subject: The Boston Bruins Tickets : Boston Has The Second Highest Total Of Stanley Cup Championships [print this page] The Boston Bruins are a professional ice hockey team based in Boston, Massachusetts. They are members of the Northeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). The team has been in existence since 1924, entering the league as the first United States-based expansion franchise. They are also an Original Six team, along with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, New York Rangers, Montreal Canadiens, and Chicago Blackhawks.
Boston currently has the second highest total of Stanley Cup championships won by an American team at five, with the Detroit Red Wings winning 11. Their home arena is the TD Garden, where they have played since 1995 after leaving the Boston Garden (which had been their home since 1928).
In 1923, at the convincing of Boston grocery tycoon Charles Adams, the National Hockey League decided to expand to the United States. Adams had fallen in love with hockey while watching the 1924 Stanley Cup Finals between the NHL champion Montreal Canadiens and the WCHL champion Calgary Tigers. He persuaded the NHL to grant him a franchise for Boston, which occurred on November 1, 1924. With the Montreal Maroons, the team was one of the NHL's first expansion teams.
Adams' first act was to hire Art Ross, a former star player and innovator, as general manager. Ross was the face of the franchise for the next thirty years, including four separate stints as coach.Adams directed Ross to come up with a nickname that would portray an untamed animal displaying speed, agility, and cunning. Ross came up with "Bruins", an Old English word used for brown bears in classic folk-tales. The team's bearlike nickname also went along with the team's original uniform colors of brown and yellow, which came from Adams' grocery chain, First National Stores.
On December 1, 1924, the new Bruins team played their first NHL game against the Maroons, at Boston Arena, with the Bruins winning the game by a 2-1 score. But the team only managed a 6-24-0 record (for last place) in its first season. They played three more seasons at the Arena, after which the Bruins became the main tenant of the famous Boston Garden, while the old Boston Arena facility the world's oldest existing indoor ice hockey venue was eventually taken over by Northeastern University, and renamed Matthews Arena when the university renovated it in 1979.
In their third season, 1926/27, the team markedly improved. Ross took advantage of the collapse of the Western Hockey League to purchase several western stars, including the team's first great star, a defenseman from Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan named Eddie Shore. The Bruins reached the Stanley Cup Final despite finishing only one game above .500, but lost to the Ottawa Senators in the first Cup Final to be between exclusively NHL teams.
In 1929 the Bruins defeated the New York Rangers to win their first Stanley Cup. Standout players on the first championship team included Shore, Harry Oliver, Dit Clapper, Dutch Gainor and goaltender Tiny Thompson. The 1928/29 season was the first played at Boston Garden, which Adams had built after guaranteeing his backers $500,000 in gate receipts over the next five years.
The season after that, 1929/30, the Bruins posted the best-ever regular season winning percentage in the NHL (an astonishing .875, winning 38 out of 44 games, a record which still stands) and shattered numerous team scoring records, but lost to the Montreal Canadiens in the Cup Final.
When Boston television station WSBK-TV began showing Bruins games on television in 1967, the television station's managers wanted to come up with a suitable piece of music to air for the introduction of each Bruins game. Because the Boston Ballet's annual Christmas performance of The Nutcracker had become closely identified with Boston, The Ventures' instrumental rock version of the Nutcracker's overture, known as "Nutty", itself likely being inspired by the somewhat earlier Nut Rocker, was selected as the opening piece of music for Bruins telecasts.
The song "Nutty" has been identified with the Bruins ever since, even though NESN, who now airs almost all of the Bruins' regular season and playoff games, has used a piece of original instrumental rock music for Bruins telecasts, that it had also used with all its Boston Red Sox televised games through the 2008 MLB season.
The song "Nutty" is still sometimes played at the TD Garden during Bruins games. "Nutty" has also been covered by popular Boston Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys. Dropkick Murphys have also written a song about the Bruins, called "Time to Go" (released on their 2003 album Blackout), and have performed at Bruins games several times.
