Welcome Back: Boston Bruins Top Man Is Fully Back….
Oskar Steen, a sixth-round draft choice of the Boston Bruins in 2016, officially left the team on Saturday after signing a five-year contract with the Swedish Hockey League’s Farjestad BK.
In his 60 career regular-season games, Steen scored four goals and eight points while playing for the Bruins for portions of four seasons from 2020 to 24. The 26-year-old forward spent four seasons with Farjestad before agreeing to an entry-level three-year contract with Boston on May 3, 2019.
Along with playing 221 games with the American Hockey League’s Providence Bruins, the 5-foot-10, 195-pound winger recorded 53 goals and 63 assists. Steen’s hockey career will probably end in his home country of Sweden.
It seems appropriate to look at his top 25 players and pinpoint a specific aspect of each player’s game as Boston Bruins general manager Don Sweeney wraps up his offseason work of trying to come to an agreement with goaltender Jeremy Swayman and minor league forward Marc McLaughlin on new contracts.
Jeremy Swayman: Swayman showed his mettle in the postseason pressure cooker, but the 50-something starts he will likely make in his first NHL season as a number-one goalkeeper (in more than uniform number) are unknown territory. It is suspected that the Bruins would not have signed Nikita Zadorov if Linus Ullmark had continued to share the net.
Joonas Korpisalo: Like Ullmark and Jaroslav Halak before him, this European journeyman is being brought into a competitive, positive environment outside of the playoffs, where he can flourish and get advice from the finest in his field, “Goalie Bob” Essensa.
Nikita Zadorov: One question is if “Radko” is still there in Zadorov’s game, and another is whether that is a positive thing. The 6-foot-6, 248-pound Russian defenseman will be the target of opponents’ initial attempts to provoke him into the penalty box. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try the chicken dance. Zadorov needs to block out the noise in order to assist Charlie McAvoy in making the game simpler.
