The quotes in this essay were taken from "A Growing Legacy" by Bill Howard, for 1998-99 Dallas Stars Official Game Program; photos from Sept./Oct. 1989 Les Canadiens.

Question:
"If Carbo was so great, why wasn’t he a bigger star?"

Answer:
"It’s all about the Selke Trophy."

Many of the reasons why Guy Carbonneau was such a great player are, in fact, the same reasons why he never became an NHL superstar.

Had Carbo continued down the path he began in his junior days, when he scored 323 points his last two years, including 182 in the 1979-80 season, things would have been different. Had he kept the same role he played at Montreal’s American Hockey League farm team in Nova Scotia the following two years, when he had 88 and 94 point seasons, he would certainly have attracted greater attention once he was in the NHL.

But as this web site accounts, things didn’t go that way. In his rookie year with the Canadiens, a teammate’s injury created an opening in the penalty kill unit, and Carbo brought into regular ice time on a line with Bob Gainey. "He was probably the best teacher I had," says Guy, adding that Gainey taught him more by example than by words. "Watching him was the thing that taught me the most. Things like, show up every game, play as hard as you can, don’t be afraid to make mistakes...you’re always going to make mistakes but the thing is not to make the same one too often. Once you do those things, good things happen."

Gainey comments on how well Carbonneau adapted to the new role: "It wasn’t too difficult for him because he already had many of the attributes, like skating ability, thinking ability and competitiveness. He just had to apply them to what he was asked to do."

Says Guy, "I’ve had defensive skills since I was a kid. What I had to do was perfect the game and learn the game a little more. I needed to learn whom I was playing against and then apply that knowledge. At the NHL level, it’s a different game."

Landing his berth on Gainey’s line was a turning point in Guy’s career. He lost his shot at appearing in future All Star games, and instead found himself on the road to the Selke Trophy.

The Selke salutes "the forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game." That phrase and the term "defensive forward" are simple on their face. But on the contrary, to win this award three times as Guy did (surpassed only by Gainey with four), a player must possess a complex combination of skills and personality traits that are as rare as the offensive touch of a Jaromir Jagr.

The defensive forward’s team depends heavily upon him to permit and preserve victories. His checking is needed to shut down the opponent’s top scorers. His efforts in the corners, fighting often against bigger and faster players, interfere with the opposition’s plays or give his teammates more room to work. He’ll be counted on in crucial penalty kills, or any situation when the game is at stake. "You’re on at critical times, like the ends of periods, the last 30-40 seconds of the game, and when you have face-offs in your own zone," Carbonneau explains.

In short, without scoring, a defensive forward can sometimes make all the difference. And he’s expected to score occasionally as well.

What sets apart a Selke Trophy winner, Bob Gainey says, is an innate sense of the game that few players possess.

"There are certain characteristics that are going to make that player very good," he explains. "Some of them are physical, like skating ability, getting around the ice and across the ice so you an be in more places that the (opposing) offensive players wish you were.

"There is an instinctiveness about where the puck will move and knowing other people’s thought patterns. That puts you into their mind before they’ve made their selection of plays so you can rob them of the play they want to make," he continues. "It’s a similar process to the offensive player who is anticipating where the puck will go next because he’s going to get it from one of his teammates. A defensive player has the same process but his end result is he wants to get it from the other team."

"I don’t think any team can win without defensive forwards," Carbo says. "You’re always going to have guys who can put the puck in the net, but in certain situations, especially now with how teams carry two or three guys just for the power play, you need defensive forwards.

"There are so many good players in this league now that if you can’t carry guys who are going to be able to defend that, they you will get in trouble most of the time," he adds. "Look at every team that has won the Stanley Cup from the beginning, they always had those big players that could score goals. But the rest of the guys, they’re the reason why the team’s winning."

For all this unique talent, even the most successful defensive forward will probably have statistics that indicate he is an average player. His point totals will not show all the goals he prevented his opponents from scoring, and his plus/minus will not show all the time he logged limiting the plus/minus of the league’s best players.

Thus the unglamorous role of the defensive forward is by nature self-sacrificial, and when that role is assumed by a player with proven offensive skills, like Carbonneau, it requires just that much more selflessness. The league recognized in 1978 that such players deserve some honor of their own, and instituted the Selke Trophy.

After he won the award in 1987, Carbo says he began to see a shift in the focus of the voters choosing the Selke winner. More offensive-minded forwards were getting more votes, and when Doug Gilmour won in 1993 after a 127 point season, there followed a series of defensively capable, but nevertheless high-scoring forwards winning the trophy.

"The award was meant for the forward who was sacrificing a lot of his game for his team," says Carbonneau. "When Sergei [Fedorov] won it, I mean, c’mon. He’s a great player, but I don’t think he was sacrificing a lot of his game. For a few years, the way the award was given changed. It seemed like whoever had a great season offensively but didn’t win the scoring championship won, like the league felt sorry for the second guy. I don’t think that was fair."

Carbo’s objection is based on his first-hand understanding of what, at heart, makes a defensive forward great.

"The first thing you need to have is the will to do anything for the team," Carbonneau says. "That’s mainly what [a defensive forward] does. Once you have that, you will sacrifice some offense, you will sacrifice some scoring chances, sacrifice a little bit of your body to do whatever it takes to win the game."

In recent years the Selke has once again been given to more Gainey-style players like Michael Peca and Jere Lehtinen, and in Guy’s final year many hockey authorities were calling for him to receive the trophy a fourth time. Although this didn’t occur, it was a testimony to Carbonneau’s true greatness that at 40 years old he was still mentioned as worthy of consideration as the NHL’s best defensive forward.

The Selke honors those who sacrifice stardom to be great in a more subtle but just as valuable manner. And why is Guy Carbonneau so great? Because he did just that.

Postscript, 11/12/00: In an online poll conducted by www.rds.ca, respondents chose Carbo as the best defensive forward in the history of the Canadiens.

See also "Another Selke"; "X-Factor"