Zdeno Chara: From Laughingstock to Stanley Cup Champion

At first, Zdeno Chara’s transfer from the Ottawa Senators to the Boston Bruins could not have been more ill-timed. What ultimately came to be for the peerlessly towering defenseman in 2011 was the hypothetical vision of countless “What if?” questioners in 2007.

Had he stayed in the Canadian capital for one more year, he could have spelled the difference in the 2007 Stanley Cup championship.

He could have played on the NHL’s final frontier four years earlier.

He could have built upon four reckonable seasons with the Senators and stifled the likes of Anaheim Ducks scorers Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Teemu Selanne en route to Ottawa’s first title.

Instead, in the absence of the 6-foot-9, 260-pounder, the Senators suffocated and conceded the Cup in five games for the shortest title series since the 2004-05 lockout.

But at least Chara’s old friends had the privilege of playing through the balance of April and May and into the first week of June.

In his new Boston digs, it would be an understatement to say that the Bruins resurgence, ostensibly coming with Chara as the new captain, got off to a false start.

Delayed gratification? In retrospect, that’s one way to put it, though perhaps a mild one at that.

Before coming to the Bruins, Chara had already endured varying degrees of futility in four years apiece with the Senators and New York Islanders. But the ridiculousness peaked when he joined his third NHL team.

Along with fellow free agent Marc Savard, new general manager Peter Chiarelli (a former assistant in the Ottawa front office) and new head coach Dave Lewis, Chara was raring to replenish the Bruins in 2006-07.

Upon assuming the “C” previously sported by Joe Thornton before he even played a regular-season game with the Black and Gold, Chara fell victim to Lewis’ blunderstruck approach. He was overworked most nights, playing Ray Bourque-like minutes that he was not capable of handling. And he had an even worse time handling the puck in all three zones.

Incidentally, Chara’s 43 points matched his output the previous season with the Senators. But that only accentuated his egregious minus-21 rating, which reeked of regression to his forgettable years as an Islander.

None of the regulars on the 2006-07 Bruins roster finished with a positive plus/minus, but Chara jutted out with the worst rating among all defenders to finish the year there. (Brad Stuart and Paul Mara had a minus-22, but were both traded at midseason.)

A third-round choice by the Islanders in the 1996 NHL entry draft, Chara spent the bulk of his first two professional seasons fostering his skills with two woebegone AHL franchises, the Kentucky Thoroughblades and Lowell Lock Monsters. When he put in the occasional appearance at Nassau Coliseum, he made ripples in the media simply for being the tallest competitor in league history.

Once the trivia questions lost their luster and Chara was a full-timer in The Show, his peerless stature was eclipsed by his egregious stats.

In back-to-back years (1999-00 and 2000-01), Chara mustered a mere two goals and retained a minus-27 rating. That constituted the worst rating on a team that was getting nowhere near an end to its perpetual playoff no-shows.

Ironically, the year after they parted, both Chara and the Islanders did reach the Stanley Cup tournament. The Toronto Maple Leafs ultimately took responsibility for ending both runs, bumping the Islanders out of the first round in seven games and then ousting Chara’s Senators in the second round.

Chara was at least with a contender now and he was pitching in more delectable data. But he and the Senators never played in June and the path that was his first full six NHL seasons would soon recycle itself when he signed with the Bruins as a free agent in 2006.

If Chara’s first year in Boston was a virtual return to the floundering Islanders, then his second season as the Bruins captain was a rerun of 2001-02. With Claude Julien replacing Lewis, the all-around bleeding stopped. Chara increased his production by six goals and eight points while elevating his plus/minus to plus-14, a good 35 points from the previous campaign.

Not to mention, the 2007-08 Bruins returned to the playoffs, though they expectedly snuffed out of the first round against Montreal.

Before long, Chara’s once-doubted leadership qualities were building up immunity as the BS built up respectability ahead of schedule. On an individual platform, he kicked abundant ice chips over the Lewis debacle by garnering his first Norris Trophy in 2009.

From a team standpoint, Chara’s second season in Boston was not unlike his second season in Ottawa. In both cases, Chara partook in a rise to first place in the Eastern Conference, only to be let down by a premature playoff exit brought on by a Game 7 loss.

The 2003 Senators fell shy of a Stanley Cup final berth at the hands of the Devils, while Boston was dislodged by Carolina in the second round in 2009.

From there on, especially now as an established captain and hardware-caliber blueliner, Chara would be judged based on his team’s spring success.

Would the Bruins of the new decade just be the Senators of the past decade all over again?

By the time Chara shook hands with deputy commissioner Bill Daly and summoned his teammates to pose with the Prince of Wales Trophy last May 27, most signs pointed to an eventual “no.”

Four years after he had missed out on testing himself against Anaheim’s favored sizzlers, Chara was now tasked with taming twins Henrik and Daniel Sedin as the Bruins engaged the regular-season champion Vancouver Canucks.

On the heels of a career-high plus-33 rating in the regular season, one that nearly earned him a second Norris Trophy, Chara helped to confine the Sedins to a combined three points in seven games.

Between the two of them, Henrik and Daniel could only muster two goals in the championship series. That’s as many as Chara had scored in each of his three seasons as a regular on Long Island.

Furthermore, playing 24 out of 25 postseason games in 2011, Chara duplicated his 2-7-9 scoring log from a full 82-game regular season in New York in 2000-01.

But whereas one of those campaigns culminated in Chara transferring his personal belongings from New York to Ottawa, the other ended with him carrying the NHL’s most prized possession from Vancouver to Boston.

It has now been a full decade since Chara doffed his last Islanders jersey. It has been five years since he bolted from Ottawa and four since he last had to listen to Lewis.

Of those four parties―himself, his first two NHL employers and his first Boston skipper―only Chara has achieved late spring fulfillment.

Guess delayed gratification is still gratification.