The Montreal Canadiens head into the 2023 NHL Draft with a lot of hope. They have the fifth overall pick, two picks in the first round, an early second round pick and a total of 11 selections.
They will obviously be looking to add some star power and hope to avoid being added to this list in the future, where we count down the worst draft classes in Canadiens history, starting with the fifth worst.
This one came in 1964, and was the second ever amateur draft held by the NHL. Sam Pollock was the team’s general manager then, but he didn’t have a lot of preparation time, and he didn’t really have all that much to pick from in his first NHL Draft. He would later become known for his tremendous drafting, but that did not come immediately.
There are a few caveats that need to be pointed out here and they almost make it unfair that the 1964 NHL Draft is on this list. First of all, Pollock had just been hired as the team’s general manager in May, 1964 and was selecting players in the NHL Draft in early June. That’s not a lot of time to prepare, especially when there would be no hockey being played at that time, and no internet to research players.
The 1964 NHL Draft was just the second entry draft in NHL history. The only players eligible were players that had not already been scooped up by teams before the 1963 draft. Many players at that time would sign a contract with an organization by the time they were 14 and that NHL team would own their rights pretty much forever.
So, any 17 year olds who hadn’t already been signed a contract with a team was eligible to be drafted. The draft then was a four round draft with just six teams in the league so that meant only 24 players were selected.
The Canadiens ended up taking Claude Chagnon, Guy Allen, Paul Reid and Michel Jacques. None of them would ever play an NHL game in their career. The best player taken in the draft was Ken Dryden, and Sam Pollock, as he always did, would eventually get his man when he traded for the goaltender from the Boston Bruins.
Again, it’s not really fair to include that draft, but it is rare to look back and see a grand total of zero NHL games from an entire draft class. There were reasons for that and obviously Pollock was able to make it for it in later years with terrific drafting and team building, especially around the expansion era when he took advantage of several expansion teams by trading them over-the-hill veterans for first round draft picks, only to go out and select the next future star like Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson or Steve Shutt.
While the explanation for the lack of games played makes sense, when looking back over 60 years of NHL Drafts, this one is certainly among the worst for the Canadiens. The current management team has been working hard all year to ensure the 2023 NHL Draft class does not end up on this list in future years.