Ken Dryden

Ken Dryden was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on August 8, 1947. The Boston Bruins took him in the third round of the 1964 NHL amateur draft, 14th overall, and on June 28 of that year sent his rights to the Montreal Canadiens along with Alex Campbell in exchange for Guy Allen and Paul Reid. Dryden said years later that he had always assumed Montreal was the team that drafted him.

Instead of entering the Canadiens' system, Dryden went to Cornell University, where he studied history and played three seasons for the Big Red. His record there was 76-4-1, with the 1967 NCAA championship and three ECAC tournament titles in a row. He was Canada's goaltender for two games at the 1969 World Championship in Stockholm and graduated in 1969. Cornell retired his No. 1 on February 26, 2010.

Dryden turned professional in 1970 with the Montreal Voyageurs of the AHL, where he played 33 games before the Canadiens called him up in March 1971. His first NHL start came on March 14, 1971, in Pittsburgh: 35 saves on 36 shots in a 5-1 win. He won all six of his regular-season appearances that spring, and Montreal gave him the net for the playoffs. He went 12-8 in 20 games, the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup, and he was voted the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. Six regular-season games were not enough to use up his rookie status, so he was still a rookie in 1971-72 and won the Calder Memorial Trophy that season, after the Conn Smythe.

He played four of the eight games in the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union, including the opener in Montreal and the deciding Game 8 in Moscow. In 1972-73 he won his first Vezina Trophy, which in those years went to the goaltenders of the team that allowed the fewest goals rather than to a voted winner, and Montreal won the Stanley Cup again that spring.

Dryden and the Canadiens could not agree on a new contract after that season, and in September 1973, days before training camp opened, he said he would not play. He had completed his law degree at McGill University earlier in 1973, and he spent 1973-74 articling with the Toronto firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt. (His interest in public-interest law went back further: he had spent the summer of 1971 working for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization.) Montreal, which had allowed 184 goals in 1972-73, allowed 240 in 1973-74 and went out in the first round of the playoffs.

He was back in the Montreal net for 1974-75. From 1975-76 through 1978-79 the Canadiens won four consecutive Stanley Cups, and Dryden was awarded the Vezina in each of those seasons, sharing the last three with Michel Larocque, for five in all. He retired after the 1979 championship, at 31.

His NHL totals, all with Montreal: 397 regular-season games, a 258-57-74 record, a 2.24 goals-against average, a .922 save percentage and 46 shutouts; in the playoffs, 112 games, an 80-32 record, a 2.41 goals-against average, a .915 save percentage and 10 shutouts. His six Stanley Cups came in 1971, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979.

After his playing days Dryden called Olympic hockey for ABC in 1980, 1984 and 1988; at Lake Placid in 1980 he was the analyst beside Al Michaels for the United States' win over the Soviet Union. He wrote several books. The Game (1983) was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award, and Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada (1989) was written with Roy MacGregor. He was president of the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1997 to 2004. He kept writing about the sport long after that: when he argued in The Atlantic in 2021 that NHL nets should be made bigger, a piece for InGoal by Paul Campbell took issue with his account of how modern goaltending works.

Dryden won the Toronto riding of York Centre for the Liberal Party in June 2004 and served as Minister of Social Development in Paul Martin's cabinet from July 2004 to February 2006. He held the seat in the 2006 and 2008 elections and lost it in May 2011. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012 and invested in 2013. In 2017 the NHL named him one of its 100 Greatest Players, and in 2020 Hockey Canada named him to the Order of Hockey in Canada.

The Hockey Hall of Fame inducted Dryden in 1983, and the Canadiens retired his No. 29 on January 29, 2007.

Ken Dryden died of cancer in Toronto on September 5, 2025. He was 78.

Sources: NHL.com (statistics, draft, awards); Hockey-Reference; The Canadian Encyclopedia; NHL.com obituary; NHL.com (Dave Stubbs on the 1964 draft and the 1971 debut); NHL.com (June 28, 1964 trade); InGoal.