Then came the Kings, who needed a heroic Game 7 effort from Gretzky to beat Toronto. The third round was also short, taking out the Islanders in five. All four could have gone either way, but it earned the Canadiens a midplayoff breather. In the second round, Montreal won four consecutive 4-3 games against Buffalo, the last three in OT. “We started 0-2 in Quebec, then went 16-2. “We lost one of the first game in OT in Quebec and then won Game 3 in Montreal and made it 10 overtime wins in a row,” Damphousse recalled. But the Canadiens took Game 3 at home on an overtime goal by Damphousse, evened the series in Game 4, and then closed it out in six games. After losing the two games in Quebec City, they looked done. They were given little hope in the opening round against the rising young Nordiques. Ed Ronan, Benoit Brunet, Gary Leeman and Kevin Haller were other regulars, while the injured Denis Savard spent the final behind the bench in a suit. It helped that both Pittsburgh and Boston, who had beaten Montreal in three straight playoff meetings, were knocked out early, clearing a path to the final.Īnd unsung heroes arose, including winger Paul DiPietro, who had eight playoff goals, and Gilbert Dionne, who had six. How hockey would change only a few years later. Russian winger Oleg Petrov was around, but didn’t play and didn’t get his name on the trophy. And it was the last team to win a Cup with no European players. It was a team that skated out onto the Montreal Forum ice to the crashing chords of the rock song “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Jefferson Starship. “We had a good team but we just didn’t know how good.” “We had some good veterans and some good young talent, like Eric Desjardins and John LeClair, who weren’t well known until that Cup,” said Damphousse. But when it reached the playoffs, it got a roll that couldn’t be stopped. It was a team that needed a full season under coach Jacques Demers to jell into a tight defensive unit that leaned on Roy’s brilliance in goal and on some timely scoring. The top defence pair had point man Mathieu Schneider and tough guy Lyle Odelein, followed by Eric Desjardins and Jean-Jacques Daigneault. General manager Serge Savard had made two key pre-season acquisitions, picking up scoring forwards Damphousse and Brian Bellows, to add scoring punch to a group led by centre Kirk Muller, captain Guy Carbonneau, gritty winger Mike Keane and promising young winger John LeClair. The 1992-93 Canadiens rode otherworldly goaltending from Patrick Roy and a record 10 consecutive overtime victories to a Cup few gave them any chance of winning after a regular season in which they finished third in what was then called the Adams Division, behind Boston and the detested rival Quebec Nordiques. “I think you’ll see a lot of teams going 20, 30, 40 years without winning now.” “Its not like the 1950s or 60s where you could build a team and keep it together and have a dynasty. “There’s 30 teams in the league now and every year it’s very competitive,” Vincent Damphousse, the scoring leader on the 1993 Montreal team, said this week. But before that, the Cup had been won seven straight years by Canadian teams - five by the Oilers and one each by Montreal (1986) and Calgary (1989). When Montreal last drank from the silver bowl, it ended Mario Lemieux and the Pittsburgh Penguins’ two-year reign. And it would end a jinx that saw the 1994 Canucks, 2004 Calgary Flames, 2006 Edmonton Oilers and 2007 Ottawa Senators all lose in the final. If the Vancouver Canucks beat the Boston Bruins this season it would end an 18-year Cup drought for the country that lives and dies with hockey. Big enough that there was a riot in downtown Montreal after the Cup-clinching game.īut in those days, a Canadian team winning it all was the norm rather than the exception. Well, it was a really big deal if you were a fan of the Canadiens, who caused a surprise by reaching the final and then dispatched Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings in five games to claim their record 24th Cup. MONTREAL The last time a Canadian-based team won the Stanley Cup - the Montreal Canadiens in 1993 - it was no big deal.
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