Harry Sinden proud that B's have kept ‘Be-A-Bruin' mojo alive all these years

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Count legendary Bruins head coach and longtime executive Harry Sinden as a big fan of this current group of Black and Gold players.

The venerable Sinden was on a Zoom call with reporters commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Stanley Cup team that will also be featured in a Big, Bad Bruins documentary premiering this weekend ("The 1970 Bruins: Big Bad & Bobby" on May 10 at 8 p.m.) on the NHL Network.

So naturally some of the conversation was about some good, old-fashioned, old-time hockey, but there was also time to gauge Sinden’s hockey thoughts on what he sees with the current edition of the Bruins as well.

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Certainly, he wasn’t going to give out public advice to the current Bruins management group that has pushed the team to three straight postseason appearances, and brought them to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final last June. Instead, Sinden was thankful that the current group of Bruins have kept intact the franchise tradition of tough, skilled, hard-working players from the heyday of the Cup teams in the early 1970s.

In other words, the Black and Gold have not lost their mojo.

Nowadays the Bruins aren’t exactly identical to the teams that had the NHL’s best player in Bobby Orr or later editions that featured all-around Big Bad Bruins brawlers like Terry O’Reilly, Stan Jonathan or John Wensink.

Instead it’s about a combination of skilled top-line players like Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak, and some old-school, hard-nosed, on-the-edge players like Zdeno Chara and Brad Marchand that keep the Big, Bad Bruins tradition alive.

It’s a tradition that Sinden was afraid would fall by the wayside, but that hasn’t happened as guys like O’Reilly, Cam Neely, Milan Lucic and Chara have carried the torch over the last 50 years while being extremely tough to play against.

“I think I would call it whatever way Don Sweeney is going to call it, and Bruce Cassidy, and Cam Neely,” said Sinden. “They came in here with a few problems. Don Sweeney’s first draft he had never seen of the players play. He’d spent all his time in Providence and had nothing to do with the three draft picks we had in the first round. He had never really seen them play at all and had to live with [the picks] who they are.

“We came out of it okay and we’ve done better since. I just think that what the team and players have established as an example for the way you have to behave and the way you have to play has never gone away. The fans have not gone away and you guys [in the media] certainly won’t let it go away. They bought into it big-time. It has a lot to do with Cam, with Donnie and with Bruce. There are so many years that I’d fear we would lose the Be-A-Bruin type of thing, which is maybe just something that’s in my mind. We had a couple of good players we got in drafts, but I never thought of them as Bruins and we couldn’t. But as long as we keep that alive we’re going to be challenging for the Stanley Cup forever.”

When the regular season was put on pause, the Bruins were atop the NHL standings with 100 points and they had traded for another big-bodied, tough player in Nick Ritchie at the trade deadline while in hot pursuit of another Stanley Cup.

It’s unknown when the 2019-20 hockey season will get going again, but the B’s brain trust continues to keep the Big Bad Bruin tradition going even if the NHL has totally changed its idea of hockey toughness. And that keeps a smile on the 87-year-old Sinden’s face as he watches as many Bruins games as he can these days.

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