This weekend, the NHL account on X sparked a lot of comments when it asked fans what the pettiest hockey grudge they were still holding was. There were plenty of answers that wanted to set the record straight by saying that there were no petty grudges in hockey and that all grudges were valid. A statement which would find a lot of support in Montreal, considering how seriously fans take their hockey in the Mecca of hockey. Here are, in chronological order, the five biggest grudges in Montreal Canadiens history.
On March 13, 1955, there was an altercation in a game between the Habs and the Boston Bruins. As the Canadiens were on a power play, Maurice Rocket Richard was high-sticked and a delayed penalty was called. Once the Bruins touched the puck and the penalty was called, Richard sought revenge on Hal Laycoe, and as linesman Cliff Thompson attempted to restrain a furious Rocket, he was struck by the star. That led to a disciplinary hearing with the league, and NHL President Colin Campbell decided that Richard, who was on his way to win the scoring race, would miss the remainder of the 1954-55 season and the playoffs.
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Unsurprisingly, the ruling was not well received in Montreal. When Campbell showed up to the game between the Canadiens and the Detroit Red Wings on March 17, 1955, it sparked what would come to be known as the “Richard Riot,” an event that many would go on to describe as the start of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The League president was assaulted in the stands, was thrown various items at, and was slapped and hit with a tomato in the face. The crowd got so unruly that a tear gas bomb was set off and the building was evacuated, forcing the Habs to forfeit the game. A full-blown riot erupted outside as fans felt the Richard suspension was motivated by the fact that he was a French-Canadian.
The following day, Richard took to the airwaves to plead with fans and ask them to support the team rather than protest his suspension. They did, but they didn’t forget, and as Hab Bernard “Boom Boom” Geoffrion passed Richard in the scoring race, the Montreal fans booed him.
40 years later, on December 2, 1995, rookie coach Mario Tremblay hung out to dry superstar Patrick Roy when he left him in net in a game against the Red Wings when it was clear that it wasn’t St-Patrick’s night. By the time the coach finally pulled the goaltending legend, he had let in nine goals on 26 shots and had been booed and mocked by the home crowd. Once back on the bench, Roy told team president Ronald Corey that he had played his last game in Montreal. Days later, GM Rejean Houle traded Roy and captain Mike Keane to the Colorado Avalanche for Jocelyn Thibault, Martin Ruscinsky, and Andrei Kovalenko, arguably the worst trade in Habs history and one that sent the franchise into a very dark age.
To this day, plenty of fans still hold a grudge against Tremblay for not pulling Roy sooner and against Houle for that awful trade. The fact that Roy went on to win two more Stanley Cups with the Avalanche after the trade while the Canadiens haven’t won a single one since certainly didn’t help.
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The 2010 playoffs will forever be known as the Halak spring in Montreal. That year, Jaroslav Halak wrestled the starting job away from Carey Price and carried the team to a surprise Eastern Conference Final. He ran out of gas in the third round, and the Habs were eliminated in five games by the Philadelphia Flyers, but his performances against the Washington Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins as the Canadiens beat both Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby in seven games in the first two rounds were the stuff of legends.
It turned the goaltender into a fan favorite, and in the offseason, as he was about to become an RFA, GM Pierre Gauthier elected to trade him to the St. Louis Blues in what he called a “big picture decision”, deciding to bet on Price’s bright future rather than on Halak’s immediate success. However, the return Gauthier got from the Blues was judged to be far too low, as center Lars Eller, who had only played seven NHL games by then, and tough guy Ian Schultz came to Montreal. Fans felt betrayed that the playoff hero was sent packing, and despite Price turning out the way he did, there are still those who lament the trade. Canadiens fans can certainly hold a grudge.
Zdeno Chara from the Bruins became public enemy number one in Montreal when he hit Max Pacioretty, a hit that saw him hit the glass between the two team benches. It was very much as if he had hit a wall, and he fell on the ice unconscious. You could have heard a pin drop in the Bell Centre on that day; Chara silenced an arena that’s always raucous for a Canadiens-Bruins duel. There was real concern in that moment not only for Pacioretty’s health but also for his career. The sniper was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with both a severe concussion and a fractured fourth cervical vertebra.
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Canadiens fans never forgot that hit, and they never forgave it either. From that day on, whenever Chara touched the puck on the Bell Centre ice, he was copiously booed by the Habs faithful.
Price was on fire in the 2014 Stanley Cup playoffs; he helped the Canadiens sweep the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round before being one of the key elements of a 7-game win in the second round against the Bruins. The Canadiens fans were hoping he could take them all the way to the 25th Stanley Cup in franchise history, but in the first game of the Eastern Conference Final against the New York Rangers, he was run over by Chris Kreider, skates first, colliding with the goaltender’s right knee.
If you ask a Rangers fan about that incident, they’ll tell you that Kreider was the innocent victim of a trip by defenseman Alexei Emelin. If you ask a Canadiens fan about it, they’ll tell you that if Kreider were tripped, he wouldn’t have fallen that way. The belief in Montreal was, and still is, that Kreider saw an opportunity to take Price out and he took it.
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12 years later, Kreider, who’s now with the Anaheim Ducks, is still booed by the Habs faithful, and that will never change. Price did concede that the hit was part of the problem with his knee, but he wouldn’t call it “The problem” in a 2025 phone interview with The Gazette’s Stu Cowan. He added that he didn’t hold a grudge against Kreider, calling the incident a quick play in the playoffs and that he doesn’t have any ill will toward the power forward.
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