BROSSARD, Que. — We told Martin St. Louis to picture hoisting the Stanley Cup back overhead and asked him what it would mean to him to do it just five years after leaving the bench of his son’s bantam team for the one at the Bell Centre.
When the coach of the Montreal Canadiens gave his answer, it only confirmed why he might just make that vision a reality as soon as this season.
“I think of my dad, who grew up in Mont-Laurier (roughly three hours north of the old Montreal Forum),” St. Louis says. “He didn’t have a TV when he was young. They finally got one later, but he used to watch the Canadiens through the window of the TV store. He’d be outside freezing, sitting on the shoulders of his brother, watching those games. He loves this team.
“My dad is now 75, and I would just love to win that for him. My (late) mom and dad provided so much for me. Such unbelievable people. That would be amazing to do that for them.”
St. Louis, now 51 and entering his fifth full season with the Canadiens on Tuesday, understands this must be a selfless pursuit.
He could’ve talked about how amazing it would be to do this for himself, about the satisfaction he’d feel exercising his lifelong habit of proving the doubters wrong because, let’s face it, there were many more of them than believers when he first took on this mandate in his home province.
But that wouldn’t have jived with something else repeatedly said since taking the job in February of 2022.
"It’s not about me."
The latest version of that St. Louis refrain came out in our 25-minute conversation at the Canadiens’ south-shore practice facility last Wednesday when he said, “I’m not going to win a Cup, they’re going to win a Cup.”
St. Louis knows that attitude is at the foundation of championship culture because he is a champion.
The rest, he said, is about strict adherence to being process-driven.
“Don’t you need to focus on the end-goal if you’re ever going to achieve it?” we ask.
“If all you ever think about is 'I’m trying to win a championship, I’m trying to win a championship,' you get lost in it,” says St. Louis, who won a Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2004. “You’ve just got to have your process and execute that every day.”
Why?
“Because it’s been proven,” he responds.
By whom?
“Bill Walsh, Nick Saban, Bill Belichick,” St. Louis says.
It wasn’t a coincidence he named three serial winners, though St. Louis didn’t do that just because they’re serial winners.
“Those guys always created the conditions to have opportunity to win, and they won a lot because of it,” St. Louis says. “We’re not just trying to win here; we want to win and keep having opportunity to win. And to execute that, you need to keep focusing on your process and perfecting it.”
Perhaps no coach in team sports has leaned on that approach as much as Geno Auriemma, who brought UConn women’s basketball from total obscurity to prominence since landing on the Huskies’ bench in 1985. Auriemma has coached UConn through six undefeated seasons, helped them to 25 Final Four appearances, and guided them to 12 national championships. St. Louis believes he’s enjoyed all that whopping success by opting for transformational, not transactional, leadership.
“Transactional leadership is focused on wins and losses. You win, I’m happy. You lose, I’m pissed. That’s transactional,” St. Louis explains. “Whereas a transformational leader really wants to improve their team without guarantee of victory, knowing that when you focus on the process to consistently improve the team without total emotional attachment to the result, the result usually takes care of itself.”
He has talked about that a lot through what is now the fourth-longest coaching tenure in the NHL, and he has often repeated that he didn’t invent that way of thinking.
“I didn’t invent any of this,” St. Louis reiterates, adding he’s just borrowing bits and pieces from the Auriemmas, Sabans, Belichicks and Walshs and making them his own because, as he says, “You’d be stupid not to.”
From Belichick, the leader of the New England Patriots dynasty, he borrows a sense of ingenuity.
“I don’t know if people like him or don’t like him, but from a strategic standpoint, he’s not afraid to go outside the box. He’s the first coach to use the two-tight end offence,” St. Louis says. “I want to be unafraid to go outside the box and not necessarily just copy. There’s stuff around the league I really like, but I want to be able to be open-minded to trying different things. I feel like Belichick did that.”
What does St. Louis take from Walsh, who led the San Francisco 49ers to three NFC championships and three Super Bowl wins from 1979-88?
“When he says, 'If you want to be a champion, you’ve gotta act like a champion before you become one,' that resonates,” St. Louis says. “There are certain high standards champions live by every day, so if you want to be one, then you better have those high standards.”
Saban didn’t build up a 297-71-1 record for a mind-blowing .806 win percentage over his 28-year college football coaching career by enabling his players to accept low ones.
He created an environment that pushed his players to keep raising the bar and growing their culture, which is exactly what St. Louis and his staff members have been trying to emulate with the Canadiens.
They’ve made their environment as inclusive as can be and turned it into a breeding ground of excellence, sparing no expense or resource to enable players to push themselves — and each other — toward peak performance. As a result, their culture has grown substantially year over year, propelling them along a far more linear path than rebuilding teams typically travel.
The Canadiens went from just losing in Year 1 to competing in the most one-goal games in the league in Year 2, and from winning enough to make the playoffs in Year 3 to then coming within seven wins of capturing the Cup in Year 4.
None of that happened by accident, and St. Louis said the Canadiens must recognize that to keep moving forward in Year 5.
“I think the biggest thing for our group to understand is this is where we are. We won two playoff rounds, let’s accept this is where we are,” he says. “We have to understand how we got here, because it wasn’t luck. Luck has nothing to do with why we’re here. Are we on time? Are we ahead? Who cares, this is where we are.
“When you accept where you are, now there’s more responsibilities. We had to accept where we were two years ago and get to work. Now that we’ve gotten to where we are today, we have to accept it and embrace the bigger responsibilities that come with it to move forward.”
Like the Carolina Hurricanes did to win the 2026 Stanley Cup.
When asked what the Canadiens can borrow from the team that beat them in five games of the Eastern Conference Final, St. Louis says it’s less about how they play and more about their unwavering commitment to their process and a universal buy-in to their system.
“We have to find that consistency in our details — (consistency in) being face-off ready, in our way of winning battles, in not missing assignments,” St. Louis says. “Carolina’s alarm is on from offence to defence and defence to offence, and there’s no steamboats in between. There’s consistency in applying their style because all their players do it all the time. It’s everybody. The structure is only as good as all five guys playing it together.”
The Canadiens applied theirs well enough to earn 106 points in the standings last season, and they applied it even better to win two seven-game series against equally strong teams in Tampa Bay and Buffalo.
But St. Louis came away from the loss to the Hurricanes knowing that they could do better, and so could he.
Parking his ego and telling his players as much was critical, in his view.
“If you’re going to sell how you plan to be better and convince them, you have to first take accountability for where you fell short,” St. Louis says. “We told them, ‘That’s on us, boys. We asked you to do it a certain way, and that’s how it went.’ But we then said, ‘Here’s what we got for you and here’s why it makes sense,’ and now all of a sudden, they’re convinced too.”
That’s been his approach since Day 1 in a job he’s never needed but loves more than anything.
Why does St. Louis love it so much that he would sign up to do it for four more years, like he did when he agreed to an extension at the onset of Canadiens training camp?
“Because my favourite thing is being on a team, working with others on a shared goal and shared vision, competing together, and trying to execute a daily process with people,” St. Louis says. “I love hockey, I love leading, I love relationships, and I love helping people. All that checks every box for me.”
Finally, something is for him.
But the Cup, if St. Louis ever hoists it again, is for his players, for his wife and three kids, for his sister, his late mother, and most definitely for his dad, who started watching the team his son coaches from the window of that TV store in Mont-Laurier.
