It’s yet another reminder of how difficult it is for rawboned kids to make an immediate impact at the NHL level, as well as how the truly talented keep pushing, setting their goals higher, wanting more. The standard injury caveat aside, Bedard has the skills and drive to be an offensive force for years to come.
Following the Bruins’ visit to the Blackhawks on Wednesday, the slick pivot had 19 points in 26 games and again was atop his club’s scoring chart. He’s on track for approximately the same solid numbers he put up as a freshman. All may not be great for the highly-skilled sophomore, but he’s on the right track, even if he went 12 games without a goal (0-6–6) starting in late October.
Connor Bedard , the 19-year-old Blackhawks center, recently voiced frustration that his production has not taken flight this season, following a rookie year in which the No. 1 draft pick led Chicago in scoring (61 points).
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Bedard is small (5 feet 10 inches, 185 pounds) by NHL standards, and he’ll need to add muscle. Equally critical will be the needed build out of roster talent around him. Lack of talent led to coach Luke Richardson getting canned Thursday, less than 24 hours after the 4-2 loss to the Bruins.
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The Bruins saw how hard instant stardom was to attain for wunderkinds when Joe Thornton arrived on Causeway Street as the No. 1 pick in 1997. Jumbo Joe had size (a gangly 6-4, upward of 200 pounds) and reach and junior hockey bona fides (41 goals and 122 points the previous season for OHL Sault Ste. Marie), only to tally a meager 3-4–7 in 55 games as a rookie with the Black and Gold. He was barely on the offensive radar for a team led that season by Jason Allison (33 goals/83 points).
Seven slots lower in the 1997 draft, the Bruins grabbed Sergei Samsonov, the Magical Muscovite, who turned 19 in October of ‘97. He collected 22 goals and 47 points and was named Rookie of the Year (Calder Trophy).
All these years later, it’s Thornton (career points: 1,539), who soon will get the call rightly welcoming him to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Samsonov enjoyed a solid, albeit not spectacular, NHL career.
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By the end of their rookie seasons, betting around the league would have had Samsonov headed to the HHOF and Thornton figured as a potential No. 1 bust. Reminder: For most, it’s a journey best not predicted in the first 2-3 years.
Over the last quarter-century, the best 18-year-old Bruin to walk right in, sit right down, and let his career roll on was Patrice Bergeron — also soon to be handed his HHOF plaque, ring, and navy blue jacket.
Bergeron arrived in his first Bruins training camp 18 in 2003 with few expectations, the muted ballyhoo that surrounds second-round picks straight out of junior (Quebec League).
“Bergy was a guy that we didn’t anticipate making the roster out of training camp,” Mike Sullivan, Bergeron’s coach that rookie season, recalled when his Penguins played in Boston on Black Friday. “But he continued to impress in training camp, kept playing and playing, and he just made it difficult to take him out of the lineup . . . and never looked back.”
Bergeron, because of his overall skill set and savant-like mind for the game, early on shaped and centered his game on defense, being a sound 200-foot player. The expectations surrounding Bergeron never were that he would pace or carry the club’s offense. He got there, though, as his game matured. For a large chunk of his career, he also was among the game’s premier faceoff artists. He finished with 1,040 points, never more than 79 in a season.
Though only 18 upon arrival, Bergeron immediately displayed an intelligence for the game, a hockey IQ that defined his game perhaps better than points or statistics. He was rarely, if ever, in the wrong position.
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“You could see it right away,” noted Sullivan. “He had a real high hockey IQ. He was a fierce competitor. You have those two things, you have a real chance.”
It was a difficult league for an 18-year-old to crack in Bergeron’s day, reminded Sullivan, and it remains so 20-plus years later.
“It takes a unique player, I think, for an 18-year-old to enter a man’s league and have an impact’ Sullivan said. “I think it speaks volumes for those 18-year-olds that are able to do it. There haven’t been a lot of them. And it’s every bit as hard now as it was then.”
Even as a young pro, Patrice Bergeron displayed an incredibly mature hockey IQ. Chin, Barry Globe Staff
MAKING HIS MARK
Grebenkin a big hit in Toronto
Just this past spring, Nikita Grebenkin won the Cup. That’s the Gagarin Cup, the shiny KHL trophy named after famed Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (we deal in all rockets here, Richard or otherwise).
A spare rookie forward with the Maple Leafs, the 21-year-old Grebenkin made some good trouble Monday might when he put a solid lick on Blackhawks blue liner Wyatt Kaiser in the final seconds of a 4-1 Chicago loss.
Kaiser, bulldozed by the 6-2, 210-pound Russian right winger, objected to the smack behind his own net with the final horn about to blow. A scrum ensued, bodies having to be pulled apart amid happy Leafs fans filing out of the rink in Toronto.
In fairness to Kaiser, no one likes getting smoked in the final seconds of a three-goal loss (or win), but apparently no one handed Grebenkin the book of NHL Gentleman’s Rules and Conduct before he left the mining town of Serov, Russia, to dig for fortune in the icy sheets of North America.
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“Game not done,” a matter-of-fact Grebenkin explained the next day after the Leafs workout. “I play, you play. Don’t stop. Don’t relax. You play NHL. You understand. I kill you, you kill me. It’s business. No problem.”
Grebenkin is 100 percent right. Don’t get caught buttering your postgame popcorn until the final horn blows. Kaiser for sure knows that now, if it wasn’t made clear prior to his turning pro out of NCAA Minnesota Duluth.
No surprise, Grebenkin has caught the attention of Maple Leafs bench boss Craig Berube, a man who favors the game’s nightly cocktail of action shaken, stirred, and repeated.
“I like his grit, his determination that he plays with,” Berube told Toronto media. “Now, there’s a lot to learn. He’s a young guy and hasn’t played a lot of pro [in North America]. He’s learning on the fly and he’s strong. He’s a big guy that’s strong on the puck. He just has to learn the game.”
Nikita Grebenkin has transitioned nicely to the NHL from Russia’s KHL, thanks to the gritty nature of his game. Chris Tanouye/Getty
ETC.
Sanderson had strange weight loss plan
There were only glimpses of Derek Sanderson, mostly video and and black-and-white photos of the Bruins’ glory days, during last Sunday’s 100-year celebration at the Garden.
Now 78 years old and living year-round on the Cape, The Turk remained home on the couch, nursing a cold, through the weekend. But he’s up and around, he reports, and continuing physical therapy in hopes of renewing his golf passion at the Ridge Club in Sandwich this spring.
“Man, arthritis is tough,” said the irrepressible Sanderson. “My fingers are all bent.”
Sanderson, the now-extinct sweep check a trademark of his game, in the last couple of years slimmed down by 58 pounds and has been able to maintain his weight at 180, right around his playing weight when he made the Boston roster, at age 21, in the autumn of 1967, and went on to be the league’s rookie of the year.
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As for a weight loss plan, Sanderson would not recommend the, let’s say, circuitous path he took. It began in September 2022, when his appetite disappeared.
“Feeling sick, didn’t want to eat, almost always like I was going to throw up,” he recalled. “But never did.”
By November he was subsisting only on desserts, and by January 2023 he landed in the hospital with a bad case of COVID. While he recovered from the virus, he said, medical staff conducted tests aimed at finding the root cause of his nausea and loss of appetite.
“A [CT] scan came back and they’d found a piece of metal stuck in my esophagus, turned sideways at the entrance to the stomach,” he said. ‘I said, holy . . . what . . . metal?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, metal, and we’re going to go in tomorrow and get it.”
To which the forever unfazed Sanderson offered, “OK, good.”
Sanderson was in his room, post-surgery, when doctors handed him their finding, what he described as “a small, circular brass, shiny thing.”
Upon close inspection of the small metal disc, eyeglasses fixed in place, Sanderson made out the three trees that serve as the logo of the Ridge Club.
“I’d swallowed a ball marker!” he said. “I swallowed the ball marker, never ate for three months, lost all the weight, and never gained it back!”
Which raises the obvious question: How does one swallow a ball marker, roughly the size of a penny or nickel, and not know it?
“Well, I’ve got dentures, so you don’t taste it or feel it,” Sanderson said. “So, I guess somebody handed me a Coke or something and I took a big swig, and boop! I drank it down. That’s the only plausible reason why I could have a ball marker in my stomach.”
The greatest benefit of losing all that weight, noted Sanderson, is the stress it has taken off his oft-surgically repaired hips.
“The hips don’t bother me at all now, much better,” he said. “It’s my back, shoulder . . . the arthritis is really bad, my fingers, but I can still hold a golf club, so I am OK.”
From left, Boston Bruins Derek Sanderson, Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito celebrate after winning the Stanley Cup against the St. Louis Blues at the Boston Garden on May 10, 1970. Frank O’Brien/Globe Staff
Sinden said it best
Former Bruins general manager/president Harry Sinden also wasn’t in the house for the 100-year celebration, but he appeared on the Garden’s big video board and, no surprise, was the centennial’s most eloquent contributor.
Sinden, 92, acknowledged the “great honor” it is to represent the Bruins, the city, and state, and then hit on one of his favorite subjects, the core of what it means to be a Bruin — and more broadly, what it takes to be a successful NHL player.
“The most important traits are skill and will,” mused Sinden, repeating the mantra he used time and again during his long run in the Causeway corner office. “Hockey is a game where you have to have the will to play. You can have all the skill in the world, but if you don’t have the will that’s required on the ice, it’s probably true that you won’t be as successful as you could be.”
Old foe joins festivities
Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden, decked out in the all-too-familiar red Canadiens sweater, joined in the center-ice ceremony for Sunday’s festivities. What would a glorious centennial celebration be without a Forum ghost making a courtesy sweep down Causeway Street?
Dryden was the gardien de but, of course, for that fateful “too many men” game at the Forum on May 10, 1979, when the Habs rallied with goals by Guy Lafleur and Yvon Lambert (OT), eliminating the Bruins in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup semifinals.
Two things we didn’t know that night: 1. It would be the final game Don Cherry would coach for the Bruins and 2. Dryden, only 31, played only five more games (defeating the Rangers for the Stanley Cup) and soon after abruptly called it a career, leaving the game and glory behind after backing the Habs to a sixth title in his eight playoff seasons.
That, folks, is a mike drop.
To this day, even some of the Black-and-Gold’s most ardent fans remain unaware Dryden’s rights were briefly owned by the Bruins. They drafted him with the 14th pick in 1964, only to deal him days later (June 28) to the Canadiens as part of a four-player swap.
The Bruins packaged Dryden and Alex Campbell, a right winger whom they’d taken No. 2 in that draft, for defenseman Guy Allen and right winger Paul Reid.
Allen, selected 12th by the Habs that same spring, had played at OHL Niagara Falls with Sanderson. Reid was chosen 18th by the Habs out of OHL Oshawa, where he was briefly teammates with phenom-to-be Bobby Orr.
“Oh, I remember Allen,” recalled Sanderson. “Played point on the power play for us, and could he shoot, just drill it.”
Dryden, who toured Harvard before opting to attend Cornell, went 76-4-1 (this is not a typo) in three seasons with the Big Red. By the time Dryden debuted in the ‘71 playoffs for the Canadiens (opponent: is that really important?), Reid had been out of hockey for a couple of years, and both Allen and Campbell would call it quits after the spring of ‘72. None of the three ever made it to the NHL.
High-flying Russians
While true not all highly touted Russian phenoms light it up upon reaching the NHL, a select few have shot out the lights, among them top gunners Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, and Nikita Kucherov (the trio combining for 1,704 goals and 3,802 points at last look).
Early this past week, the Wild ranked No. 1 in the league standings and their star Russian winger, Kirill Kaprizov, led the league in points (38).
Granted, the season is only at its one-third mark, but no Minnesota NHLer (wearing either the North Stars or Wild logo) has finished as the league’s top scorer.
Kaprizov had played in 302 regular-season games, potted 176 goals and collected 369 points as weekend play approached. Since entering the league in the fall of 2020, he ranked ninth for points per game (1.22), with fellow Russians Kucherov (1.55) and Artemi Panarin (1.30) second and fifth, respectively.
Unlike many of his fellow Russian stars, Kaprizov was not high on anyone’s radar entering the 2015 draft (groan here, Bruins fans). The Wild essentially took a flyer on him at No. 135 and he didn’t opt to try the NHL until the fall of 2020, some six months prior to turning age 24. Until then, he was making a decent buck playing for CSKA Red Army in Moscow.
Not even five years later, he’s pushed his way to the top of the scoring heap, and as of July 1, with a year left on his current deal (five years/$45 million), he can cash in with the Wild a year ahead of his UFA threshold. Likely target: the eight-year/$112 million extension Leon Draisaitl signed over the summer with the Oilers.
Kirill Kaprizov leads the NHL in points. Bailey Hillesheim/Associated Press
Loose pucks
Dino Ciccarelli, among the most prolific North Stars scorers, finished sixth in league scoring (103 points) in 1986-87 and ninth (106) in 1981-82. Ciccarelli, who will turn 65 on Feb. 8, finished with 608 goals and 1,200 points. Soon to be passed by Sidney Crosby (600 goals), Ciccarelli ranks 19th on the league’s all-time goal scoring list . . . Nikita Grebenkin won the Gagarin Cup this past spring with Magnitogorsk Metallurg, on a roster that included Luke Johnson, a former Blackhawks draft pick who played college three seasons at North Dakota . . . A couple of Sundays ago, this space led with Phil Esposito and the online auction that the Bruins legend used to sell some of his precious mementoes. The auction closed Wednesday, and the two items that brought the biggest haul were his 1970 Cup ring ($39,203) and a Bruins sweater ($24,244) that he wore in one of the dozen games he played in prior to being dealt to the Rangers in November 1975. A pair of yellow chairs from the old Garden brought $1,837. Esposito’s Hockey Hall of Fame blue blazer might have been the best deal of all: $1,156.
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com.