Former Montreal Canadien Ken Dryden skates during the Centennial Celebration ceremonies prior to the NHL game between the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins in December, 2009, at the Bell Centre in Montreal.Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images
With apologies to Stompin’ Tom Connors, “the good old hockey game” is far different today, on the eve of the 2024-25 NHL season, from the one Tom sang about back in 1973.
I mean, who knew that the most unpredictable, ingenious play imaginable would be to drop the puck back two zones on a power-play rush?
The game has evolved from virtually the first drop of the puck. For years, there was no forward passing allowed. There were six skaters on the ice, not five. Goalies have gone from the littlest guy on the team to, whenever possible, the largest – Ivan Fedotov, at 6 foot 7, made his NHL debut with the Philadelphia Flyers this preseason.
Forward passes can now go more than two lines. Penalties no longer run the full two minutes if the other team scores. Offsides are no longer automatically called. Coaches who once told their charges to let the goalie see the puck now demand players block every shot possible, even if it costs you your teeth.
At 6-foot-4-inches in height, Dryden was unusually tall for a goaltender when he won six Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens between 1971 and 1979. The tallest goalie in the NHL is currently Philadelphia Flyers netminder Ivan Fedotov, who stands at 6-foot-7 inches.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Sticks once weighed in pounds now weigh in ounces. Sticks that cost $2 now run as high as $400 and more. Mercifully, the glowing FoxTrax puck came and quickly left.
Advertising has crept from nowhere to the boards to the ice and, lately, to players’ uniforms and helmets.
Off-season fitness has gone from players joking that they drove around all summer with the windows down to full-out training sessions as stringent as the season itself.
There has been no student of the modern game more astute than Ken Dryden, the then-unusually tall (6-foot-4) goaltender who won six Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens between 1971 and 1979. The Hall-of-Famer, now 77, has been a member of Parliament, a cabinet minister, president of the Toronto Maple Leafs and a prolific author, his most recent book being The Class, a memoir of his high-school years and fellow students (available in paperback this month).
Dryden’s best-known work is The Game, which came out in 1983 and is widely recognized as the best book ever on the game he played at such high levels. He has also written Home Game: Hockey Life in Canada (with yours truly), Face-Off at the Summit, The Series and a study of legendary coach Scotty Bowman.
Like just about everyone else in this hockey-obsessed country, Dryden is looking forward to the 2024-25 NHL season. What will this no-name team, the Utah Hockey Club, look like as it relocates from a disastrous tenure in Arizona? How will 37-year-old Sidney Crosby – no longer ‘Sid the Kid’ – do with a Pittsburgh team moving beyond its ‘best before’ date? Will one of the seven Canadian teams bring home the Stanley Cup that has not been raised in Canada since the Montreal Canadiens won way back in 1993?
Dryden knows that he himself was a turning point in the game, being so young and tall when he led the Canadiens to the Cup in 1971.
“It was odd,” he concedes. “The best size to be a goalie was six feet tall, not six-foot-four. Given how a game was played, and given the equipment you had, six foot was kind of an ideal size, just as an ideal size for a defenceman was a bigger guy, and wingers were bigger guys, and centres were smaller guys.”
What changed the goalie position was the equipment, he believes. Once much lighter and stronger equipment developed to offer “perfect protection,” masked goalies could drop down and play full out to block shots. “All of a sudden,” he says, “you don’t have to be a stand-up goalie any more.
“So then you can drop your head below the bar. And then, what do you do with your legs? Then, well, you fan them out to the side, you go into a butterfly, you cover that much more net, because you got your whole body now in front of the net, rather than some of your body doing nothing above the bar.”
The changing goaltender, Dryden maintains, dramatically changed the shooter, and much of that had to do with the development of super-light, non-wooden sticks. “You can’t shoot a puck through a goalie,” he says. “You can’t intimidate the goalie with the speed of the puck. The only thing you can do is hit the little places that the goalie isn’t able to cover. And what do you need there? You don’t need a power instrument – you need a surgical instrument. So sticks get lighter and lighter and lighter. And players learned to manipulate them incredibly well.”
Late this summer, Dryden found himself going to the Toronto-area arenas at St. Michael’s College and Downsview, where multiple current NHLers would be training under the likes of hockey fitness experts Gary Roberts and Matt Nichol. Some sessions would begin as early as 7 a.m.
The players, he says, “were working as hard over the summer as they did in winter. It was amazing to watch them. It was fantastic. This is their summer team at the gym. They love it. It’s got all the dimensions of the team. It’s the spirit of the guys. It’s the chirping, competing against each other, yourself. They love it.”
Just before the players headed off to their various NHL training camps, Roberts and Nichol hold a mini-tournament at Downsview featuring 10 players on each of several teams. They played their matches four-on-four rather than five-on-five, 12-minute games on three ice pads in a round-robin format leading up to a playoff to determine a champion.
Several of the game’s greatest stars were involved – Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Zach Hyman of the Edmonton Oilers for the Roberts side – and Dryden says he could not believe the speed.
“It is so fast, so incredible,” he says. “Connor McDavid is simply of a different dimension to the others. He’s not a step more, he’s two or three steps more. He does everything two or three steps more, and it’s not just his foot speed, it’s his hand speed, his shooting speed, his mind speed.
“What an unbelievable carnival to watch that hockey from eight in the morning until after noon.”
Dryden wonders if perhaps he saw some of the future of hockey in those two mostly-empty Toronto rinks this summer. The next stage in hockey’s steady evolution.
Four-on-four hockey.