It’s been 30 years, but time has done little to diminish the memories of June 9, 1993, for Patrick Roy. It was the start of another idyllic summer in Montreal for the Canadiens goaltender, who backstopped the Habs to a 4-1 Game 5 win over Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings, adding another championship for the NHL’s oldest franchise.
“Every time you win a Stanley Cup I mean, it’s pretty fresh in your mind,” Roy, speaking recently from Quebec City, where he is general manager and coach of the QMJHL’s Remparts, said of the second of his four career NHL championships. “Doesn’t happen every year.”
As he paraded the trophy around the hallowed Montreal Forum, on the same patch of ice that Howie Morenz, Rocket Richard, and so many other legendary Habs had done before him, he had lived up to what was seemingly the championship birthright for members of the bleu, blanc et rouge.
And it wasn’t just a Quebec thing, either. Out West, too, winning Stanley Cups was a routine part of life for NHL clubs in Canada. The two Alberta teams, the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames, had combined to capture six of them during a seven-season span from 1983-90, sandwiching Roy’s first Cup in 1986.
In all, Canadian teams had won eight of the previous 10 when the Habs got their hands on Lord Stanley’s fabled silverware three decades ago.
So count the Hall of Fame goaltender as surprised as anyone that the trophy has been the exclusive preserve of teams south of the border since.
“In ‘93, if you would tell me we’d be on the phone in … 2023, and no Canadian team would have won a Stanley Cup I would never believe you,” he said. “I would have said to go see a psychologist because you need help.”
Of the record 24 Stanley Cups on the Canadiens roll of honour, that last one has a special resonance to those old enough to remember it. The Canadiens had finished the regular season sixth over all in the NHL standing, 17 points back of the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Pittsburgh Penguins, led by Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, who were gunning for a third consecutive championship.
So while the Canadiens were a team that kept opponents on their toes, they were by no means favourites entering the playoffs, and their chances looked slim at best after falling into a 2-0 first-round hole against the Quebec Nordiques. Chief among their concerns was the play of Roy, who had conceded six goals through two games, leading to some calling for the benching of the all-star goaltender in favour of backup André Racicot.
But head coach Jacques Demers – who Roy recalled as one of his favourite bench bosses – wasn’t about to kowtow to the boo birds.
“It would have been easy for him to put me on the bench after Game 2,” Roy said. “I didn’t have good Games 1 and 2 against Quebec. And then he just said ‘Hey, I’m going to live and die with you.’
“So when the coach is willing to do those things, obviously as a player you want to perform, you want to give them a good game.”
The Canadiens responded … and then some. They won 11 consecutive games from that point, disposing of Quebec, blowing by Buffalo and pushing the New York Islanders – who had upset the Penguins along the way – to the brink of elimination.
Of those 11, seven came in overtime. That OT prowess was ultimately one of the keys to that ‘93 Canadiens squad winning the Stanley Cup, with the team setting an NHL record for overtime wins in one playoff year. While that’s a mark that’s unlikely to be bettered any time soon, for the unflappable guy between the pipes – whose own coolness under pressure famously extended to winking at Kings forward Tomas Sandstrom during overtime in the Stanley Cup final – it all comes down to momentum.
“In our case the confidence got stronger and stronger,” he said. “But it was because we had so much success. I mean, we lost the first overtime game against Quebec and then we went on to win 10 in a row afterwards.”
Those 1993 playoffs marked the 100th anniversary of the first awarding of the Stanley Cup, and for a while it looked like the Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs were on a collision course to meet in the final. But in the midst of one of the finest playoff campaigns in his incomparable career, Wayne Gretzky played spoiler extraordinaire, rallying the Kings from a 3-2 best-of-seven-series disadvantage, punctuated with a hat trick in Game 7 at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The tantalizing possibility of a final between the long-time Canadian adversaries was a topic of discussion in the Forum dressing room, Roy says.
“We did. I mean, we were all watching Game 7 between L.A. and Toronto,” he added. “And there’s a lot of people that were talking about it, but Gretz was on fire that night. He had probably one of his best nights of his career and he was the difference maker of that game.”
The Great One’s quest for a fifth Stanley Cup ran out of steam in the final but with two minutes to play in Game 2, it was looking firmly on course. Having skated to a comfortable 4-1 victory in the opener, the Kings were seconds away from taking a two-games-to-none lead back to California.
But then L.A.’s Marty McSorley was called for an illegal stick and the trajectory of the entire playoffs was turned on its head.
Montreal’s Éric Desjardins, who tied the game on the resulting power play, scored the winner 51 seconds into the extra period to complete his hat trick. Those two-plus minutes may well have changed the outcome of that year’s Stanley Cup, according to the ever-confident goaltender.
“If we lose the Game 1 and 2 going into L.A. down 2-0, I don’t know if it would have been the same, especially going into overtime and stuff like this,” Roy said.
As it turned out, with the series tied, John Leclair scored back-to-back sudden-death winners at the Great Western Forum to send the series back to Montreal and give the Canadiens a chance to lift the Cup on home ice.
While some might describe that ‘93 run as divine intervention, for those on the inside, it was just a result of sticking to some basic hockey maxims.
“We didn’t have time to think that the gods were on our side,” Roy said. “When we got to L.A. we were pushing games to overtime and I guess there was a lot of confidence coming out of our group and believing that someone will score that big goal for us.”
Roy has yet to require any overtime heroics this playoff year in his current role as GM and head coach of the Quebec Remparts. His team swept the Charlottetown Islanders to open the QMJHL postseason, and none of the four games required overtime.
Though his Stanley Cup heroics – in addition to Montreal, he won another two titles with the Colorado Avalanche – will live long in playoff lore, he’s not sure they carry much weight with his current team.
“When I retired, there’s [at least] one of my players that were not [yet] born,” Roy said. “So I mean, they probably saw maybe some of my games on YouTube or something like this, but I think they do see me more as a coach than anything else.”
Now in his 13th season in charge of the Remparts, he burst onto the coaching scene in much the same way as he did as a player, with spectacular playoff success. After capping his rookie season in the NHL with a Stanley Cup in 1986, 20 years later he led the Remparts to their second Memorial Cup win. With the exception of the three years he spent as the head coach of the Avalanche from 2013-16, he’s spent the intervening period trying again to scale junior hockey’s Mount Olympus.
“It’s funny because there’s a coach who said to me, ‘You won the Memorial Cup in your first year and you’re probably gonna be a better coach and you might never win it again,’” he said. ”So it’s something that I remember but sometimes you don’t have any control on that.”
While Roy takes the next step on that ascent with a second-round series against the Rimouski Océanic, Canada will have three more shots to end its Stanley Cup drought this spring, with the Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs and Winnipeg Jets all reaching the postseason.
And though the three-time Conn Smythe Trophy winner hopes that one of the three can return the Cup to its spiritual home north of the border, he’s quick to remind us that even a 150-odd-point season by current superstars such as Connor McDavid is no guarantee of postseason success.
“It’s not easy to win a Stanley Cup,” he said. “You see it there [with McDavid]. When you have a chance to make the playoffs then you’ve got to make the best of it.”