Zdeno Chara was a defenseman whose job was mostly to make the area in front of his own net unlivable, and he reached 19 goals in a season exactly once. Hat tricks were not something he had much reason to prepare for.
He had prepared anyway.
On January 17, 2011, with the Boston Bruins beating the Carolina Hurricanes 7-0, Chara got his third of the night past Justin Peters late in the third period. He had scored twice in the first. What he did next, he had been carrying around for years.
Chara turned to the crowd at TD Garden and waved his arms upwards, telling them to throw their hats onto the ice.
It wasn’t his idea. He had taken it from Peter Bondra, his teammate during four seasons with the Ottawa Senators, who used to do exactly that.
“I kind of remembered that if I ever get a hat trick, I’ll want to do the same, so I thought it was pretty cool,” Chara said.
Zdeno Chara’s Norris Trophy season, 2008-09:
| Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Goals | 19 |
| Power-play goals | 11 |
| Points | 50 |
How hard was Zdeno Chara’s slap shot?
Nobody in NHL history has hit one harder, and the record has stood since the All-Star Skills Competition in Ottawa in 2012, when Chara put one through at 108.8 miles per hour. It explains why opposing forwards spent a decade finding somewhere else to stand whenever he wound up at the blue line.
READ MORE: Zdeno Chara couldn’t talk, so he wrote down two words
That shot was most of his offensive game. Chara reached 50 points in only three of his 24 seasons, and the 2008-09 campaign that brought him the Norris Trophy was the most productive of them.
He stayed in Boston for 14 years, captain for every one of them, and the Bruins raised his No. 33 to the rafters in February 2026, two months after he entered the Hockey Hall of Fame.
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