They say that good can outweigh bad, but does that apply to hockey? Patrik Laine has done one thing since arriving to the Montreal Canadiens, and that is score goals. However, that is not enough for a lot of fans and some pundits to question his value to the team.
History of Montreal Canadiens Goal-Scoring Woes
There is a trophy in the NHL for the player who scored the most goals in the regular season, and that trophy is called the Rocket Richard Trophy. The trophy was donated by the Montreal Canadiens in 1998-99, and has been given out every NHL regular season since.
The trophy was named after Maurice Richard, the Quebecois star that spent his whole career with the Montreal Canadiens, from 1942 to 1960. And The Rocket is undoubtedly one of the greatest goal-scorers in NHL history. In the 1944-45 season, Richard scored 50 goals in 50 games and was the first NHL player to do so.
He also finished his career with 544 goals, being the only NHL player at the time to score 500 career goals, and all with the Montreal Canadiens. Today, that total has been blown past, and Alex Ovechkin is almost guaranteed to be the new NHL career goal-scoring leader at 895 goals.
To this day, Maurice Richard still sits at 33rd overall in career goals, which is quite the accomplishment for a player that played 80 years ago.
What's crazier is that Maurice Richard is still the Montreal Canadiens goal scoring leader. There are only two players that have scored more goals in their entire career and played for the Montreal Canadiens that have scored more goals than The Rocket did in Montreal.
The first is Guy Lafleur. Le Demon Blonde played most of his career with the Montreal Canadiens, scoring 518 goals. But after retiring, Lafleur returned to the NHL, and played with the Quebec Nordiques and the New York Rangers, retiring with 560 career goals.
The other one is Mark Recchi. Recchi had quite the career, spanning 22 seasons with 7 teams. Five of those seasons were played with the Montreal Canadiens. There in the Bleu-Blanc-et-Rouge, Recchi scored 120 goals. But in total, Recchi scored 577 goals in his career.
And that is it for the Montreal Canadiens goal scorers. "Le Gros Bill" Jean Beliveau is the only other Canadien to break 500 goals, and Yvan Cournoyer and Steve Shutt are the only other players to score 400 in a Habs uniform.
Brendan Gallagher is the current Canadiens goal-scoring leader with 233, and undoubtedly Cole Caufield will get up there, provided he remains with the Habs and keeps scoring at this rate. But what about all the time between now and the 1970s?
The most recent offensive dynamo for the Habs was Max Pacioretty. Pacioretty was drafted in the first round in 2007, and it would take a couple of years before he would break out. in 2011-12, Pacioretty exploded with 33 goals in 79 games, and proved over the next few years that that was no fluke.
As a member of the Habs, Pacioretty recorded 4 straight 30 goal seasons, but was never able to eclipse the 40 goal mark. He scored 39 in 2013-14, but that would be his highest career goal total in a single season.
In 10 years, Pacioretty scored 226 goals, and even if Pacioretty played all of his games in Montreal, that would just put him at 335 goals, still quite a few back of the 400 goal mark.
And its not too difficult to see why Pacioretty didn't score more. The Canadiens have had a lot of struggle filling the top line of their team with consistent scoring threats. Look at some of the biggest names on the top line in the not-so-distant past: Phillip Danault, Brian Gionta, David Desharnais, Tomas Plekanec, Saku Koivu.
A lot of those players are great and will be remembered in their place as solid forwards for the Canadiens, but those are not big goal scoring names. A lot of these guys are more known for their defensive prowess rather than their offensive output. Koivu's highest season total was 22, and Plekanec had 29.
And other Canadiens' players had some offensive acumen, but it never worked out in Montreal. Alexei Kovalev and Mark Recchi were past their peaks in Montreal, and it really seems to come down to poor drafting.
If you want to find the last time a Montreal Canadiens drafted a player that scored 200 goals? Brendan Gallagher in 2010. Then you have Max Pacioretty in 2007. And then there is a whole lot of nothing.
For 200+ goal career players drafted by the Montreal Canadiens, there aren't any until you go all the way back to 1998, when the Habs drafted Mike Ribeiro (who hit his stride in Dallas after his time in Montreal), and Michael Ryder.
And then you are getting past the time I was even born. Saku Koivu was drafted in 1993, and just barely passed 200. The same year the Habs drafted Toronto Maple Leafs legend Darcy Tucker, who obviously didn't do much in Montreal.
Its an incredible run of offensive futility that ran all the way to the 1980s. The simple truth is that the Montreal Canadiens haven't had very many offensive threats because they are terrible at drafting offensive scorers.
And it is hard to find scoring outside of the draft. You have to trade to find it, and teams usually don't want to give up goals. After all, goals win games, and that is what hockey is all about. But the Habs bought low, and they hit paydirt during the 2024 off-season.