Fifty years ago this fall, the Montreal Canadiens began a three-season run that now reads like a story from another sport — or another universe. Across 1975–76, 1976–77, and 1977–78, they won 58, 60, and 59 games, swept two of their three Stanley Cup Finals, and lost only eight games in their best year. Nine of those players would end up in the Hockey Hall of Fame, plus their coach. Our new book The Heights Team argues it's the greatest sustained excellence hockey has ever produced. It's hard to find a counterargument.
But here's the part that sits with us: we built the modern game to make that impossible on purpose.
The salary cap, the draft, free agency, revenue sharing — every mechanism designed to create parity also quietly installed a ceiling on greatness. That was the point, and mostly it worked. The league is more competitive now, more fair, more genuinely uncertain week to week. But something was traded away, and I'm not sure we've ever admitted out loud what it was.
It was the permission to be extraordinary long enough that it stopped being a streak and became a culture. A dynasty isn't just talent; it's an idea a place can hold for years — a standard so high that people absorb it before anyone explains it. Those Canadiens didn't just win. They defined an identity a whole province and a whole country still argue about, five decades later.
The word matters because the idea leaks beyond the rink. We use "dynasty" for families, for companies, even for bands now. What we're really naming is an old longing: for something built to last, in a world that increasingly rewards the disposable.
We don't actually want the old economics back. That team won partly because it could outspend and out-stockpile everyone else, and there's nothing romantic about that. But I miss what they represented — the belief that a team, or a company, or a person, could keep getting better not for a season, but for a decade.
We got fairness, and we gave up the chance to watch greatness endure. Maybe that's a trade worth making. Maybe it isn't. But we should at least say out loud that it is a trade.
Is there anywhere in life — work, family, community — where we'd still rather protect a dynasty than accept parity?
8th House Publishing will publish Canada Strikes Back, a forthcoming novel by Richard Rathwell that imagines a near-future in which the United States has quietly absorbed its northern neighbour.
The novel opens in British Columbia's Fraser Valley with Nadia Okafor, a Tim Hortons supervisor and graduate student — an ordinary person living in a country that no longer exists. It is a story of occupation without war: not an invasion, but an absorption, accomplished through paperwork rather than bombs. And the resistance that rises to meet it comes not from capitals or armories, but from neighbours.
Rathwell grounds the story in a specific geography — the hills, the valley, and a community that refuses to become an abstraction on someone else's map.
MONTREAL — Three seasons. 282 games. A standard nobody has touched since. That is the argument at the heart of Jeff Olson's new book, The Heights Team: Hockey's Best Team Ever, from 8th House Publishing.
Olson makes a case that has long been whispered but rarely argued this carefully: the Montreal Canadiens of 1975–76 through 1977–78 are the greatest sustained run in hockey history. He even coins a name for them — the Heights Team — alongside the old familiars: Les Habs, Les Habitants, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge.
The numbers do a lot of the talking. The Canadiens posted 58 wins and 127 points in 1975–76, then 60 wins and 132 points the following season — a campaign with just eight losses that the book insists was never equaled in any NHL schedule — then 59 wins and 129 points in 1977–78. Three straight Stanley Cups across 282 games: 240 regular-season contests plus 42 in the playoffs. Scoped to the 80-game era, Olson argues that nobody has matched that combination of dominance and championships.
He does not simply lean on the standings. He takes readers through a roster that is a problem for anyone arguing against him: Guy Lafleur, who led the league in scoring all three seasons; Ken Dryden in net; Larry Robinson and Yvan Cournoyer; and the rest of a lineup that counts nine Hall of Famers — all wired together by Scotty Bowman.
Timed to the 50th anniversary of the 1976–77 season, The Heights Team is published in English and French editions, a fittingly bilingual tribute to a club at home in both.
The book is available in paperback and hardcover, 392 pages, with archival black-and-white photographs. Paperback ISBN 978-1-926716-86-2 ($29.99 USD); hardcover ISBN 978-1-926716-85-5 ($39.99 USD).
👉 Buy now: https://shop.8thhousepublishing.com/109-30-the-heights-team-hockey-s-greatest-team-ever.html
Imagine a city where survival is arithmetic. In near-future Montreal — after Quebec has separated and the economy has collapsed into recession — the Imperial Meridian Hotel on Sherbrooke Street has been reborn as the Ballroom, one of about a dozen gambling halls in the city. Every day, displaced people pay a ten-dollar entrance fee for a programmed tablet, then roam an enormous hall that stretches like a cathedral, trying to guess the exact number of players inside. When the officials hold one of their randomly timed counts, anyone whose guess matches the total wins the jackpot. A whole society's desperation, distilled to a single number.
At the center of this world are a father and a daughter. Bella is sixteen and left school after ninth grade to help her father. Walter is a Canadian Army veteran, scarred by Afghanistan; counting players in the Ballroom is the only work he could find after his discharge. "Here, Walter and Bella spent their days counting players who simultaneously counted them". Everyone in the hall is running the same estimate — counting the people who are counting them back. Human beings, reduced to units in a moving sum.
The game feels real, and not just as dystopian scenery, because its author actually knows the mathematics. Abraham Boyarsky is a novelist and a mathematician — for years Professor of Mathematics at Concordia University in Montreal, now retired from that professorship. When Walter explains his method, it reads like genuine estimation theory. He paces out a 400-square-foot zone — one-fiftieth of the 20,000-square-foot floor — counts the players inside it, multiplies by fifty, then refines. "It's about inference," Walter had once told Bella. "About knowing how people move when they're hungry. About subtracting the ones who ghost out. It's as much about what you don't see". The game, the book insists, is more than luck: it is pattern recognition, intuition, and much more.
But the novel's true subject is what refuses to be computed. Beneath the counting lies grief. Walter's war trauma follows him through the hall, and so does the memory of Elena — Bella's mother, an eighteen-year-old waitress when Walter met her in the Ballroom twenty years earlier, later lost to painkiller addiction and found lifeless in the kitchen by Bella. No estimate covers that. He lights a candle for his comrade Sam Dichter, killed by an IED in Afghanistan — a small ritual of remembering what the numbers erase. The love between Walter and Bella is the one thing in the book that cannot be reduced to a probability. "Don't let love become a cage," her mother said. "Not even your father's love". And when the Ballroom's owner tries to recruit Walter as an informant, Walter refuses — choosing instead to assemble a small team and try to beat the game on his own terms.
This is a dystopia that is really a question about value — what a person is worth when a system can only see them as a number to be guessed. The Ballroom is no decaying ruin; the floor is mopped three times a day, kept pristine because the place is still open for business. The horror is not in neglect but in how thoroughly order and counting have become the same thing. And still, a line of graffiti reminds the players that they will survive together — a promise the arithmetic cannot touch.
When have you been reduced to a number — and what in your life refused to be counted?
Last week we gathered in Minnesota to launch The Heights Team: Hockey's Best Team Ever by Jeff Olson, and the room felt like a locker room full of old friends.
Jeff was there in his #12 Yvan Cournoyer Canadiens jersey, living the history he wrote about. NHL great Tom Younghans (North Stars and Rangers) joined us, along with Coach Tom Saterdalen and Chris and Emily Paradise. Hockey author Anthony Walsh read from the book, and Audrey Nelson shared a passage that brought the 1975–78 Montreal dynasty right into the room.
A faceoff-style program, a book table, and a whole lot of people who simply love this game.
If you made it out, thank you — you're the reason these stories get told. And if you couldn't, the book is ready whenever you are.
So tell us: what's the greatest team you've ever watched?
The wait is over, hockey fans. The Heights Team — Hockey's Best Team Ever, Jeff Olson's definitive account of the three greatest consecutive seasons in hockey history, is now available at all major retailers — in bookstores and online, in both English and French editions.
No more pre-orders. No more waiting for the puck to drop. The book is on shelves and in carts today.
The Heights Team tells the story of the 1975–76, 1976–77, and 1977–78 Montreal Canadiens — the dynasty that won three straight Stanley Cups and set a standard no club has matched since.
At its peak, the 1976–77 Canadiens posted a season for the ages: 60 wins against just 8 losses, a staggering 132 points, and the Stanley Cup.
And the timing couldn't be better: the 2026–27 season marks 50 years since that legendary 1976–77 campaign — a height no team has reached in half a century.
Jeff Olson brings that era roaring back to life: the players, the coach, the dynasty, and the three consecutive seasons that made history.
Title: The Heights Team — Hockey's Best Team Ever: The Three Greatest Consecutive Seasons in Hockey History, 1975-76 + 1976-77 + 1977-78 Montreal Canadiens
Author: Jeff Olson
Editions: English & French
Format: 6×9, black & white
Pages: 382
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926716-86-2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-926716-85-5
Available now at all major retailers and direct from the publisher:
👉 shop.8thhousepublishing.com — The Heights Team
Pick up your copy today and relive the greatest team ever to take the ice. 🏒
Hockey fans, mark your calendars. Join author Jeff Olson and a lineup of Minnesota hockey legends for the official release program of The Heights Team — Hockey's Best Team Ever.
Date: Friday, October 16 (MEA weekend — schools closed)
Time: 11:15 AM — Social • 11:30 AM–Noon — Program
Location: Tom Reid's Hockey City Pub — North Stars Room
Address: 258 7th Street West, St. Paul, MN 55102 (southeast corner of West 7th St & Walnut St, downtown St. Paul)
Tom Younghans — NHL great, Minnesota North Stars & New York Rangers (1976–82), NCAA Champion (1976)
Coach Tom Saterdalen — one of Minnesota's top hockey coaches, 5 MN State H.S. Boys Championships and 15 trips to State leading Bloomington Jefferson
Jeff Olson — author, readings from the book
🏒Minnesota Wild pucks giveaway every 10 minutes
🏆Contest for #1–#5 "Hockey's Best Team Ever" — prize: a hardcover book
💰Special program pricing — 25% & 30% off
🥅Bring a hockey stick → $2 off all book purchases
🍽Appetizers for early arrivals (otherwise, buy your own)
The Heights Team chronicles the 1975–76, 1976–77, and 1977–78 Montreal Canadiens — three straight Stanley Cups, including the legendary 1976–77 season (60 wins, 8 losses, 132 points), a height no team has reached since. Available in English and French editions.
Come celebrate the greatest team ever. See you at the pub! 🍻
👉 Book details & ordering
Set in a near-future Canada absorbed — incrementally, then abruptly — into a continental security empire dominated by the United States, the novel traces the formation and operation of TORCH, a grassroots resistance network in British Columbia's Fraser Valley, across the twenty-six months of what the occupying authority calls "the Continental Stabilization."
At its centre is Nadia Okafor, a Nigerian-Canadian Tim Hortons shift supervisor and graduate student, who asks the question that carries the book from first page to last: what do you want it to look like when it's over? Around her gathers an unforgettable ensemble — Danny Arsenault, the Acadian TransLink driver and Kandahar veteran who counts things; Marguerite Tremblay-Côté, the political economist whose fifteen years of research becomes the resistance's founding document; Silas Raven and Clara Watts of the Haida Nation; and Colonel Sarah Maines, the American commander assigned to run an operation her own paper predicted would fail.
Structured in five parts and drawing on the French Resistance, Myanmar's Civil Disobedience Movement, and the historical analysis of how empires fail, Canada Strikes Back is a novel about occupation, reconstruction, and the specific courage that is simply the refusal to stop. The Fraser River runs through it as both landscape and witness — "patient and indifferent and fully itself."
Further details, including the release date, will be announced shortly. Cover tentative.
8th House Publishing is proud to announce the first-ever English translation of Heart, Head and Stomach (Coração, Cabeça e Estômago), the celebrated satirical novel by Camilo Castelo Branco (1825–1890), one of the greatest and most prolific writers in Portuguese literature.
First published in 1862, the novel traces the life of Silvestre da Silva through the three ruling forces named in its title. In the first, the heart holds sway: a young Silvestre chases love across a libertine Lisbon and meets only with disillusionment. In the second, the head takes command, and he turns a calculating eye toward the wealthy heiresses of Porto. In the third, the stomach rules, and he withdraws to Soutelo, his ancestral home, in search of a quieter, more comfortable life.
Presented as the posthumous papers of its hapless hero, Heart, Head and Stomach is a sharp and strikingly modern satire of romantic ideals, social ambition, and bourgeois hypocrisy — fiction that anticipates the realism still to come. This new translation by Francis More brings the book to English-language readers in a fresh, faithful rendering.
Publication details and a release date will follow.
What if the greatest hockey team ever assembled has been hiding in plain sight for fifty years?
Between 1975 and 1978, the Montreal Canadiens — nine future Hall of Famers, guided by Scotty Bowman — completed three straight seasons of dominance never equalled. 240 regular-season games. 42 playoff games. 282 games of greatness. Point totals of 127, 132, and 129 that no NHL team before or since has approached.
The Heights Team: Hockey's Best Team Ever is the first book to tell the complete story of this dynasty. Jeff Olson reconstructs every season — from opening night at the Montreal Forum when the torch passed from Henri Richard to Yvan Cournoyer, to the championship-clinching victory in Boston Garden 282 games later. Game by game, player by player, Olson brings you into the locker room, behind Bowman's bench, and onto the ice with the men who set a gold standard that endures fifty years later.
- 1975–76: 58 wins, 127 points. A 12–1 playoff run capped by a four-game sweep of the two-time defending champion Philadelphia Flyers. Lafleur's 56 goals and 125 points announced a new era. Dryden's 2.03 GAA.
- 1976–77: 60 wins, 8 losses, 132 points. The single greatest regular season in NHL history — and 2026–27 marks its 50th anniversary. Only one home loss in 40 games. Dryden's Vezina. Lafleur's Art Ross and Hart (136 points). Shutt's 60 goals. A 216-goal differential. No team in any era has matched these 132 points in an 80-game schedule.
- 1977–78: 59 wins, 129 points. Lemaire's career-best 97 points. Lafleur's 60 goals. A third straight Stanley Cup — the quietest masterpiece, and the capstone of a run unmatched in any team sport.
Olson profiles all nine Hall of Famers in dedicated chapters: Ken Dryden, the cerebral giant in goal; Guy Lafleur, the electrifying "Flower" at the peak of his powers; Larry Robinson, the 6'4" cornerstone of the legendary "Big Three" defense; Serge Savard, the Conn Smythe–winning leader; Guy Lapointe, the offensive defenseman; Yvan Cournoyer, "The Road Runner" — the 5'7" captain with 10 Stanley Cups; Jacques Lemaire, the two-way center who later coached the Devils to a Cup; Bob Gainey, the checking-line pioneer with four straight Selkes; and Steve Shutt, the left wing who scored 60 goals off Lafleur's passes.
The book illuminates the supporting cast — Jarvis, Risebrough, Tremblay — and traces the extraordinary legacy these players left behind: six became NHL head coaches, four became general managers, one served as team president. Decades later, the fingerprints of these 282 games were still visible on champions from New Jersey to Dallas to Detroit.
The 2026–27 season marks the 50th anniversary of the 1976–77 Canadiens. No book has ever told the full story of these three seasons as a unified work. Olson fills that gap with meticulous research and the passion of a lifelong hockey historian. Archival photography, season-by-season breakdowns, and head-to-head comparisons with every NHL dynasty make this the definitive account. Coming soon in English and French editions.
For readers who loved: The Game by Ken Dryden · Searching for Bobby Orr by Stephen Brunt · The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey
For fans of: Montreal Canadiens history · NHL dynasties · 1970s hockey · Scotty Bowman · Guy Lafleur · Ken Dryden · sports history gift books · Quebec sports heritage
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