The Game

by Ken Dryden

I knew that the dominance of the Canadiens would diminish. Nobody could sustain the pace of fifteen Stanley Cups in twenty-four years. Pollock and Bowman were gone. The farm system had been built during a sponsorship time when teams could sign up kids almost at birth, and when every Canadian kid wanted to play for the Canadiens or the Leafs, and when every non-Canadian kid, every American or European, didn’t matter. When sponsorship ended in 1969, and a universal draft of players forced kids to play with whichever team chose them, the Canadiens already had enough players in their system to trade their surplus for future draft picks to teams desperate to compete and survive. But by 1979, all that was coming to an end. The next generation of great players was getting spread around through the draft.