Where The Players Stay: The Ultimate Hotel Guide For Canadian NHL Fans

Les Habitants, the Canadiens, the Habs’ – however you know them, the Montreal Canadiens are the NHL’s most successful team. To Habs fans, Montreal is the centre of the hockey universe, having won the championship 24 times. That’s nearly double than The Toronto Maple Leafs, their arch enemies and closest rival who have taken home the Stanley Cup 13 times. The Montreal Hockey Club was the first Stanley Cup winner way back in 1893, many years before there was a National Hockey League. A quarter of the players named in 2017 by the league as the top 100 NHL players of all time made their mark in Montreal. From George Vezina, who began playing in 1910 (the league’s annual trophy awarded to the top goalie is named for Vezina), to Patrick Roy, the Habs’ goalie during the team’s championship run in 1993, the list reads like a history of hockey.

Almost as well known as the hockey club itself is its home from 1926 to 1996, the Montreal Forum. The year after the Canadiens moved to the Bell Centre, the Forum was declared a National Historic Site. The two buildings are only three metro stops from each other in downtown Montreal. To hockey fans, especially Montreal supporters, making the pilgrimage from the team’s current home to the building many consider the most storied in hockey history is an absolute must.

The Ottawa Senators is one of those rare sports teams successfully resurrected after many years of absence from the league. The original Senators played from 1883 to 1934 and won eleven Stanley Cups – tying them for third with the Detroit Red Wings in all-time Stanley Cup wins. In 1992, some 58 years after they folded, the Senators were reborn and have been a competitive force in the NHL ever since, last making it to the finals in 2007.

To see a Senators game, fans head to the Canadian Tire Centre in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, home to the team since they rejoined the NHL. Despite its location twenty kilometres from the city centre, the Senators regularly place in the top half of NHL attendance numbers, partly because the public transit authority provides shuttles to the arena with pickup throughout the city.

Q: What do you call a Toronto Maple Leaf with a Stanley Cup Ring?

A: Very old or a thief.

Leaf jokes are as common as bacteria in bad butter, as the old saying goes, a saying that captures the way Leafs fans feel about jabs at their team. Even though the team has been crowned champions 13 times, they haven’t brought home the cup since 1967. The great players from that era like Dave Keon, Ron Ellis, Norm Ullman, Tim Horton, Paul Henderson and Johnny Bower are still revered by Leafs fans to this day. They remember that it was Tim Horton who started Canada’s monumental coffee shop chain of the same name, it was Paul Henderson who scored the winning goal against the Russians in the famous 1972 series, and it is Darryl Sittler who still holds the record for most points in a single game – 10 in 1976.

The Leafs home, the Air Canada Centre at the foot of Bay Street, is as centrally located as any NHL arena. It replaced the famous Maple Leaf Gardens in 1999. Nearby is the CN Tower and Rogers Centre, home of the Toronto Blue Jays. For a chance at bumping into stars from visiting teams, check into the Westin Harbour Castle right on the lakefront and just across the Gardiner Expressway from the arena.

Winnipeg Jets fans have taken their city’s nickname back. The term “Winterpeg” is a mildly sarcastic dig by outsiders about harsh weather. Today, it’s a point of pride for Jets fans. After all, hockey is a winter sport. Calling themselves the True North – in reference to Canada’s national anthem – fans dress in white and wave white towels, turning the arena into what looks like a snowy landscape. According to some Jets players, this fan “white-out” feels like an extra player on the ice.

Winnipeg fans are known as some of the loudest in the league, mostly because they’re so grateful to have a hockey team in the city again. For 15 long winters, there was no NHL hockey in the Peg. The original Winnipeg Jets entered the league in 1979, but were sold and moved to Phoenix in 1996. In 2011, the NHL franchise from Atlanta moved to Winnipeg to become the current Jets organization. When season tickets went on sale that year, they sold out in hours. When the waiting list for season tickets reached 8,000 in just two hours, the team capped the list.

When longtime Calgary Flames fans think of their team, they might picture a huge red moustache. The owner of that fantastic facial feature, Lanny McDonald, wasn’t the Flames all-time leading scorer or even the longest-serving player, but his tenure with the club from 1981 to 1989 was Calgary’s golden era. In his final year, at age 36, McDonald captained the team to its only Stanley Cup championship. He even scored in the final game. The flamboyant, talented McDonald was the soul of the Calgary Flames throughout the 80s and is possibly the team’s all-time most popular player. The year after Calgary’s cup win and McDonald’s departure, the Flames retired his number nine jersey.

The Alberta rivalry between the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers is one of the greatest in hockey, and perhaps only the century-long clash between Toronto and Montreal runs deeper. The Oilers easily have the better playoff record with five Stanley Cups, but historically the balance of regular season wins tilts in the Flames’ favour. Between 1982 and 1990, that classic period in the rivalry, the Flames and Oilers finished first and second in their division six times. Visiting teams would dread a road trip through Alberta, which they referred to as hockey’s Death Valley.

The Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s are considered hockey’s last great dynasty, winning five Stanley Cups in seven seasons, many of those championships under the leadership of Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky. Some consider the mid-80s Oilers the best team in hockey history. In the 1983-84 season, the Oilers finished the year with 119 points, fifteen ahead of the second place New York Islanders. That season, the team set a record as the first with three players to score fifty goals – Wayne Gretzky, Jari Kurri and Glen Anderson. The team’s 446 goals that season remains an NHL record.

Stats aside, the 80s Oilers played what some considered a new brand of hockey, favouring speed and skill over toughness and defence. The team was a marvel to watch, but have since had a major drop off in success. Despite the comings and goings of stars like Taylor Hall, the post-dynasty Oilers have languished as one of the worst in the league. Only recently, after the addition of phenom Connor McDavid in 2015, have the Oilers started seeing success again.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, the Vancouver Canucks have never won the Stanley Cup, though they’ve played in the finals three times since they entered the league in 1970. They lost to the New York Islanders in 1982, the New York Rangers in 1994 and most famously to the Boston Bruins in 2011. After being up in the series against the Bruins three games to two, Boston won at home and then took game seven in Vancouver, sparking riots in the streets, repeating the aftermath of the 1994 game seven loss.

But to think of the Vancouver Canucks only for these two incidents is unfair, especially since 2000 when the Swedish Sedin twins – Daniel and Henrik – joined the team. With the twins, the Canucks were a joy to watch. The Sedins played their full 18 seasons exclusively with the Canucks, nearly always on the same line. Fans marvelled at their creative playmaking, often confounding opponents with the fluidity and unpredictability of their style. Daniel is the Canuck’s all-time leading goal scorer and Henrik their all-time leader for goals and assists combined. They retired – together, of course – at the end of the 2018 season.