Same befell other stars - Harvey, Geoffrion, Moore, Plante. Others previously - Olmstead. Changed somewhat under Pollock - Beliveau, H.Richard, Cournoyer but under Frank Selke Sr. few made it to the end of their careers with the Canadiens. Point could be made that Lemaire and Dryden beat Grundman at the game by retiring.
Not even Selke would have dared to trade Maurice Richard or, had he stayed around a decade longer, Jean Beliveau. It was generally regarded as simply unthinkable that either of them would ever play for another club, and, in any event, neither of them would even have considered doing so.
Some of those players Selke got rid of left their hearts in Montreal. As a Canadiens fan, I hated those trades because those players still had a lot to give and were still worthy of donning the Canadiens sweater, as they demonstrated when playing for their new clubs.
There's a clip from the early 1960s somewhere on the Internet that features Frank Selke talking about Richard. He claims Richard retired too early, that he was capable of playing for another five years. It was not then generally known that Selke had, in effect, forced Richard to retire, practically shoving him out the door. And so Selke is somewhat disingenuous on the clip. As I recall, Selke did make reference to Richard's battle against his weight problem in his last couple of years, the effort it would have required for Richard to get down to a weight at which he could have excelled in play and avoided injury. and the fact that Richard would not have settled for less than playing excellent hockey. But he left the distinct impression that retirement was Richard's choice and against the club's wishes, when the precise opposite was the case.
One reason Selke's statement went unquestioned was that the Canadiens had put Richard on their protected list in the summer, preventing other clubs from picking him up. It was assumed that the Canadiens could hardly have wanted him to retire because they had used one of the limited number of protected player spots on him. But the main reason the claim was accepted as a matter of course was that Richard himself, typically, said nothing; he was always reticent and particularly reluctant to say anything against the club.
According to the Red Fisher column, Fisher was sitting outside the office when Richard, having been called in by Selke right after the morning on-ice practice, was meeting with Selke. Fisher said Richard was grim-faced when he entered the office and 30 minutes later stormed out fuming. "They want me to retire," Richard "snapped" as he stomped off, according to Fisher. Later that day a press conference was held at which Richard announced his retirement, claiming it was to make way for younger players. Richard had scored four goals against Jacques Plante in a practice scrimmage that very morning.
That old skinflint Selke no doubt got pleasure out of saving the team some 20 thousand dollars in salary with Richard gone (assuming he paid the minimum to the player he was able to add to the team's roster due to Richard's absence). It was karma coming back to kick him in the behind when, without Richard to lead them, the Canadiens went out to the Black Hawks in six games in the Stanley Cup semifinals their first season following Richard's retirement--although they had again won the regular season title, finishing 17 points ahead of the third-place Hawks, with Geoffrion becoming the second player, after Richard, to score 50 goals in a season and Beliveau finishing second in the points scoring race--thus ending their streaks of five straight Stanley Cup victories and 10 straight seasons in the Stanley Cup finals. The Canadiens never again won the Stanley Cup under Selke, who presided over four straight semifinal eliminations after Richard left and then retired. All eight Stanley Cups the Canadiens won under Selke came with Richard in the lineup.
