Former Detroit Red Wings forward André Pronovost, a four-time Stanley Cup champion and the grandfather of one-time Wings first-round pick Anthony Mantha, has died at age 90.
The Montreal Canadiens announced the news.
Pronovost’s NHL story is usually told in bleu, blanc et rouge. The Shawinigan, Quebec, native won the Cup in each of his first four seasons with Montreal, from 1956-57 through 1959-60, skating on the same ice as Jean Béliveau and Maurice Richard. But his career also ran through Olympia Stadium, and that stretch still belongs to Detroit hockey history.
Boston sent him to the Red Wings on Dec. 3, 1962, in a deal for Forbes Kennedy. Pronovost arrived as a compact, two-way left wing — 5-foot-9, 185 pounds — and immediately found a role on a club still built around Gordie Howe.
In 47 games that first Detroit season, he scored 13 goals. In the 1963 playoffs he added five points in 11 games. The next year was his most complete as a Wing: 70 games, 23 points, and his best postseason anywhere, seven points (four goals) in 14 games as Detroit pushed deep into the spring of 1964.
He dressed for three more games in 1964-65 before finishing his NHL path with Minnesota. In a winged-wheel sweater he totaled 120 games, 20 goals and 42 points, plus 12 playoff points.
He was not related to Hall of Fame defenseman Marcel Pronovost, the four-time Cup winner who defined an earlier Red Wings era. The two Pronovosts simply shared a name and a league. André’s lasting Detroit tie is family. His grandson, Anthony Mantha, was Detroit’s first-round pick in 2013.
Pronovost was in the building on March 24, 2016, when Mantha scored his first NHL goal — against Montreal, no less. That night closed a circle the old winger could not have drawn when he left the Forum for the Olympia more than 50 years earlier.
Pronovost finished with 198 points in 557 NHL games and 22 more in 70 playoff games. He was never a star in Detroit, and the Wings of his years did not hoist the Cup.
What he offered was the same thing he had given Montreal: a reliable shift, a hard corner, and a willingness to play whatever role the lineup required. For a franchise that still measures itself against the 1950s and the Howe years, that kind of player is easy to overlook and harder to replace.
Hockey people in Detroit remember him now as part of a longer family line — a Cup winner who later watched a grandson pull on the same jersey.
That is a Red Wings story, even if most of the banners hang somewhere else.
