Oh, the excitement mounts!
Our story so far:
10. Chicago Cubs, 1906-1910.
9. Boston Red Sox, 1912-1918.
8. Los Angeles Lakers, 1980-1991.
7. New York Yankees, 1994-2003.
6. Green Bay Packers, 1960-1967.
5. Chicago Bulls, 1988-1998.
Now it's time, ladies and germs, to get into the real monster dynasties, with Cretaceous-era lifespans. Are you ready???
4. Montreal Canadiens, 1955-1979. Yes, we have to get hockey in here somewhere. And who better but Les Habitants? To people my age, it somehow isn't really a Stanley Cup final if un-helmeted players are not bringing the puck up ice through the cigarette-smoke gloom of the Forum.
(Which, incidentally, suffered an even more ignominious fate than the Real Original Yankee Stadium, having been gutted and turned into the Pepsi Forum, a movie multiplex, shopping and restaurant hub. Honestly, there are people in this world who would make the Vatican into a parking garage. But I digress.)
To choose these years once again indicates a certain arbitrariness in these selections. One could just as easily, I suppose, have extended the years to 1992-1993, when the Canadiens won their last Cup, or push them back to the 1950-51 season, when Montreal lost in the Cup finals—albeit with a 25-30-15 record, something that speaks to the whole weakness of hockey in this competition.
Throughout pretty much the whole history of the NHL, most of the teams have made the playoffs, which have often been ridiculously short (a best-of-three final!). And through a good part of that time, it's not even clear—unlike with every other major, North American sport—that our hockey teams have even been the best in the world.
But the Canadiens were in a class by themselves, and in the era I'm talking about here there always seemed to be some continuity—the same people bouncing back as coaches or executives, the torch being passed to one great players or another: Rocket Richard and the Pocket Rocket, Boom-Boom Geoffrion and Jean Beliveau, Guy La Fleur and Guy Lapointe, Jacques Plante and Ken Dryden and Gump Worsley, Yvan Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire, Doug Harvey and Larry Robinson. Coaches Toe Blake, and Scotty Bowman, and Claude Ruel.
In these 24 seasons, they won 15 Stanley Cups and lost another final—an astonishing total even if there were only 6 teams in their league for about half of the period. They won 4 in a row (1975-1979), and 5 in a row (1955-1960), thereby tying the Yankees for the most consecutive championships in any North American professional sport of note (No, World Team Tennis does NOT count.)
During the regular season the Canadiens finished first 16 times, and they reached a sort of grand climax by compiling the best NHL record ever in the 1976-1977 season, going 60-8-12, for 132 points. (Yes, the Red Wings went 62-13-7 in 1995-1996, but that was with 2 more games and regular-season overtime. And they still didn't break the Canadiens' points record.)
Les Habitants, sadly, have not won a Cup in over 25 years, since 1993. I suggest they move back to the Forum, kick out Pepsi, and tear down the Celine Dionne statue outside. That might do it.
Friday, December 27, 2019
The 10 Greatest Dynasties! Ever! Part IV!
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14 comments:
I really like these and look forward to the final three. Again, thanks for doing them.
I'm guessing my advocacy for the Harlem Globetrotters is going to fall short. I'd toss in Eddie Feigner, and the already disqualified (for being a college team) Connecticut Girls Basketball team but I know that these will not make the cut as well.
I haven't been this excited to hear the winner since it came down to Miss Philippines vs Miss Iceland in the 1993 Miss Universe contest.
Doug K.
Thank you for working on this list. I'm hoping the NY Islanders 4 Stanley Cup run will be somewhere in the top of the list. (The year they lost their "Drive for Five" was so heartbreaking. I wish they had made it five in a row, but youth will be served, and the Oilers had youth.) More Yankee dynasties at the top of the list too I'm sure.
The Hammer of God
"Many a tear has to fall
But it's all
In the game..."
Thanks, Doug K., and Hammer, you make a very good case. Keep watching the skies!...Um, I mean, keep watching this space!
Oh, and as to the Connecticut women's basketball team (we're very enlightened here), as mentioned in an earlier post I decided to skip colleges because it just gets too difficult and esoteric.
What was the best Notre Dame dynasty? Knute Rockne's? Frank Leahy's? How do they compare to Wooden's UCLA men's basketball team? How do you rank Bear Bryant's old powerhouses...back when they were an all-white team, playing only other, all-white teams?
Too many apples, oranges, and kumquats to compare, too uneven a playing field.
As for the Globetrotters, that is an intriguing idea. But it's the same thing as with, say, the old Kansas City Monarchs. How do you compare teams that spent most of their time barnstorming with those in a top professional league? I know I can't.
Hoss,
Yeah I know. That's why I said the Husky Gals (Is that insulting? Sorry.)were disqualified because you were confining it to professional (major sports)
Here's another one that can't make the list. The US Olympic Men's Basketball team.
As far as the "all white idea". Are you not going to give those 20's and 30's Yankee teams their due? You play who you play. And if the leagues were integrated your team would be integrated too.
So it's a (white) wash. :)
Dynasty's dominate eras and play with the rules of the era whether those rules are fair or not. They beat the teams they played. It's like getting mad at a historical figure for not being woke. They can't be held to a modern standard.
Doug K.
Very true, Doug K. And I'm not saying it was the players' or even Bryant's fault. Some hold that Bryant deliberately invited a powerful USC team to whip 'Bama in Tuscaloosa, so the trustees would get the point.
BUT, major leaguers and major-league clubs frequently played exhibitions against black teams—on off-days, during postseason barnstorming tours, in Cuba.
Accounts of those game vary a lot. Some accounts I've read have the black teams winning as much as 2/3 of the time, which could well be true.
But whereas we know that the best black players were at least as good as the white ones—and that a black all-star team might well have beaten a white one most of the time—we also know that the players were at least pretty comparable.
(To give an example, Babe Ruth fanatic Bill Jenkinson actually tracked down every account of a Ruth game against black teams that he could find, and concluded that the Babe hit .455, lifetime, against black or Hispanic teams.)
More importantly, no black or Hispanic team could've competed on a regular basis with the very top white teams. Not out of lack of talent—they simply didn't have the financial resources to keep top players together.
For Alabama and the other all-white, Southern teams, it's not nearly so clear, either way.
For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, all-white Oklahoma, Tennessee, Maryland, Auburn, LSU, Mississippi, and Texas were all awarded national championships, while only playing all-white competition.
Were they actually better than, say, Big Ten, Pac-8, Notre Dame, and other teams of the time that were already integrating? Could the segregated, Southern teams have beat them? Could they have beaten the great, all-black teams of the time, such as Grambling?
Who knows? Because there weren't even those (hard-fought) exhibition games. There was nothing. Even in most bowl games, Southern/all-white teams rarely played squads from outside the region—and almost never the very top, integrated teams.
And even apart from integration, the lack of inter-regional play in many eras makes it very hard to judge college teams.
Also, comparing different college teams in different sports and different genders is too difficult to judge. Again, too many oranges and raisins to compare.
BUT—to speak directly to your other point, while I might include the 1920s and '30s Yankees teams in a dynasty, I would NOT call the 1927 or 1939 Yanks the very greatest team of all time.
I think that HAS to go to a post 1946 team; just too many people were excluded. So...the best is the 1998 Yankees!
I think you will have the 60's Celtics in top three. Who was the one who suggested the Icelanders? Doesn't even come close...
Suggested the "Icelanders"? I think that was Bjork. :)
Hoss,
Fair enough and certainly no disrespect to all of the non-white players who should have been allowed to play across all leagues, sports, eras, and situations.
That said, dominance is dominance. You can only play the teams you play. So I'm glad you're considering pre 1946 Yankee teams.
As a side point, regarding the exhibitions, it's funny but I wouldn't take any stats that come out about those games too seriously. Mostly because the circumstances are so varied.
For example players taking a free trip to Cuba to play some exhibitions might consider the games themselves secondary or even tertiary to the experience. (Wink. Wink.)
Whereas the Cuban players themselves might be laser focused seeing it as a chance to measure themselves against the "pros".
Here is a stupid example (in reverse) from my own life. In the late 70's while attending college in Western NY a buddy of mine and I decided to drive into Ohio because... well just because.
We ended up at Ohio State and at the time the stadium there was open to student use. The two of us ended up playing a game of touch football on ASTROTURF!!!!!
We kicked the crap out our opponents. Not because we were better, but because they were playing their usual Sunday AM football game but, WE WERE PLAYING IN A FOOTBALL STADIUM WITH ASTROTURF!!!!!! We were stoked and focused.
Just sayin'
Doug K.
Nice article, Horace. There's just one area where I disagree. That being the Montreal Canadiens. Wherever they played, Montreal Forum,Pepsi Forum, Molson Centre or today's Bell Centre.
The accomplishments you listed are absolutely correct. However, they won many of their championships when the draft system was fixed and before that the "Sponsorship System".....tilted against the other 5 teams in the original 6. It came during a period where the NHL players were almost exclusively Canadian and of that pool, very much populated by French Canadians. The Montreal team had first rights to any French Canadian talent. While this only lasted 6 years as far as the draft in the 1960's, an equivalent of the French Canadian Rule existed during the sponsorship years to a point where Montreal had 10,000 players on 750 teams across the continent that were considered a part of the Canadiens’ farm system, a stable of future prospects larger than that of the five other NHL teams combined. Sure, there were some French Canadian stars on other teams but they were used by Montreal in trades to get better and a few slipped away. But that was few and far between.
As a Ranger fan the '75 playoffs have a spot burned into my memory. We were playing the Islanders and thought for sure we'd outscore them soundly. But the new format only afforded a 3-game series so anything could and did happen. I barely had time to get back to my seat and pop open a new beer before J.P. Parise ended it 11 seconds into OT. Like a bullet through my heart.
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