WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou
I will get banned again soon, worry not.
In 86 they finished 7th overall in a 21 team league with a record of 40-33-7. The bottom third of the league finished with records of under .500 so the Habs were in the middle of the pack of teams with winning records. That is the epitome of mediocre. And the only reason they won, aside from the otherworldly goaltending of Roy, who at that time NOBODY was predicting a Hall of Fame career (in fact, Roy didn't even get the lion's share of starts for about another 3 or 4 years) was because 5 of the 6 teams that finished ahead of them got eliminated before the Habs would have had to play them and there was no re-seeding after each round. So, as it turned out, the Habs had home ice through the first 3 rounds and in the final played a Calgary team that finished only 2 points ahead of them in the standings. Three out of four first place teams got bounced in the first round.So, what you're saying is, a team that wasn't expecting to do much, had a bunch of rookies that played well enough to contribute, had 4 other future HHoFers on it, had 3 players on it that finished in the top-30 in scoring, wasn't mediocre?
Sounds like a decent team to me. But shrug.
The 86 Habs, with or without Roy, weren't going to beat the Oilers or Flyers, but they never had to play them. They are only a decent team in retrospect because of how things turned out. But as someone who was living in Montreal at the time and who attended a lot of games that season, I can tell you for a fact that what made victory so sweet was the fact that it was so unexpected and came out of the blue. After Game #80 most fans were pissed off (the Habs lost 8 of their last 11 games in the regular season, including a 7 game losing streak) and we had zero expectations other than that we'd probably get past Boston and then get embarrassed by the Nordiques in Round 2. As it turned out, We swept Boston (as usual) Quebec was eliminated and we nearly got embarrassed by Hartford in Round 2 instead. Then instead of having to play Philly or the Isles in the Conference Finals we got a mediocre Rangers team.
The 86 Habs were the biggest fluke champions in modern NHL history.