Scotty Bowman Autographed Card

How should I go about this one?

Option 1: When it comes to Holidays, the one that counts the most is the one with ''the big man'', coming to bring you presents, and in the hockey world, as far as coaches are concerned, there is no one alive bigger than Scotty Bowman, who brought his teams Stanley Cups like Santa Claus fills Christmas stockings.

Or Option 2: Every team needs a head coach, even my all-time Habs Numbers Project team, and what better way than with the winning-est coach of all time, Scotty Bowman?

Either way, I win:

It's card #160 from Upper Deck's 2008-09 Canadiens Centennial set, signed in black sharpie a couple of years ago at a function with other former Habs - he didn't want to sign it at first, but he remembered Gustave Lacombe, my grandfather who was a journalist and news editor in the 1970s and also had two or three Canadiens players boarding at his house in any give year, and his face changed from scary to friendly in half a second after that. Still, I left him alone for the rest of the evening.

He rarely comes back to his hometown these days, living in the U.S. on a permanent basis for the past 30 years, and most team functions he attends are those of the Detroit Red Wings or, in working duties, the Chicago Blackhawks, with whom he serves as a consultant for GM Stan Bowman, his son.

Like many things related to the Montréal Canadiens of the 1950s-1980s (and again under Bob Gainey's watch in the 2000s), Bowman didn't always have it easy in Montréal. He coached the Habs-affiliated Ottawa Canadiens in the Québec Junior League to a championship, and led the Peterborough Petes to the Memorial Cup, then more championships with the NDG Monarchs and Montréal Junior Canadiens, but still didn't get his first taste of the NHL with the Canadiens, instead starting as an assistant with the St. Louis Blues, but taking over head coaching duties mid-season and leading them to three straight Stanley Cup Finals in his first three seasons at the helm before bowing out in the first round in his fourth season.

Come 1971, he was appointed to coach the Habs, replacing Al MacNeil, who not only didn't speak French but favoured playing anglophones (Frank and Pete Mahovlich over Jean Béliveau, Yvan Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire up front, Terry Harper over Guy Lapointe, Serge Savard, Jean-Claude Tremblay and Jacques Laperrière on defense, Phil Myre in 30 games in goal despite his statistics being far from Rogatien Vachon's). The farthest thing from a ''player's coach'', Bowman was strict and at times even mean, but apart from teaching someone a lesson / showing them who was boss, he gave the best players the most ice time and was deemed more fair than his predecessor. His goal was to win the Stanley Cup every year, and he would do anything he had to to get there.

On a team that included Guy Lafleur, Steve Shutt, Lapointe, Yvon Lambert and Mario Tremblay among the renowned partiers, the fact that Bowman wouldn't begrudge his players' off-the-rink habits as long as they performed well during games kept the locker room balanced. The coach also had tricks up his sleeve to disrupt the opposition, knowing when to use his tough guys (John Ferguson played under his watch), but also using the city's rabid hockey fanbase and his contacts to have the fire alarm sound off at the hotels where opposing players were staying in the middle of the night, so they'd be tired when it came time to play against the Habs.

And just like it didn't start like a fairy tale for Bowman with a stint in St. Louis before getting the call in Montréal, it ended abruptly when he wasn't offered the general manager's job when his mentor, mastermind Sam Pollock, retired.

The Buffalo Sabres came calling, offering him the dual GM/head coach job. In seven seasons in Buffalo, he held the head coaching job for four full seasons and parts of three others, where he served as interim bench boss after firing whoever he'd appointed when they couldn't do the job.

He stepped down and took some time off from the daily grind of the game, appearing occasionally on CBC's Saturday-night show Hockey Night In Canada for the end of the 1980s, until he became director of player personnel with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1990, winning the Stanley Cup with the team in that role. However, after the Cup win, head coach Bob Johnson was diagnosed with cancer, and Bowman replaced him behind the bench, leading the team to its second straight Cup.

He left after the 1992-93 season, after the two-time champs and regular-season leaders were ousted in the first round, signing with the Wings, where he coached for 9 years, winning three more Cups in the process while playing in the same conference as the Colorado Avalanche (winners of two themselves), and losing in the Finals to the New Jersey Devils in 1994-95, also known as the Year Hockey Died.

He helped bring the Wings back to respectability, and had the team's old-timers be proud to walk into the Joe Louis Arena every game again. Detroit became an attractive place where superstars could come win a Cup before they retired (Brett Hull, Brendan Shanahan, Luc Robitaille).

By then he had adapted his coaching style, softening it to become a better teacher, communicating more, developing strategies to make use of the NHL's modern landscape, such as having five Russian players - or five Swedes by the end of his tenure - play together and communicate only in their own language on the ice to foil the opposition with tactics they could only see but not hear; he also made the ''left wing lock'' (where the left winger is more of a defensive rover) a common thing to counter the straight-up trap the Lemaire-coached Devils used to kill the game.

He is the NHL's all-time leader in regular-season wins (1244) and postseason wins (222), and counting all Cups at every level, his 13 as a coach and executive rank second only to Jean Béliveau's 17 (10 as a player, 7 as an executive). The way the Hawks are built, he could very well earn a couple more before he decides to step away from the game completely.

Ralph Backstrom Autographed Card

As I mentioned when I first started mapping out my Habs Numbers Project in May, I did already have a Ralph Backstrom autographed card I hadn't featured on here yet, thus making his jersey number (6) one less I have to look for in my quest to have a collectible from every number worn by a Habs player (ideally an autographed item).

Backtrom played for the Montréal Canadiens for 12 full seasons, and parts of 15 in total (he played only 5 games in his first two in the NHL, and only 16 games to start out the 1970-71 season after requesting a trade), but was an important player until late in his career.

With the Habs, he played in six All-Star Games and won six Stanley Cups (only three of them coinciding, meaning he was a dominant player for at least nine in total), won the Calder trophy as the league's best rookie in 1958-59, and led the team in scoring with 65 points in 66 games in 1961-62 despite a line-up that included Jean Béliveau and Henri Richard.

He moved from the NHL to the WHA after splitting the 1972-73 season between the Los Angeles Kings and Chicago Black Hawks, and managed to put up 33 goals and 83 points in 78 games with the Chicago Cougars in 1973-74. In an odd 1975-76 season he started with the Denver Spurs, which turned into the Ottawa Civics for a handful of games mid-way through the season before folding, his rights were sold to the New England Whalers, where he finished the season and played the next one. All in all, for that year with three teams, he had 35 goals and 83 points in 79 games.

All told, he ended his career with 278 goals and 639 points in 1032 NHL regular-season games (and 27-32-59 in 116 NHL playoff games), and 100 goals and 253 points in 304 WHA games (plus 10-18-28 in 38 WHA playoff games).

He was an important player in hockey history, and one who witnessed a lot of weird things, including playing for the Civics who never even had the time to design a logo or uniform and just played with their Spurs uniforms without the crest - oh, WHA! - winning only one game, losing five, playing only twice on ''home'' ice, with the players never notified of either the team's relocation (they allegedly had their only clue hearing the Canadian national anthem during a road game) nor its dissolution a couple of weeks later.

He was in town during the Habs' Centennial celebrations, and I met him at a banquet with a lot of other former alumni; it is there that he signed this 2008-09 Canadiens Centennial card (#70 in the set) by Upper Deck in black sharpie, though it was my guest who approached him with it and not myself:

Guy Lafleur: 5 Autographed Cards (Part 1)

Few players can claim to have been the best in a season, let alone in a decade or a generation. Guy Lafleur, however, sure can. His tenure with the Montréal Canadiens alone got him elected into the Hall Of Fame in his first year of eligibility (1988), and you'd figure he was a shoe-in, what with 1346 points (the team's all-time leading scorer), on the strength of 518 goals and 728 assists in 14 seasons.

He is tied for the team record of goals in a season (60) with his former linemate Steve Shutt, while the center of that line, Jacques Lemaire, is now widely regarded as one of the three best coaches in NHL history (with Scotty Bowman and Toe Blake) - and the reason why Lafleur retired in the first place, putting an unusual amount of pressure on the superstar to play a defensively-minded game rather than being the offensive catalyst.

He holds the team's points in a season record (136) and was the first player in NHL history to have six consecutive 50-goal and 100-point seasons. He has 3 Art Ross trophies (1976, 1977, 1978), 2 Hart trophies (league MVP in 1977 and 1978), 3 Lester B. Pearson Awards (now the Ted Lindsay trophy for the best player as voted by the players, 1976, 1977, 1978) and a Conn Smythe Trophy (1977) to go with his 5 Stanley Cups and 1976 Canada Cup.

One of the most beloved players in Habs history, the Forum crowd would enter chants of ''Guy! Guy! Guy!'' every time he touched the puck, scored, or was named one of the game's three stars.

Feeling he had been forced into retirement unjustly, and with the lingering feeling that he had a few more goals left in him, Lafleur trained like a boxer to get back in shape and attempted a comeback in time for the 1988-89 season, with the New York Rangers, becoming the second (after Gordie Howe, before Mario Lemieux) of three players to come back to the NHL after being named to the Hall Of Fame. In his first game back to the Forum, Lafleur netted a hat trick (3 goals!) against the best goalie of all time - Patrick Roy - in a 7-5 Rangers loss; he was named the first star, to the usual chants of ''Guy! Guy! Guy!'' that rang through the Forum for the whole game.

He was sent to the Québec Nordiques with head coach Michel Bergeron in the off-season and, despite diminished ice time, was among the best players on the team, even earning an invitation to the 1991 All-Star Game, an invitation he declined, stating ''Joe Sakic has been by far our best and most deserving player, I withdraw myself so he can attend as our team's representative''. Sakic was named, and Lafleur was subsequently invited as ''the commisionner's choice'', an honor for a soon-to-be-retiring player of high caliber he shared with Bobby Smith that year.

Now onto the cards!

First, the oldest Guy Lafleur card in my collection, from Topps' 1982-83 O-Pee-Chee set (card #187, the In Action sub-set):

Hair in the wind, about to take off at full speed, a complete view of his whole body position and uniform, and even the stick's curved blade. I like this card so much I even have two more of them (unsigned).

And now for some 2008-09 cards by Upper Deck:

The card above is from the special-edition 2008-09 Montreal Canadiens Centennial set, the Trophy Winners sub-set (card #256). I thought it'd be cool to have an off-ice card signed. He is pictured with all the trophies he won in the 1977-78 season.

But UD went all out for these cards:

Believe it or not, these two are variants of the same card, from the 2008-09 O-Pee-Chee set (card #579, the Legends sub-set). The card on the left is the regular version, while the one on the right is the ''retro'' variant. Even the backs were different:

(continued on the next post)