Kooks and Degenerates on Ice: Bobby Orr, the Big Bad Bruins, and the Stanley Cup Championship That Transformed Hockey

Whalen (When the Red Sox Ruled: Baseball’s First Dynasty, 1912–1918), a professor of social science at Boston University, thrillingly details the 1970 Stanley Cup championship season of the Boston Bruins. Whalen begins in 1967, when the NHL, responding to a growing interest in U.S. hockey, doubled the number of teams from the “Original Six” across the continent, detailing how Boston—which in 1924 had the first non-Canadian franchise—remained the hub of American hockey. He highlights the team’s colorful characters, whose on- and off-ice antics led one Bruins player to describe the team as “just a bunch of kooks and degenerates who get along”: the young defenseman Bobby Orr, “a human highlight reel—a Michael Jordan on ice”; the scoring champion Phil Esposito; and the perennial brawler and “wildly unpredictable” clutch scorer Derek Sanderson. Whalen vividly takes readers through the arc of the winning season, from early season struggles to the eventual Stanley Cup victory over the St. Louis Blues with Orr’s game-winning goal, captured in the famous flying Superman photo. This exciting slice of hockey history is an open-net goal for Bruins fans. [em](May) [/em]