Boston, Bruins

The Boston Bruins are a professional ice hockey team based in Boston. They compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Atlantic Division in the Eastern Conference. The team has been in existence since 1924, making them the third-oldest active team in the NHL, and the oldest to be based in the United States.

The Bruins are one of the Original Six NHL teams, along with the Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Blackhawks, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and Toronto Maple Leafs. They have won six Stanley Cup championships, tied for fourth-most of any team with the Blackhawks, and tied for second-most for an NHL team based in the United States, also with the Blackhawks (after the Red Wings, who have 11).

The first facility to host the Bruins was the Boston Arena (now known as Matthews Arena), the world's oldest (built 1909–10) indoor ice hockey facility still in use for the sport at any level of competition. Following the Bruins' departure from the Boston Arena, the team played its home games at the Boston Garden for 67 seasons, beginning in 1928 and concluding in 1995, when they moved to the TD Garden.

In 1924, at the convincing of Boston grocery magnate Charles Adams, the National Hockey League decided to expand to the United States. Adams had come to greatly enjoy ice hockey while watching the 1924 Stanley Cup Finals between the NHL champion Montreal Canadiens and the WCHL champion Calgary Tigers. The previous year in 1923, Thomas Duggan received options on three NHL franchises for the United States, and he sold one to Charles Adams, who in turn, persuaded the NHL to grant him a franchise for the city of Boston, which occurred on November 1, 1924. With the Montreal Maroons, the team was one of the NHL's first expansion teams, and the first NHL team to be based in the United States. Adams' first act was to hire Art Ross, a former star player and innovator, as general manager. Ross was the face of the franchise for the next thirty years, including four separate stints as coach.

Adams directed Ross to come up with a nickname that would portray an untamed animal displaying speed, agility and cunning. Ross came up with "Bruins", a name for brown bears used in classic folk tales (from the Dutch "Bruin", the name of the bear in Reynard the Fox, literal meaning "brown"). The team's bearlike nickname also went along with the team's original uniform colors of brown and yellow, which came from Adams' grocery chain, First National Stores.

Even though the NHL had by 1942 been reduced to the six teams that would in the modern era be called the "Original Six", talent was depleted enough that freak seasons could take place, as in 1944, when Bruin Herb Cain would set the then-NHL record for points in a season with 82. But the Bruins did not make the playoffs that season and Cain was out of the NHL two seasons later.

The stars returned for the 1945–46 season, and Clapper led the team back to the Stanley Cup Final as player-coach. He retired as a player after the next season, becoming the first player to play twenty NHL seasons, but stayed on as coach for two more years. Brimsek proved to be not as good as he was before the war, and after 1946 the Bruins lost in the first playoff round three straight years, resulting in Clapper's resignation. Brimsek was traded to the last-place Chicago Black Hawks in 1949, followed by the unexpected lifetime ban of promising young star Don Gallinger on suspicion of gambling. The only remaining quality young player who stayed with the team for any length was forward Johnny Peirson, recognizable to fans of a later era as the Bruins' television color commentator in the 1970s.

During the 1948–49 season, the original form of the "spoked-B" logo, with a small number "24" to the left of the capital B signifying the calendar year in the 20th century in which the Bruins team first played, and a similarly small "49" to the right of the "B", for the then-current season's calendar year in the 20th century,[12] appeared on their home uniforms—a nod to the Boston area's nickname of "The Hub". The following season, the logo was modified into the basic "spoked-B" form that was to be used, virtually unchanged (except for certain proportions within the logo), through the 1993–94 season.

The 1950s began with Charles Adams' son Weston (who had been team president since 1936) facing financial trouble. He was forced to accept a buyout offer from Walter A. Brown, the owner of the National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics and the Garden, in 1951. Although there were some instances of success (such as making the Stanley Cup Final in 1953, 1957, and 1958, only to lose to the Montreal Canadiens each time), the Bruins mustered only four winning seasons between 1947 and 1967. They missed the playoffs eight straight years between 1960 and 1967.

In 1954, on New Year's Day, Robert Skrak, an assistant to Frank Zamboni, the inventor of the best-known ice resurfacing machine of the time, demonstrated a very early model of the machine at Boston Garden to the team management, and as a result, the Bruins ordered one of the then-produced "Model E" resurfacers to be used at the Garden, the first known NHL team to acquire one of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous "Zambonis" for their own use. The Bruins' Zamboni Model E, factory serial number 21—used as late as the 1980s on an emergency basis—eventually ended up in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in 1988 for preservation.

On January 18, 1958, a milestone in NHL history occurred as the first black person ever to play in the NHL stepped onto the ice for the Bruins, New Brunswick-born left wing Willie O'Ree. He played in 45 games for the Bruins over the 1957–58 and 1960–61 seasons, scoring six goals and ten assists in his NHL career.

During this period, the farm system of the Bruins was not as expansive or well-developed as most of the other five teams. The Bruins sought players not protected by the other teams, and in like fashion to the aforementioned signing of Willie O'Ree, the team signed Tommy Williams from the 1960 Olympic-gold medal-winning American national men's hockey team—at the time the only American player in the NHL—in 1962. The "Uke Line"—named for the Ukrainian heritage of Johnny Bucyk, Vic Stasiuk, and Bronco Horvath – came to Boston in 1957 and enjoyed four productive offensive seasons, heralding, along with scoring stalwarts Don McKenney and Fleming MacKell, the successful era of the late 1950s. There followed a long and difficult reconstruction period in the early to mid-1960s.