Guy Carbonneau, 16 years after he first became eligible, will join many of the offensive stars he tormented as an elite checking forward for 19 years when he enters the Hockey Hall of Fame on Monday.
His statistics come nowhere close to telling the story of his career. Rather, it is the stories of some of the biggest offensive stars of the 80s and 90s that explain why the former Montreal Canadiens captain and three-time Stanley Cup winner is entering the Hall.
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“Where most guys might be more offensive and less defensive, Guy could do all of it,” Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine said. “He could score that goal, win that big faceoff, and in all the clutch situations he was out there. There are very few players that you look back at and they were Hall of Fame role players in all areas. He did everything exceptionally.”
LaFontaine noted that Carbonneau was an offensive star in the QMJHL, one who put up 182 points in 72 games in his final season with the Chicoutimi Sagueneens, but one who also adapted to his new reality in the NHL to become a difference-maker on the other side of the puck. The influence of Jacques Lemaire and Bob Gainey in Montreal, LaFontaine suspects, played a role in Carbonneau becoming an elite 200-foot player.
If we remove Igor Larionov and Sergei Makarov, who spent their prime playing in Russia, Gainey is the only Hall of Fame forward that played after the 1967 expansion to accumulate fewer than Carbonneau’s 663 career NHL points.
But the forwards who Carbonneau regularly prevented from scoring can easily see his Hall of Fame worthiness.
“I learned very early as a young kid that he was really, really hard to play against and very competitive,” said Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic, who faced Carbonneau regularly in the old Adams Division with the Quebec Nordiques early in his career.
“He never cheated the game; he was so good defensively. Obviously, he had a big role throughout pretty much his whole career to take pride in not getting scored against and neutralizing the other team’s top players, but he only did that because his hockey IQ was so great. He was always in the right spot. He was just a very, very difficult guy to play against.”
Carbonneau won his first Stanley Cup with the Canadiens in 1986, two years before the start of Sakic’s career. It was the height of the Canadiens-Nordiques rivalry and Carbonneau was an important player in that because of his head-to-head showdowns with Peter Stastny.
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“It was a game of cat and mouse,” former Nordiques coach Michel Bergeron said. “When Jacques Lemaire (and Jean Perron after him) wanted Carbonneau on the ice against Peter Stastny, I couldn’t tell Stastny to come back to the bench. He never would have accepted that.
“One day I told Peter that he could stay on the ice as long as he wanted, because as soon as I sent him out in the offensive zone, they answered with Carbonneau, especially when we played at the Forum. So I saw Bobby Smith and Mats Naslund getting frustrated on their bench because they had to get off the ice as soon as I’d send Peter out there. I saw Bobby Smith kicking the boards and looking at his coach. So, that worked for me.”
Stastny was the second-most productive player in the 1980s behind Wayne Gretzky; he was prolific. But over Stastny’s time with the Nordiques he averaged roughly a point a game against the Canadiens (71 points in 68 games). This paled in comparison to how he torched the rest of the Adams Division with the Nordiques; he had 84 points in 62 games against the Buffalo Sabres, 96 points in 72 games against the Boston Bruins and 115 points in 68 games against the Hartford Whalers.
Sakic has vivid memories of watching Stastny take on Carbonneau his first season in Quebec City, and it is a tale of two intense competitors going head to head multiple times a season. It was a role Sakic would take over when Stastny was traded to the New Jersey Devils late in the 1989-90 season.
“When Peter left, I usually got matched up with Guy, especially in Montreal,” Sakic said. “You had to be ready to play and be ready to battle because he wasn’t going to give you an inch. He was just such a smart hockey player, always in the right spot, and he made it difficult.”
Sakic was not the only top centre in what was then called the Prince of Wales conference to be forced to deal with Carbonneau early in the 1990s. LaFontaine was among them over his time with the Islanders and Sabres.
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“He had tremendous hockey sense,” LaFontaine said. “Because he was an offensive player too, he knew the instincts of other players. He was strong on the faceoffs. He would know probably patterns of where guys would go. And you know, he didn’t necessarily have to shadow you all the time, but he knew where to be at the right place at the right time.”
Sakic’s Nordiques and LaFontaine’s Sabres fell victim to Carbonneau’s Canadiens in 1993 on their way to the 24th Stanley Cup in franchise history, but each of them was matched up against Kirk Muller more so than Carbonneau. That changed in the Stanley Cup final when the Canadiens faced Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings.
At first, Canadiens coach Jacques Demers decided to give the Gretzky assignment to Muller. But after Gretzky put up a goal and three assists in a 4-1 Kings win in Game 1, Carbonneau went to see his coach. He wanted Gretzky.
“We lost Game 1 and we kind of looked at their team and their style and the matchups and all that, and basically Carbo said, ‘Hey, listen, why don’t I take him, focus on him? And then that opens it up for you guys,’” Muller said.
“And if you look back, he took on Wayne after we lost Game 1 and did a great job shutting him down. Our line with Brian Bellows and Johnny (LeClair) was able to open it up. Johnny ended up scoring the two goals in L.A., and then I had the game-winner back in Game 5. So we had offence in that series. But it gave us a chance to do it because Carbo did a great job with Wayne.”
With Carbonneau checking Gretzky from Game 2 onward, the series changed. After getting four points in Game 1, Gretzky had three points the rest of the series and the Canadiens won the Cup in five games.
Many believe that loss in 1993 is one of Gretzky’s main regrets over a career that had so few of them. Carbonneau shadowed him in the series because that’s what the situation called for, but that was not something he normally did.
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“Maybe he had to do that in the playoffs against Wayne, but for the most part, he didn’t shadow,” Sakic said. “He was just smart and knew how to play, and play the right way. I mean, if you gave him an opportunity, he would go the other way as well. It’s not as if he would just sit there and played a checking role and followed you around. Could he do that? Absolutely. But he was just so smart.
“I don’t think you can be a shutdown defensive centreman or any shutdown (player) unless you’ve got a great IQ and an understanding of reading the plays, and he was one of the best at that.”
Carbonneau, Muller said, took less pleasure in shutting a particular player down as he did in the overall sense of frustration he created for entire teams, especially those that were more gifted offensively than the Canadiens were. Carbonneau loved creating that sense of doubt, that chink in the armor of an offensive power.
“When I was in Jersey, I played against him and I was like, ‘Damn, quit being on that side of the puck on me all the time!’” Muller said. “Like, I could never get away on him, you know? And he played the game smarter than you, so you never had an advantage on him.”
If there was one player Carbonneau’s line in the mid to late 1980s, centering Bob Gainey and Chris Nilan, had trouble stopping, it was probably Cam Neely.
Before the young Boston Bruins winger hit his stride around this time, the rivalry with the Canadiens wasn’t much of one because of how one-sided it was. Until Neely, the Bruins practically never beat the Canadiens in the playoffs.
From 1987 to 1991, Neely almost singlehandedly brought balance to the rivalry. Not only was he dominant in the regular season, but over those five straight years the Canadiens and Bruins squared off in the playoffs, Neely scored 20 goals in 26 games.
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“We played a lot against him,” said Neely, now the Bruins’ president. “Obviously, here in Boston we were trying to change the matchups the best we could, but in Montreal I saw them a lot.”
Even having the last change didn’t help the Canadiens much against Neely. Over all the years Neely was in Boston and Carbonneau was in Montreal, Neely scored 12 goals and 20 points in 20 games in Montreal, and 16 goals and 25 points in 24 games in Boston. It was the same in the playoffs: seven goals and 11 points in 13 games in Montreal and 13 goals – no assists – in 13 games in Boston.
Could it be that Neely, undeniably the Bruins’ best forward at the time, had so much success against the Canadiens because he played on the wing and not at centre? He was not in a direct matchup with Carbonneau as a result, instead tormenting whatever left winger or left defenceman that stood between him and the Canadiens’ net.
But still, it was not as if Neely enjoyed playing with Carbonneau on the ice.
“There was a lot of compete in him as a player and you had to fight for the ice that you wanted,” said Neely. “He was not going to just give it up.”
That intensity, that fight for his ice, began in the faceoff circle, where Carbonneau became one of the most dominant centres in the league.
“I learned a lot early in my career on faceoffs just by going against him,” said Sakic. “He was so good at it that you really had to dig down and you just appreciated how much importance he put into the faceoff dot, and that made you realize that you had to do a lot of work to try and get to that level.”
Sakic got more than his fair share of lessons from Carbonneau over his career because both players switched to the Western Conference within a year of each other; Sakic to Denver when the Nordiques became the Avalanche, and Carbonneau to first St. Louis and then Dallas. They were, therefore, direct rivals for 11 seasons, until Carbonneau retired in 2000.
Carbonneau won his third Stanley Cup with the Stars in 1999. In Dallas he found someone to mentor: Jere Lehtinen, who would go on to match Carbonneau by winning three Selke trophies. Even though Carbonneau was in his late 30s, he fit in perfectly on the Stars and the stifling system employed by coach Ken Hitchcock. Plus, the winning culture he learned in Montreal was firmly in place in Dallas, where the general manager was his former linemate and mentor Bob Gainey and his teammates were Muller, Mike Keane, Brian Skrudland and Craig Ludwig, all former Canadiens.
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“That was just such an outstanding team,” Sakic said. “It was a great rivalry during that short run. I cannot remember too many high scoring games; I’d be shocked if there were a lot. For both teams at that time it was tight checking, tight physical hockey.”
Tony Granato, who was part of that 1993 Kings team that faced the Canadiens in the final, also had to face Carbonneau more often toward the end of the decade.
“Most of the people got the attention with the offensive players, but he was one of those guys that didn’t need to score a goal to have an impact on a game,” said Granato, now head coach of the University of Wisconsin Badgers. “He made a ton of plays defensively to make sure that the other team didn’t get any momentum, and he limited the other team’s chances by his defensive ability and awareness, and also by his shot blocking ability.”
To Bill Guerin, who faced the Stars two years in a row in the playoffs with the Edmonton Oilers, Carbonneau’s influence on the game was best seen in how he blocked shots and how that forced opposing teams to change the way they deployed their power play, not to mention leading to a rise in popularity in shot blocking in general.
“He was one of the few who did that back then,” said Guerin, now general manager of the Minnesota Wild. “It was just so unique that you had somebody that would do it as often as he did. Nowadays it’s a bit much, it takes away from the scoring, but that’s where the game is. It’s a big part of the game. But he was one of the guys, he developed a certain style in that. Mentally you knew, especially if he was in front of you on the PK, you had to focus on just getting the puck by him because he was very good at it.”
Carbonneau never considered the way he adapted his game when he arrived in the NHL to be a sacrifice. It was the opposite; it opened a door to a long and successful career. So much so, he is now part of a very exclusive club of defensive forwards to be enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame, the ultimate tribute to the mark he left on the game. Even if the specific role he popularized is slowly disappearing, his emphasis on playing two-way hockey, on being a threat at both ends of the ice, is now practically a prerequisite for success in the league today.
It is not his 663 points in 1,318 career games that brought Carbonneau to the Hall. It is hearing Sakic, Neely and LaFontaine say the same thing, almost verbatim, in three separate interviews.
“You knew when you were going to play Guy Carbonneau you would have to bring your very best.”
(Top photo: Bernstein Associates/Getty Images)
