Meet Me in Chicoutimi: Canadiens pose at the Aréna with (in white) local players on the afternoon of March 7, 1915. Dark-sweatered Montrealers are (front row, from left) Louis Berlinguette, Didier Pitre, and Harry Scott and (back row, from left) Jack Laviolette with Ernie Dubeau (I think) next to him, Nick Bawlf fourth from left, and Georges Vézina sixth from left, in the tuque. It’s likely that Vézina’s older brother Pierre would have played in this game, and judging from other photographs, I’m guessing that he’s the tall one at the back, third from the left. Or maybe front row, farthest to the right? A defenceman, he played briefly for Montreal in the NHA, suiting up for a single game in 1911-12.
A birthday today for Georges Vézina, who was born in Chicoutimi on a Friday of this date in 1887. That means he would have been 28 in March of 1915 when this photograph was taken on the ice at the Aréna one Sunday afternoon in his Saguenay hometown, when his Canadiens came to town for an exhibition game against the local Banque National team. While I haven’t found a record of the score that day in ’15, what I can report is that Montreal’s season had finished with a thud a few days earlier, when they’d finished dead last in the standings of the six-team NHA.
It’s not that the team lacked talent: alongside Vézina, playing in his fifth professional season, the 1914-15 Canadiens iced a few other future Hall-of-Famers that year in Jack Laviolette, Didier Pitre, and Newsy Lalonde, as well as the solid talents of Bert Corbeau and Louis Berlinguette. A year later, with much the same line-up, Canadiens did win their first Stanley Cup, but in 1915 they just couldn’t get it together.
Finishing top of the NHA that year were the Ottawa Senators and Montreal’s other team, the Wanderers, and those two teams duly played for the league championship.
Ottawa won the two-game series, earning the right to play the PCHA-champion Vancouver Millionaires for the Stanley Cup. That was at the end of March; Vancouver prevailed, winning three successive games.
Progrès du Saguenay ad ahead of Montreal’s exhibition in Chicoutimi in March of 1915.
Montreal’s teams, meanwhile, went to New York, where they played in a friendly tournament at the St. Nicholas Rink at 69 West 66th Street. Wanderers lined up the Cleghorn brothers that year, Odie and Sprague, along with Harry Hyland and Goldie Prodger. They took the first game 7-6 over Vézina and his teammates, and won again the following night, 8-3.
Maybe “friendly” isn’t quite the right word, given the reports from New York.
“It was a hard game from start to finish in the way of body checking,” The New York Times wrote of the first encounter. “The players of each team crashed into each other with utter disregard of consequences and several times players were sent sprawling on the ice and time was taken so they might recover.”
Jack Laviolette impressed: a dispatch from the sidelines of the second game described him skimming “over the ice with such speed that in his jersey of flaming scarlet he resembled a fire brand.”
Vézina, too, earned praise, despite the eight goals that went by him that night. He was deemed to have done “some excellent work at stopping the rush of the Wanderers” even though “at times they came at him so fast and furious it was impossible for him to see the puck at all.”
The victorious Wanderers went on to meet their NHA rivals from Quebec in the next stage of the tournament. The Bulldogs featured Joe Malone in their forward line and Paddy Moran in goal, but the Wanderers overwhelmed them all the same, winning by scores of 12-6 and 15-12 to claim their reward: a purse of $2,500.
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