Boston Bruins Provide Safe Zone for Zadorov.

Longtime Boston Bruins season-ticket holder Kevin Vautour posed the following question this morning as we were wrapping up our Zoom meeting with Ontario-based, hockey historian Jeff Miclash: “Why is Nikita Zadorov on his fourth NHL team?”

Kevin undersold his question: The six-year, $30 million contract he signed with the Boston Bruins on July 1 makes it six NHL cities for Zadorov.

That fact alone renders the party line about the developmental curve of behemoth skaters thrown to the wolves straight from juniors a tough sell.

You know how it works, the physically imposing defenseman who could do nothing more for himself against the kids eventually has to buck up and play the kids’ game against men. It usually isn’t pretty in a case like this. Not for years.

NHL teams that introduce this kind of player to the big leagues are invariably outside the playoff 16, and patience is hard to sustain three or four years into a career given to crash-and-burn outcomes or otherwise-slow development.

Even Chris Pronger, the only defenseman not named Bobby Orr to win the Hart Trophy since the NHL’s 1967 expansion, was traded two years into his NHL career (by Hartford to St. Louis for Brendan Shanahan).

Pronger obviously found traction in St. Louis, where he won his Hart Trophy after his plus-52 led the league. Pavel Bure (58) was the lone 50-goal scorer of the 1999-2000 season and finished third in the voting behind runner-up point machine Jaromir Jagr.

Had the vote been taken in 2024, Pronger would have never won the Hart, not in an age when plus-minus is sneered at as too primitive a statistic in a world prioritizing probabilities over results, and certainly not against two of the world’s more exciting producers of offense.

Bull crap. The Hart is voted to the player judged to be most valuable to his team. That a defenseman never gets a 21st century sniff is a sad sign of the times; that a top-five Hart Trophy vote for a defensive defenseman in 2018 became cause for derision on anti-social media was, frankly, disappointing.

I digress.

Nikita Zadorov is not Chris Pronger, but it’s almost impossible to dive into a discussion about the 6-foot-6, 248-pound, left-shot defenseman from eastern Europe without referencing Zdeno Chara, who also signed with the Boston Bruins (in 2006) at the ripe old age of … 29.

In a clear-cut case of Big Zee envy, the Buffalo Sabres drafted Zadorov with the 16th overall pick in the 2013 NHL Draft.

The Bruins had just gone to their second Stanley Cup final in three seasons, winning in 2011. Chara was, by then, the gold standard for defensive defensemen and was emerging as one of the great leaders and successful captains in modern Bruins history. Chara was amidst a run of eight, top-five finishes in Norris Trophy voting over the 10-year sweet spot of his career when the Sabres looked to Zadorov.

In the same way that Bobby Orr sent amateur scouts searching for puck-moving defensemen and how Cam Neely sent them searching for hockey’s next power forward, so did Chara’s impact on the Boston Bruins influence leaguewide attempts to replicate his effect not only on the game but on his own team.

Zadorov was such an attempt.

What happened?

Similarly to Chara and Pronger, Zadorov got traded only a couple of years into his NHL career, in his case to Colorado when Buffalo had a chance to acquire center Ryan O’Reilly. He played five seasons for the Avalanche, who moved him to Chicago in a two-for-two swap that landed the Avs Brandon Saad.

Twice he was moved by rebuilding teams for draft picks, and twice he has signed as a free agent, most recently moving on from the Canucks to the Bruins.

Broken down, Zadorov’s career path is not unusual, but leaving Colorado is probably the one transaction that requires greater explanation. A smattering of articles reporting the October 2020 deal with Chicago indicated that Colorado GM Joe Sakic had more reliable options for defense core on the upswing toward Stanley Cup contention and wishing not to undermine that climb via the most impactful of developmental curves, defense. The Avs would reach the promised land in 2022, two seasons after making the deal.

Four seasons later, Zadorov becomes a Bruin.

These last four years are, for Bruins GM Don Sweeney, critical years of development. Despite putting up a career-high 125 penalty minutes last season (a full month after UFA, we can call it that now), the Bruins believe Zadorov is no longer a loose cannon and a penalty waiting to happen.

But that’s not all, and this might be the most important point: The Boston Bruins have tweaked but have never forsaken the zone defense with which Claude Julien historically calmed their team defense.

Bruce Cassidy’s change was in green-lighting his defenseman to step outside the faceoff dots to cut off plays provided they were in the neutral zone and had appropriate backchecking support in place. Jim Montgomery has likewise taken the elimination practice a step further, but while some teams (most notably Carolina) play man-to-man coverage, the Bruins’ default position is still zone.

When the opponent has the puck in Boston’s D zone, the defenseman reach but rarely run out to scrum for the puck. That’s what the backchecking forwards do, and the D supports that effort. Low-hanging fruit they will grab, but the system has not changed.

A zone defense can help more than one kind of defenseman; it helped the talented but rambunctious Dennis Wideman calm his overall game and become a plus player. It gave Chara structural boundaries that helped him avoid trying to do too much, a turning point in his career. It will help Zadorov in ways yet to be revealed.

One thing Zadorov will do is allow Charlie McAvoy to play the big games better shielded by opponents given to torpedo hits and any-all manner of distraction that can preoccupy No. 73 with the next hit he takes or makes. Better for Boston’s best defenseman to focus on what he wants to bring. Zadorov will help with that.

In an Instagram message, the Moscow native blew kisses to the Vancouver fans, citing family reasons for his decision to join the Bruins.

Compiled with coincidental comings and goings adding up to the equivalent of a significant, multi-player trade, Zadorov and center Elias Lindholm come to Boston, and Jake DeBrusk, Danton Heinen and Derek Forbort all go to Vancouver.