammates, opponents and a legendary coach were all as stunned as the hockey world as a whole on Saturday, trying to process the death of Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden.

The 78-year-old Montreal Canadiens legend died on Friday morning, his only NHL team announcing his passing just after midnight early Saturday.

Like the passing of his 1972 Summit Series goaltending stablemate Tony Esposito on Aug. 10, 2021, Dryden’s death to cancer was virtually invisible beyond his family, not even his closest hockey friends having any inkling that he had been battling the disease.

“A friend sent me a note this (Saturday) morning, expressing his sympathies that Ken had died. I didn’t believe it, and then I saw it all over TV,” Hall of Fame defenseman Larry Robinson said. “Basically, I’m just in shock.”

Robinson was struggling to find the words to describe Dryden and how much the goalie meant to the Canadiens superpower of the 1970s, a team that won the Stanley Cup six times between 1971-79, including four in a row from 1976-79.

© Steve Babineau/NHLI; Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Ken Dryden and Larry Robinson embrace after a victory, and Robinson defending the Canadiens net with Dryden against the Boston Bruins.

“The biggest thing to me is that Ken was just so good that we kind of took him for granted,” Robinson said. “We’d say, ‘Tonight, let’s play and Kenny will keep us in the game.’ It would seem that the other team was coming and we’d say, ‘Let’s start playing now,’ and we’d win games in the third period.

“Whenever you think of Kenny, you think of him standing up tall, leaning on that stick, in that famous pose of his. You know why he did that? To give his back relief. He was so tall, when he bent over, it always took a toll on his back. He found that was the best way to relieve the strain.”

Iconic Montreal coach Scotty Bowman, who guided the the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup in 1973, then their run of four straight titles to close out the decade, recalls Dryden battling back issues that became increasingly problematic.

“Every year in January, Ken’s last four or five years, they diagnosed him with tall man’s back. … I don’t know the medical term,” Bowman said. “He had to take a couple of weeks off just to rest it.

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Scotty Bowman in 2021 with a copy of the biography written about him by Ken Dryden, published in 2019, and talking to his goalie on Montreal Forum ice during the 1970s.

“Ken was a man of many things. He was always busy, you never saw him sitting around. But he concentrated on hockey, he knew the players in the League.

“He was 6-foot-4 in an era when goalies were like Rogie Vachon and Gump Worsley and Charlie Hodge (Canadiens all less than 6 feet tall). Ken knew how to play the position because he was big. He focused on the puck so he wasn’t scrambling all over the ice. He wasn’t a goalie who bounced around.”

What particularly impressed Bowman was Dryden’s ability to make a difference on the nights when the goalie had relatively little work.

“What I recall and admired a lot was this: When Ken didn’t get 40 shots, maybe only 20, he could still concentrate so fully,” Bowman said. “There was always a point in the game when he needed to rise to the occasion. Power plays, the other team down a couple of goals and they’re coming at you offensively. No question we had good Canadiens teams stocked with future Hall of Fame players, but we had the backing of a great goalie.”

On his farm in Montana, former Dryden teammate Rogie Vachon was crushed to learn of his friend’s death. With Dryden moving into the Canadiens as their goalie for the 1970s, Vachon was packaged in a November 1971 trade to the Los Angeles Kings, where he’d be the No. 1 goalie on his way to 2016 Hall of Fame induction.

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Goalies Ken Dryden and Rogie Vachon in the Canadiens’ Montreal Forum dressing room shortly before Vachon’s November 1971 trade to the Los Angeles Kings.

“Our wives knew each other,” Vachon said of his late wife, Nicole, and Dryden’s wife, Lynda. “We were all very good friends; we had a very nice relationship.

“The way Ken was playing, there wasn’t a whole lot I could say or do. He was so good. I knew that at some point, if he continued to play like that, I wouldn’t play too many games for the Canadiens. The trade to Los Angeles worked out well for me.”

Former Canadiens captain Yvan Cournoyer was on the team through Dryden’s entire NHL career, the two retiring following the 1979 Stanley Cup victory — Cournoyer’s 10th championship, Dryden’s sixth.

“Ken always gave us a chance to win,” Cournoyer said. “If you got behind one, two or three goals in the first two periods, you knew that if you scored four goals, you were going to win. He always gave us the confidence to not quit and keep going.”

There’s a classic 1975 photo of Cournoyer racing out from behind the Canadiens net during a game at Maple Leaf Gardens, a mutton-chopped Robinson standing nearby. Dryden is casually leaning on the crossbar, not the least bit concerned that Cournoyer might turn over the puck.

The Roadrunner always gets a kick out of that shot.

“One day I told Ken, ‘Thank you for your confidence that I wasn’t going to lose the puck. If I did, you’re in big trouble,’” he said, laughing.

© Graphic Artists/Hockey Hall of Fame

Yvan Cournoyer peels out from behind goalie Ken Dryden’s net.

The two men were roommates on a single Canadiens road trip during the 1970s, in Boston.

“Ken was the best roommate you could have,” Cournoyer remembered. “Usually I roomed with Jean Beliveau because we played together, but this trip I was with Ken. He was a hockey player in the dressing room and on the ice, but beyond those places, he was himself. He always worked so hard in practice. You were happy when you scored a goal on him in practice because he wanted to stop you all the time.”

No one knows that better than legendary Boston Bruins and New York Rangers sniper Phil Esposito, who during the 1971 Stanley Cup Playoffs was so frustrated by Dryden stoning the Bruins in an NHL Quarterfinals upset that he grumbled about the goalie having “arms like a giraffe.”

More than a half-century later, Esposito has revisited a giraffe’s anatomy.

“OK, maybe the legs of a giraffe,” he said from Tampa on Saturday.

It wasn’t with the Bruins but rather with the Rangers, in the 1979 Stanley Cup Final, that Esposito was most frustrated by Dryden.

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Boston Bruins forward Phil Esposito presses in on Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden during a 1970s game at the Montreal Forum.

The Rangers had won Game 1, and Canadiens coach Bowman chose to go with Michel “Bunny” Larocque for Game 2. But in the warmup, Montreal forward Doug Risebrough drilled Larocque in the head, sending him to the hospital and Dryden, who had been heckled by Canadiens fans during Game 1, back into the net.

Montreal won 6-2, then won the next three with Dryden in goal to win the Stanley Cup.

“If Bunny doesn’t get hit in the head in warmup, he plays,” Esposito said with a sigh. “I’ll never forget sitting beside (Rangers teammate) Donnie Murdoch, saying, ‘If Bunny’s in there, we win Game 2, guaranteed.’ Maybe the series. But then here comes Dryden and there goes the Stanley Cup.

“Ken played on maybe the greatest teams ever assembled, so many Hall of Famers. When we were playing against him, we didn’t get many rebounds. He gave them up, but the defense cleared them maybe 85 percent of the time. Bobby Orr, on good knees, did the same in Boston for Gerry Cheevers.”

Cheevers saw plenty of Dryden at the other end of the rink, grudgingly astonished by the work of a fellow lodge brother.

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Boston Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers slides to make a save at the Montreal Forum. Cheevers had great admiration for Ken Dryden, a formidable opponent.

“Kenny was a huge part of their team and they were a great team. He was the cherry on top of a great sundae,” Cheevers said. “I don’t know how to explain him as a goalie, but he fit that team perfectly. Would they have won with other goaltenders? That’ll never be answered. But they went to Kenny and look what he did.

“We knew we had to beat Kenny but he beat us. I don’t mean to diminish those Canadiens teams, but they needed Kenny Dryden. I don’t know that I could have done what he did. You’ve got to be ready for 60 minutes every night. That was one of the great characteristics of Kenny Dryden, being ready when he had to be, and he was.

“People should remember how good he was, that made those teams good. He was a great one, no question about it. As frustrating as it was to play against him, there was no denying his greatness and his ability to win.”

Bernie Parent, the 1974 and 1975 Stanley Cup, Vezina Trophy and Conn Smythe Trophy winner with the Philadelphia Flyers, was similarly dazzled by what the lanky, long-legged opponent was doing in the Canadiens net.

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Philadelphia Flyers goalie Bernie Parent defends against the Canadiens’ Murray Wilson; Ken Dryden awaits a rush from the opposition.

“If you watched Ken play, you knew he understood very well what his defense would do in certain situations, so he’d be in the right place at the right time, when the opponent shot,” Parent said. “My memories of him shouldn’t be great, playing for the other team, but they are. Ken’s poise was a great attribute.”

And then, with a laugh: “But he once told me that I was a good goalie, so what did he know?”

No one will mourn the loss of Dryden more than Bowman, who had to be coaxed into working with his former goalie on a 2019 biography of the NHL’s most successful coach.

“Ken was a very cerebral person,” Bowman said. “He approached me about a book project, but I wasn’t interested. I told him I was pretty busy and that I liked my winters in Florida.

“But he came back with a timetable, said he wasn’t in a rush, saying he could call me three times a week and do a couple hours on the phone. Everything was so organized. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9 o’clock he’d call me or I’d call him and we’d talk sometimes for almost three hours, about subjects that he came up with. He came down to Florida and to my Buffalo home a few times, transcribing our talks, gathering photos and books from me, for nearly three years before the project was finally finished.

“I’ll always remember that about Ken, how thoroughly he prepared, how organized he was, how simple he made things for me. That’s the way he was in hockey, and that’s how he was in life.”

Top photo: Ken Dryden strikes his familiar pose on the ice at St. Louis Arena during a 1975 game