The Boston Bruins are the NHL’s oldest American franchise. The Bruins have been around since 1924, and have been considered by most to be part of the NHL’s Original Six teams. While it’s hard to rate every last man who has ever wore the Bruins jersey(in all its incarnations), the team at Causeway Crowd will attempt to come up with the absolute best of the best here.
From Causeway Crowd’s Matt Pueschel:
Puck Prose
There were some very tough choices and other deserving players too so this is by no means a perfect list. I used ‘body of work’ primarily, but also looked at ‘high impact’ and ‘consummate Bruin’ as other criteria. It would have also been good to see what bright young stars that burnt out all too quickly such as Normand Leveille (cerebral aneurysm at 19), Gord Kluzak (only played 4 full seasons due to injuries) or Gilles Gilbert (who had a few stellar years for B’s before eventually leaving for Detroit) could have done over a whole career.
This also has to exclude elite talents Tyler Seguin and Joe Thornton if management had not been so trigger-happy to trade them. Sergei Samsonov easily could have made the list, having scored 164 goals and 376 points in 514 games for the B’s, and David Krejci has 433 points in 573 games. Other tried and true Bruins deserve credit too for the consistent hard-working roles they filled like Ed Westfall, Stan Jonathan and Teddy Green, who continued playing solid D into the early ’70s for Boston with a metal plate in his head even after enduring a life-threatening injury from a stick fight in 1969.
Next: #30 should be familiar to even new fans