May 01--In the middle of last week, when Blackhawks rookie Scott Darling of suburban Lemont was the surprise talk of the town in Chicago, it seemed a good time to talk with the man who had been perhaps the most unlikely rookie goalie to become the star of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
That goalie, Ken Dryden, was so inexperienced he didn't even officially become a rookie until the season following his first Stanley Cup victory.
While the Darling episode may become a footnote in playoff rookie lore after his being replaced by veteran Corey Crawford in Saturday's decisive game six win over Nashville, the chronicle of Dryden's performance in the 1971 Stanley Cup is a story to be recounted through the ages.
It ended with the puck in Dryden's glove at Chicago Stadium, where his Canadiens had defeated the Blackhawks in game seven of the finals.
It began after Dryden had played just six regular-season games. He would play every minute of the Canadiens' 20 playoff games and win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP a year before he won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year.
Dryden won five Vezina trophies as the league's best goalie and six Stanley Cups in his eight NHL seasons -- despite taking a year off to get his law degree. He retired as a player at age 31, embarking on careers as an author, lawyer, hockey executive, member of Canada's Parliament and a cabinet member.
Dryden would be the first sort-of-rookie goalie to win the Conn Smythe, awarded since 1965. Three official rookies would follow: the Canadiens' Patrick Roy in 1986, the Flyers' Ron Hextall in 1987 and the Hurricanes' Cam Ward in 2006, when he began the playoffs on the bench and was later benched for another game.
Yet Roy, Hextall (the only one whose team did not win the Cup) and Ward all had played more than half their team's regular-season games in their Smythe-winning seasons.
Dryden, then 23, made his first appearance in the NHL just three weeks before his first playoff start. He began the playoffs with less than half the NHL experience of Darling, 26, whose first of 13 starts this year came last October.
"When you're a kid, you go by what all the non-kids say, and the conventional wisdom is you go with your veterans in the playoffs because the playoffs are a different world," Dryden said.
"What kind of different world, I had no idea, but I assumed it must be true."
Al MacNeil, just 35 when he replaced Claude Ruel as Canadiens head coach in December 1970, was looking to create a new world view for the team in the playoffs.
The Canadiens finished third in the East and knew well before the playoffs began they would draw defending champion Boston in the opening round. The 1970-71 Bruins, led by Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr, easily had the league's best record and had become the highest scoring NHL team in history with 399 goals, a total topped only by the Wayne Gretzky Edmonton Oilers teams in the early 1980s.
The Canadiens, whose regular goalies had been Rogie Vachon and rookie Phil Myre, would play the Bruins twice, home-and-home, in the final three games of the season. Dryden assumed whoever got the start against the Bruins in Montreal would also start the playoffs.
MacNeil chose Vachon and Myre for the games against the Bruins, Dryden for one with the Rangers.
"When Al said that, I was disappointed," Dryden said. "Maybe he saw something in my face, because as we were walking out of the room, he said to me, 'I've got something in mind. Don't worry.'"
A day before the opening playoff game in Boston, MacNeil told Dryden he was the starter. The coach also decided that for the first and only time, Canadiens' captain Jean Beliveau, 39, who already had won nine Stanley Cups, would be the kid's roommate both on the road and at home, where the team stayed at a hotel outside during the playoffs.
"At the time, it never occurred to me that having Jean as my roommate was anything more than an accident," Dryden said. "But the Canadiens had orchestrated things as well as you could and gave us a lot better chance for things to turn out as they did."
And Dryden quickly discovered he was in a much similar world than he imagined.
The crowd noise at Boston Garden in the opening game was no greater than what he had experienced there in college playoffs for Cornell, which had become a bitter rival to the Boston area hockey powers, Boston University and Boston College. Dryden also realized playoffs were playoffs, the biggest games of the year, whether you were in Peewee, Bantam, college or the NHL.
"The biggest thing in a situation like that is you can't know for sure you can do it but you just can't know that you can't do it," he said. "You discover you are ready to do this even if you had no idea you would be."
A 3-1 loss in game one became a confidence-builder -- after all, Boston was averaging 5.1 goals per game -- but Dryden still thought his time might be up when the Bruins took a 5-1 lead in game two. The Canadiens rallied for a 7-5 win, and MacNeil stuck with Dryden even after he allowed five and seven goals as the team lost games four and five before winning the final two.
The Canadiens would lose the first two games of the finals and trail the West champion Blackhawks 2-0 in the seventh game. Dryden made dramatic save after dramatic save in the waning moments of a 3-2 win, the biggest on a shot by Jim Pappin, who, Dryden recalled, began celebrating what he thought was a certain tying goal.
"Suddenly, you're in this situation, and you can actually handle it," Dryden said. "The more you play, the more excited you get, the better you play. It becomes an incredibly high-energy ride."
Dryden correctly imagined Darling felt the same way, especially after making 52 saves in the triple overtime Game 4 triumph. He would be credited with three of the Hawks' four wins in the first round series.
"You're in the playoffs, with a team as good as Chicago and a goalie as good as Crawford," Dryden said. "To actually have a chance to play, you're just thrilled and grateful."
Without knowing what Dryden had said, Darling used almost identical wording to describe his experience.
"I'm thrilled I got to play," he said Wednesday. "I wasn't expecting any ice time. The way it worked out, I'm happy I got to play, happy I got to contribute."
phersh@tribpub.com
