I am truly honored to be selected for induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
I never thought I was going to make the NHL.
It just seemed an impossibility.
The NHL was something that appeared on Saturday nights on television.
I love playing hockey. I'm not sure how many of you know that.
I noticed some that I seemed the dilettante picking up hockey as I would something else,
dropping it for something else a few years later.
He was not the prototypical athlete.
His off time was spent studying and doing more intellectual things.
I loved hockey and driveways and backyards in streets and outdoor arenas.
I loved it in college with the national team and in the NHL.
It's a game I'll never leave.
An author, politician and lawyer, there was no hockey player quite like Ken Dryden.
Drafted by the Boston Bruins but traded to the rival Montreal Canadians,
he studied at Cornell University where he backstopped the big red to three consecutive ECAC championships.
In the spring of 1971, he made his NHL debut as the Canadians approached the playoffs.
The Canadians had a sort of mediocre year.
I play roughly every third game.
The games went pretty well and they asked me to start the playoffs against the Bruins.
The Bruins, they were supposed to be the dynasty.
Winning 70. They were going to win again in 71.
I still see Felix Brigitte shaking his head near net after Ken made tremendous save.
The Canadians completed an unlikely cup run by defeating Chicago in the final.
For his part, Dryden was named the playoff MVP.
One of the remarkable stats about Ken Dryden is that he won the Kahn-Smith Trophy
and he won the Stanley Cup before he had lost one regular season NHL game.
Still considered a rookie the following season, Dryden won the Calder.
In 1973, he won his first of five Vesena Trophies.
Many of the goalies of that era were not big men.
And when Ken came along, he represented a different physical presence in the net.
He was big.
Historic imposing stature produced one of hockey's most iconic images.
I don't know where the pose started.
For me, it was just a resting position.
The traditional one is to rest on the top of your pads.
That's a fairly long way down for somebody who's tall.
It just seemed easier to me to rest on the extended stick.
Dryden's pose was immortalized on the cover of his critically acclaimed memoir, The Game.
He has a very different thought process.
He saw the game very differently.
The book that he wrote, The Game, remains the seminal work on hockey, really.
Despite his brief eight-year career, Dryden remains near the top of every statistical category for Montreal Goaltenders.
He won six Stanley Cups, posted a career 2.24 goals against Average,
and never lost more than 10 games in a given regular season.
Ken Dryden doesn't get enough credit for being one of the great characters of our game,
simply because most of the people who watched him probably didn't understand him.
A guy that retired too soon but had too much in his brain to want to just keep playing hockey.
I like the feeling of doing something well.
I like the feeling of playing hockey well.
I wanted to do whatever I did next well, and I wanted to give myself the time and the chance to do that.
