Milan Lucic turned down another Original 6 offer!
He could have joined a different 06 team.
HockeyFeed
NHL tough guy Milan Lucic is back to where is National Hockey League career began, agreeing to a free agent contract with the Boston Bruins after completing a seven year contract that he originally signed with the Edmonton Oilers in 2016.
While he was an extremely valuable member of the 2011 Stanley Cup champion Bruins and continued to consistently provide offense in subsequent years, his stats began to diminish in a big way after his first year with the Oilers. This past season with Calgary, he racked up only seven goals with 12 assists, his lowest career point total.
However, his skill set was still enough to have drawn interest from a rival Original 6 teams in the Toronto Maple Leafs. He would explain that he turned down an offer from the Leafs because of his time with the Bruins, and that it simply wouldn't feel right.
He also revealed that he had another contract offer from yet another Original 6 team in the Chicago Blackhawks, who won the NHL Draft Lottery and used the 1st overall pick to select phenom forward Connor Bedard. According to Lucic, he would have had plenty of relatives in the crowd at United Center if he had signed in the Windy City.
“Not only that, but you get to wear one of the nicest, if not the nicest, jerseys in the league,” Lucic said of the potential of playing for the Blackhawks. “Cool city. Awesome city. For me, I think I have the most family out of anywhere in Chicago. I would’ve been playing in front of family on a night-to-night basis.”
“The main thing for me, too, was I kind of wanted to go back to an Original 6 team and stuff like that because I really enjoyed that,” Lucic said. “Sometimes, when you start somewhere, you don’t really fully understand what it means until you’re gone, and I don’t want to say that I took it for granted because I didn’t."
Lucic is one of the last active NHL players from the 2011 Bruins Cup-winning team now that Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci have both decided to hang up the skates.
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