Welcome to NHL99, The Athletic’s countdown of the best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.
His voice, for a long time now, has sounded hoarse — as if he’d just recovered from a cold, or COVID-19, which Guy Lapointe contracted in July, just before the 2022 NHL Draft was about to descend on Montreal. There is still a faint, distinctive Gallic accent, but it rumbles a little lower than it once did, mostly a function of the cancer Lapointe was diagnosed with in December 2019 which led him away from the NHL and put his focus squarely on convalescing.
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In May, Lapointe briefly emerged from isolation to be a pallbearer at former teammate Guy Lafleur’s funeral. It was a somber moment and a quiet reminder that these generational players from the Montreal Canadiens’ 1970 dynasty teams — all of whom seemed larger than life in their respective heydays — are mortal after all.
Lapointe was part of a trio of defensemen who became simply known around the NHL as the Big Three. Serge Savard arrived first, full-time, in the 1967-68 season, then Lapointe three years later, in 1970-71, then Larry Robinson in 1972-73. All put in minor-league apprenticeships — that’s how it went in the years when Les Canadiens had the deepest player pipeline in the NHL.
Once Robinson became a dominant force, it gave Canadiens coach Scotty Bowman the luxury of deploying three future Hall of Fame defensemen. “And in those days,” Bowman said, “we didn’t play six defensemen. We played five. Sometimes, just four.”
And actually, sometimes, when crunch time came, just three. Usually, Robinson played with Savard and Lapointe with … whomever.
“And while no one could carry the puck like Bobby Orr, Guy Lapointe was a really good skater and could really lug the puck,” Bowman said. “He was a hybrid-style of defenseman, way before his time. He could skate and he could score.
“What he didn’t have, for most of the time, was a regular partner. People never gave him credit for that. Larry Robinson and Serge Savard played mostly together. Guy didn’t have the luxury of playing beside another All-Star defenseman. But he had a lot of stamina, so he could play a lot.”
Lapointe is ranked No. 98 on The Athletic’s list of the top 100 players of the NHL’s post-1967 expansion era — likeable and popular off the ice, sometimes tremendously underrated on the ice, one of the NHL’s greatest all-time practical jokers, someone always trying to lighten the mood while playing for a series of demanding, all-business coaches.
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On the ice, there’s almost always a pecking order to the Big Three and it usually goes Robinson, Savard and Lapointe. But in his autobiography, “Robinson for The Defence,” Robinson wrote of Lapointe: “In his heyday, a great defenseman — and not too far behind Bobby Orr. He rushed. He played the body. He blocked shots (and had two eye injuries to show for it). He was there in the heavy traffic and he had one of the best point shots in the game.
“Guy Lapointe simply did everything — and the people who compared him to (Brad) Park did him a disservice; he was better than Park because he could do more.”
In all, Lapointe won six Stanley Cup championships with the Canadiens and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. In 884 NHL games, Lapointe recorded 171 goals and 451 assists for 622 points. He also produced 70 points in 123 career playoff games.
He still holds the Canadiens’ record for most goals in a season for a defenseman (28) and most goals for a rookie defenseman (15). His number (5) was retired by the Canadiens in 2014 and hangs alongside that of another No. 5 who made it to the Hall of Fame — Bernie Geoffrion.
In addition to playing for Canada in the seminal 1972 Summit Series, Lapointe also competed in the 1976 Canada Cup as well as the 1979 Challenge Cup against the Soviet Union.
But longtime Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden first met Lapointe a decade earlier in 1969. Dryden was playing for Canada’s national team, based in Winnipeg, and Lapointe, then a minor leaguer playing in the Canadiens’ system in Houston, was loaned to the team for a European tour.
“I had never heard of this guy,” Dryden said, “and then he came out onto the ice, and it was ‘holy man!’ He was the best player. He could skate like crazy. He had this rocket shot. To me, this was the real evidence of the strength of the Montreal Canadiens — when you can have a guy like Guy Lapointe, who none of us had ever heard of, and this is how talented he is. No wonder the Canadiens win, year after year.
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“Guy, at that time, spoke very little English. He was very shy. I remember sitting beside him on a bus once when he said, ‘I’m really worried. Just before I left to come here, I got stopped for speeding.’ I said, ‘Well, Guy, we kind of all get stopped for speeding. Why are you so worried? How fast were you going?’ He said, ‘140 miles per hour.’
“Oh …”
According to Bowman, Lapointe always did things at hyper-speed, on or off the ice.
“He always had a lot of energy and he never sat around — always in a rush to go somewhere,” Bowman said. “He was a very good team guy and of course a top-notch player.
“Just the fact that he made Team Canada 1972 says a lot. Savard played only five games because of an injury and Robinson was just a kid, he didn’t make that team. But Guy Lapointe played in all but one of the eight games.”
Robinson summed up Lapointe’s personality in two words: class clown. That was the other side of Lapointe. He was a serial prankster, with the usual arsenal: cut skate laces, shaving cream in boots, newspapers going up in flames. Once, in 1977, after the Canadiens ended the Flyers’ run of two consecutive championships, Lapointe showed up in the dressing room two days later, preparing for the parade, wearing a Flyers jersey and chanting to his teammates by mimicking the crowds at the Spectrum with “Let’s Go Flyers.”
Lapointe was an equal-opportunity trickster. Everyone was fair game: Teammates, coaches, training staff, reporters … even the prime minister of Canada, who was once visiting the Canadiens’ dressing room for a meet-and-greet.
Lapointe has some memory loss associated with his cancer treatments but said: “I remember (Pierre) Trudeau coming in and shaking the players’ hands and I put Vaseline on my hand and was shaking Pierre Trudeau’s hand.”
“He had a few tricks, one was mixing up the guys’ car keys,” Bowman said. “He wasn’t practicing one day; I don’t remember why, but he went around and took everybody’s car keys and put them in different pockets. The guys would take off after practice without looking. They’d be parking on the street and they wouldn’t check their keys until they got to their cars. Then, of course, none of them worked — so they had to come back and sort it all out.”
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Just about everyone from that generation of Canadiens players has a story to illustrate Lapointe’s perpetual pranking. But according to Dryden, that sometimes distracted from the way Lapointe carried himself on the ice, where he was all business.
“A really serious player,” said Dryden. “Of the Big Three, he was the fiery one, the one who could really raise his game with the emotion that was in him.
“Guy was somebody who, when you needed an emotional burst, would provide it. He’d go up the ice. He’d join the rush. He might even lead the rush. He had a really good shot. He was dynamic. He was fierce. That was the essence of Guy Lapointe as a player.
Tom Thompson, former Minnesota Wild executive and a Calgary Flames scout before that, worked with Lapointe for decades in the two different organizations and says his favorite Lapointe story, retold by half-a-dozen ex-Canadiens who were there, occurred during the 1976-77 season, the year Montreal went 60-8-12 and won the second of four consecutive Stanley Cup championships.
But even with 60 wins in an 80-game schedule, the Canadiens weren’t always perfect and there was a brief stretch that featured a three-game winless streak that culminated with a poor performance on a Saturday night at home. The next day coincided with the team’s annual open practice for fans during minor hockey week. The Canadiens were scheduled to practice in Verdun before a packed house of young players. Bowman, displeased with his team’s performance the night before, was all business the next morning — no fun and games.
“It was that old-fashioned drill where you skate in that counterclockwise direction around the rink — and when Scotty blows the whistle, you speed up, and when Scotty blows the whistle again, you slow down,” Thompson said. “Scotty’s not happy, so he gets them going, and he wants them to skate to an eight-count, before he blows it again to slow them down.
“Meantime, Guy gets the equipment guy to put another whistle in his glove. Lapointe is opposite Scotty the whole time, so Scotty can’t see him. So, Scotty blows the whistle, and they start skating, but instead of waiting for the eight-count, Guy leans into his glove and blows his whistle early — at the four-count and everybody slows down. That keeps happening over and over.
“Now Scotty’s getting madder and madder and finally he blows the whistle about 20 times and the F-bombs start flying. So now they’ve got to clear the kids — who are watching the practice — out of the arena.”
Because Lapointe was working for Minnesota at the time, the Canadiens timed Lapointe’s jersey retirement to a visit by the Wild in 2014. Thompson was invited to be Lapointe’s guest that day and heard another story about Lapointe’s antics, as told by Savard.
This occurred during a road trip to California, when the Canadiens were scheduled to play the Golden Seals and the Kings, with a scheduled day off in between.
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“The way Serge Savard tells the story, they were going to have a day off in between games, but then they stunk the joint out in Oakland, so Scotty came in after the game and said, ‘That’s it. Day off is canceled. We’re practicing tomorrow morning — and the bus will be here at 7:30 in the morning,'” Thompson said.
“The next day, they all gather at the hotel entrance first thing, and they’re waiting and waiting and waiting for the bus and it doesn’t arrive. Finally, Scotty says, ‘Well, call the bus company.’ So, the travel secretary calls the bus company and the bus company says, ‘Yeah, we were supposed to be there at 7:30, but you called and canceled it.’ The guy asks: ‘Who canceled it?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, we don’t know, but it was a guy with a heavy French accent’ — and then they knew. Scotty tried not to smile, but he knew it was Guy.”
Following his retirement as a player, Lapointe became an assistant coach with the Quebec Nordiques, and then for three years, coached a junior team in the QMJHL (and qualified his club for the 1987 Memorial Cup). He returned to spend three more years as an associate coach with the Nordiques, and then joined the Flames as an assistant coach for three years between 1993 and 1997, when Brian Patafie was the team’s equipment manager.
Patafie, now retired, is a stand-up comic and also a pre-eminent prankster. Together, they were a dangerous pair, constantly trying to one-up each other with their practical jokes, until general manager Al Coates eventually had to intervene and tell them to tone it down because otherwise someone was going to get hurt.
Patafie’s favorite Lapointe story?
“It was the time (team owner) Harley Hotchkiss had his annual barbecue before the season started at his house, for everybody, the players and the staff, and they’d have it catered at their house. Harley did it up big — he brought in Gordon Lightfoot one year for the entertainment. So, the meal is steaks and baked potatoes and cheesecake for dessert, with whipped cream on the side. Guy being Guy, he took the whipped cream and put it where the sour cream was for the baked potatoes and then put the sour cream where the whipped cream was.
“Then we watched as Becky Hotchkiss, Harley’s wife, is loading up her potato with whipped cream. I’m laughing — and also just shaking my head. I was there with my wife — she was from North Carolina and didn’t really get hockey culture — and she’s asking me, ‘What the heck is going on?’ And I said, ‘With this guy, just keep your head on a swivel.’”
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Lapointe’s career arc mostly overlapped Orr’s, who won the Norris eight consecutive years, between 1968 and 1975, a time when pretty much everybody else was competing for the No. 2 spot on the ballot.
But remarkably, in a seven-year span, starting with the 1972-73 season, Lapointe finished in the top five of Norris Trophy balloting six times.
Beyond everything else he contributed on the ice, Lapointe was a glue guy in the dressing room.
“Guy Lapointe has the ability to read people,” Thompson said. “When Doug Risebrough first came to the Canadiens, it was Guy who made him feel welcome. Don Awrey once told me that when he played for Boston against the Canadiens, he would call Guy all sorts of awful names to try and get under his skin. But when he went to play for Montreal, Guy was the guy who made him feel welcome.
“Guy was the middle of three sons, growing up in a flat in Montreal. His dad was a fireman. His badge number was five. That’s why Guy wore the number cinq. He was a working-class guy. He befriended the security guys, and the policemen and the firemen. That’s who he was. If Guy saw you were having a rough day, he would be intuitive to that.
“He would do that in the restaurants or at the rink. He’s always got a smile and a wink for someone — or a quip. He just makes their day a little better. He’s an upbeat guy — and in a consummate team sport like hockey, you need that. Some people don’t understand that.
“But Guy Lapointe always did.”
(Top photo: Denis Brodeur / Getty Images)