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.