Most here aren't even familiar with him but he was the man when it came to hockey and a huge part of why the Canadians of the mid-late 70s were the best team i've ever seen. One of the best games ever played was New Years' Eve during the 1975-76 season against the Red Army team at the Montreal Forum.
Sam Pollock, 81, Hockey Executive, Dies August 17, 2007
Sam Pollock, the Montreal Canadiens’ general manager who built nine Stanley Cup championship teams in the 1960s and ’70s, died Wednesday in Toronto. He was 81.
Pollock’s death was announced by the Canadiens. He had cancer, The Montreal Gazette reported.
Pollock took control of a franchise with a storied history in 1964. He created a dynasty of his own as the National Hockey League undertook widespread expansion.
Engineering shrewd trades and draft selections, Pollock acquired the future Hall of Famers Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden, Bob Gainey, Larry Robinson and Steve Shutt, and he hired Scotty Bowman, one of hockey’s most renowned coaches. Pollock was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1978, his last year with the Canadiens.
Pollock projected the image of a man unswayed by emotions in making myriad deals.
“I once saw Sam on a TV show saying that running a hockey team was like running a chicken farm,” the Canadiens’ Hall of Fame forward Dickie Moore told the CanWest News Service. “He said it was all business — forget emotion. I just think that a lot of this was a front put on by a very astute man who saw the necessity of keeping his distance.”
Lafleur, the high-scoring forward who became a Canadien with the No. 1 overall pick in the 1971 draft, a selection obtained by Pollock in a deal with the lowly Oakland Seals, underlined Pollock’s penchant for swinging trades.
“You always knew things were happening when Sam would get to nervously wringing his handkerchief in his hands,” Lafleur told CanWest.
“The veterans who knew better would be checking his coat pockets to see if an airline ticket to someplace like Oakland was sticking out.”
A native of Montreal, Pollock joined the Canadiens as a scout in 1947 after he managed a softball team that included many Montreal players. “I got into hockey through baseball,” he once told The Canadian Press. “It was my favorite sport as a kid.”
Pollock was named the Canadiens’ director of player personnel in 1950 and oversaw their minor league operations when just about every French-Canadian hockey hopeful in Quebec wanted to wear the red and blue of the team known as the Flying Frenchmen.
But for most of his tenure as the Canadiens’ general manager, Pollock operated in a new era, when the N.H.L. added a host of expansion teams. He traded surplus players to these clubs to stockpile draft picks, fueling the Canadiens’ success.
Pollock also maneuvered within the league’s Original Six format, most notably in 1964, when he sent the Boston Bruins two young players who never made it to the N.H.L. for the rights to Dryden, the future star goalie.
Pollock assembled the team that won the inaugural Canada Cup in 1976. He returned to his baseball roots in the late 1990s as chairman and chief executive of the Toronto Blue Jays.
His survivors include his son, Sam Jr.
If Pollock had a limitation, it was his fear of flying, keeping him away from some games in the expansion era. But he remained the Canadiens’ indispensable man.
As the longtime hockey writer Red Fisher wrote yesterday in The Montreal Gazette: “I remember one Canadiens head coach yelling into an arena telephone only moments after the Canadiens had lost to the Minnesota North Stars. ‘Sam, Sam, you have to come down. The players aren’t listening to me.’
