Colorado Avalanche Flashback: Patrick Roy Becomes Winningest Goalie

Colorado Avalanche legend Patrick Roy celebrated becoming the winningest goalie in the NHL in a game against the Washington Capitals.

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Colorado Avalanche legend Patrick Roy recorded a lot of wins in his career — 551, to be exact. He won even more statistically in the playoffs — 151 out of 247 games. That’s damn impressive.

It is, in fact, good enough for winningest goalie ever in the playoffs. Martin Brodeur is a distant second with 113 playoff wins, a full 38 fewer postseason wins than Roy.

Today, though, we’re going to look at a record that Brodeur was able to break eventually — winningest goalie ever in the regular season. Before Martin could break it, Patrick Roy held that record.

In fact, he took over that record on October 17, 2000 as a member of the Colorado Avalanche. He beat the Washington Capitals in overtime to earn that win.

That game, of course, came in the beginning of the historic 2000-01 season that saw the Avalanche win their second Stanley Cup, the one that finally got Hall of Famer Ray Bourque a Cup.

The game started out with the Avalanche coming on strong. Alex Tanguay scored early in the first Period — his first of the year. Milan Hejduk scored his third of the year later in the period.

The second period then went off the rails. Penalties had been pretty even in the first, but Colorado started getting cute with their sticks in the second. Washington roared back with two goals in the second to tie the game.

And then Peter Bondra, who’s already scored one of the second period goals, put the Capitals up early in the third period.

You’re not going to keep great players down, though. Joe Sakic, who’d gone five games already without scoring a goal, tied the game up just a couple minutes after Bondra’s goal.

The game tightened up after that. We didn’t see much more penalty taking, and we definitely didn’t see any more scoring. The game went to overtime tied 3-3.

And that’s when things got nasty. Adam Foote gave Richard Zednik a big elbow, and the Czech was none too happy with it. He laid such a cross check on Adam Foote that he was ejected from the game for a game misconduct.

And that’s when we saw the better Peter, Peter Forsberg, score the game-winning goal on the power play. Bourque and Hejduk got the assists.

Here’s the goal that represented a win in Roy’s column:

https://twitter.com/Avalanche/status/1266451745087148032

That win represented #448 for the Hall of Fame goalie. That made him the winningest goalie of all time as he overtook Terry Sawchuk.

Here’s Peter McNab waxing nostalgic about that season and that game in particular:

We discover something a little interesting in this video below:

Patrick Roy didn’t become the winningest goalie with the win against the Capitals! He’d done so two wins earlier against the Vancouver Canucks! That one was a decisive 5-2 win that saw Roy stop 19 of 21 shots for a .905 save percentage. (He stopped 27 of 30 for .900 against Washington.)

Nonetheless, the game against the Capitals is the one that saw Patrick Roy and the whole team celebrate while he also took the net home as a keepsake.

Patrick Roy may no longer be the winningest goalie in the regular season, but never forget those post-season numbers.  And never forget that he achieved both milestones as a member of the Colorado Avalanche.