NHL99: Zdeno Chara, the tallest player in NHL history, got looked down on early (2024)

Welcome toNHL99,The Athletic’s countdown ofthe best 100 players in modern NHL history. We’re ranking 100 players but calling it 99 because we all know who’s No. 1 — it’s the 99 spots behind No. 99 we have to figure out. Every Monday through Saturday until February we’ll unveil new members of the list.

Chris Pryor remembers heading up to Prince George, B.C., to get an up-close look at Zdeno Chara, the Islanders’ tall, gangly third-round pick from the 1996 NHL Draft.

Pryor particularly recalls a conversation he had with the 19-year-old late one night over pizza.

“We’re sitting at the table and he goes, ‘Chris, what do I need to do to be among the greatest NHL defensem*n?'” recalls Pryor, former Islanders director of player development and current assistant GM of the Penguins.

“I’m looking at him like, ‘Z, let’s just take it one step at a time here.’ But that’s not him boasting. That’s not him being arrogant. That’s not him thinking he’s better than anybody else. That was his goal — not only to play, but to have an impact on the game. If you know the guy, he set the standard, that’s what he strives for: To be the best and to make himself the best he could. And he did it.”

But long before the towering defenseman would stamp his spot among the game’s best with a remarkable career that spanned 24 seasons and 1,680 games — one of leadership and longevity that saw him captain the Boston Bruins to a Stanley Cup and one that places him at No. 57 on The Athletic’s list of the greatest players of the post-expansion era — Chara realized he had a problem.

His height was getting in the way. Coaches in his native Slovakia even encouraged him to quit because of it.

“There were different forms of communication to me or my dad or my family basically saying, ‘Look, he’s going to be really tall. He might not be suitable for hockey. Maybe you should look somewhere else to be active or play sports,’” Chara told The Athletic. “And I didn’t like it. I enjoyed playing hockey.”

Chara says he was as young as 12 when he realized he was outgrowing his classmates and teammates. He didn’t know he’d end up 6-foot-9, the tallest player in NHL history, but he knew it was costing him opportunities.

“I was cut every year and I had to play for a lower division and away from my hometown teams just to keep playing hockey, and that was very tough,” Chara said. “At the time, you don’t see much of a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s like, ‘Why am I doing this?'”

Chara knew he couldn’t do anything about his height, so he put in more hours than everyone around him to become the player he wanted to be. His father, Zdeněk, an Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler who competed until he was 47, taught him the value of work.

“I always enjoyed doing the extra and I always believed in it,” Chara said. “It’s something that might not show right away or see the result right away but over the course of time, if you don’t give up, it will pay you back.”

From his WHL stint to the end of his storied NHL career, that desire to work harder helped lay the fabric for the celebrated legacy Chara left behind. He never let his early adversity get to him; it fueled him.

“I guess there’s lots of stubbornness or competitive ego, I don’t know,” Chara said with a chuckle. “I guess I love doubt. I love being challenged.”

Frustrated with the lack of opportunity in his home country, Chara spent some time with HC Sparta Praha in Prague, where he felt he’d have a better opportunity to showcase his skills. From there, he made the jump to the WHL.

The season he spent in Prince George gave him the chance to get used to the English language, the North American style of hockey, the travel and living away from home.

Stan Butler, his coach with the Cougars, has a vivid memory of his first sight of Chara at Prince George Airport.

“He got off the plane, and I thought ‘This guy is bigger than 99 percent of the basketball players I ever coached,'” said Butler, who at one time was a physical education consultant for the Scarborough Board of Education. “We had to find him clothes that fit in Northern B.C. and it’s not like we’re downtown Toronto, right?”

The WHL had never seen a player of his stature. So while Chara adjusted to the North American game, the game adjusted to him, starting with equipment that fit properly.

“The famous story was that we didn’t have a jersey that would fit him so they had to get two jerseys and sew pieces of them together,” Butler said. “His stick was too short. It used to come to his belly button. So then we had to get extensions.”

During Chara’s first week, Butler received a call one morning from his billets, Irv and Barb Mann, letting them know they had “a problem.” They had cooked a chicken for a family dinner the night before and Chara had eaten the whole chicken, thinking it was for him.

“So after that, we paid them double the rest of the year because he ate so much food,” Butler said.

Chara also had a difficult time comfortably sitting on the bus during the WHL’s incredibly long road trips.

“A lot of the times he’d have to sit right behind me because he’s a first-year player,” Butler said. “And I remember a couple times, I’m sitting there, looking under my feet and his feet are out farther than mine.”

On the ice, Chara was unpolished and, of course, imposing. But his skating needed improvement and his stickhandling was rough.

“He was athletic, but he was raw,” Butler said. “You could tell there was potential but there was work to be done.”

But Chara’s height also had its advantages, notably his strength and reach, which caught the attention of then-Islanders GM Mike Milbury.

“His reach radius was just phenomenal,” Milbury said. “The only time he got in trouble was when guys got in tight to him.

“Certainly, one-on-one he was stronger than just about everybody he went up against. He had to work on balance to a certain extent, but you know, his reach was there, his strength was there. And his decision-making became better and better over time.”

Chara’s toughness was apparent early. He got into a fight mere seconds into his first WHL game against Seattle. He took down Thunderbirds veteran Paul Ferone — “one of the toughest guys in the league,” according to Butler — fellow blueliner Shane Belter and Portland’s Joey Tetarenko within his first few contests.

“Z would fight everybody,” Butler said. “Anybody who wanted to take a piece of him, he would step up to the challenge.”

At 6-foot-9, he had a target on his back. It was something he had prepared for.

“I had a little talk from (fellow Slovak and Cougars teammate) Ronald Petrovicky,” Chara said. “He said I have a good challenge because of my height. It’s just the natural way here when you’re big, they expect you to fight so I knew that was coming and I was ready for it. I knew I had to obviously fight, not just fight for the sake of fighting, but just to prevent people from taking shots at me.”

In transitioning to the NHL game, with stops in the AHL along the way, Chara learned to play the way members of the Islanders organization taught him to play: be simple, tough, use your size and your reach.

“They worked with me on that daily,” Chara said.

But above all, it was Chara’s work ethic that impressed. “I’ve never seen a guy that worked so hard for so long. And he did it every day,” Milbury said. “And he’s been dedicated to his craft since the first time I’ve known him.”

“He took one-timers forever and ever every day,” remembered Doug Houda, Chara’s former Islanders teammate and later assistant coach with the Bruins. “Or if it was quick feet drills, he just was trying to perfect everything. He wouldn’t be happy with his shot the next day, he’d be out there working on it. If he got shots blocked, he’d be out there working on it. Because he’s got a longer stick, maybe sometimes he gets more shots blocked, but he’d be out there working on it, trying to get pucks through. Depending on what happened in the game the night before, he’d be out there the next day working on it.”

“I guess that was kind of my thing,” Chara said. “If we had a practice at the end of a game or some sort of optional bike ride or something and they call it ‘extra’ and they saw 80 percent of people, well that’s not really the extra because everybody else does it. If I want to be the extra, or do the extra, I did more. … They did one session on the ice, maybe one session off the ice. Well, I did maybe two sessions on the ice and one session off the ice, or maybe one session on the ice and two sessions off the ice. So I did morning, afternoon and late at night. That’s when I knew I was doing the extra.”

Butler took note of Chara’s early offensive potential in junior, letting Pryor know during his visit to Prince George that he was more than just a stay-at-home defenseman. But Milbury didn’t anticipate him being a power-play player. He had a hard slap shot — eventually setting the NHL record at 108.8 mph at the 2012 All-Star Skills Competition — but it took him a while to wind up.

The Islanders drafted Chara thinking he’d be a top-four, penalty-killing defenseman. For four seasons in Long Island, he leaned into that role. His big, tough exterior was obvious, but his ability to handle the puck and make plays was underrated and underappreciated, Pryor said. When he was sent to the Ottawa Senators as part of a trade for Alexei Yashin ahead of the 2001-02 season, the contending Islanders were hoping to make headway in the playoffs. It didn’t work out that way.

“In the end, Ottawa got the better end of the deal, and that’s the end of that story,” Milbury said. “If we had seen him as an offensive player, maybe he’d have still been in an Islanders uniform.”

During a four-year stint in Ottawa, Chara continued to work on his offensive game as part of a system Senators coach Jacques Martin encouraged — defensem*n jumping up to support the offense, getting more opportunity on the power play. It was new to Chara, save for some experience playing forward back in junior in Slovakia, but he enjoyed scoring goals and playing in all situations. And like everything he set out to master, he was good at it.

After signing with the Bruins as a free agent in 2006, Chara crawled up the ranks of the NHL’s elite as a No. 1 defenseman tasked with shutting down the league’s top players. While most could play two or three feet in front of other defensem*n, they had to be aware of his long stick at all times. On the forecheck, players had to go around him because of how big his wingspan was. In the middle of the ice, he was the pillar — literally and figuratively — of a good penalty-killing forecheck.

Going up against the game’s top players night after night was something he enjoyed.

“It was very hard, but it was something I was looking forward to, just to have that matchup with somebody who is the best in the world on the other team,” Chara said. “It was always a measuring stick every night, you should measure yourself against somebody on the other side who is really, really good at what he does.”

Looking back on his 14 seasons as Bruins captain, there are many standout moments that define his jump from “good” to “great.” There was his first fight as a Bruin against Chicago’s 6-foot-6 David Koci after ex-coach Dave Lewis had forbidden him to fight the season prior. His Norris Trophy in 2009. His presence on the ice during Boston’s 2013 Game 7 rally over the Maple Leafs, when he fired a one-timer on goaltender James Reimer before Milan Lucic nabbed the rebound. Or when he screened Reimer ahead of Patrice Bergeron’s tying goal, monitoring the left point while Bergeron capped off the comeback in overtime.

The captain, the coach and the GM from the 2011 Cup champs, a shared history forever bonding them.
In my latest, Zdeno Chara’s Bruins legacy, as told by Claude Julien and Peter Chiarelli :

via @TheAthletic https://t.co/iKgPSeJXip

— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) September 20, 2022

It’s no surprise Chara had the makings of an NHL captain, with his desire to take charge, to take responsibility, to go above and beyond on and off the ice, to not give up on the matchup, to never back down on a fight, to improve incrementally year after year. Leadership was just another asset that fueled Chara.

As he said in his NHL retirement speech in late September: “I loved being relied on.”

“You know what? He wants to be the guy,” Houda said. “And I think that’s what makes him special.”

Was being “the guy” easier at 6-foot-9? Maybe, but that’s not to discredit his standout work ethic.

Dating to his conversation with Pryor as a WHL rookie, Chara set out to impact the game, and ultimately did as the game’s tallest player, and perhaps one of the hardest workers ever.

“I’ve been around the game for a long time. I’ve seen guys that work hard. I have yet to see a guy who’s worked harder than him,” Pryor said. “You don’t find guys who get out of practice, go home and hop on the bike for three hours. You don’t find guys who are 6-9 who hop on the bike in the summer and go on the Tour de France. You don’t find guys who are 6-9 who climb Mount Kilimanjaro . You don’t see guys do pull-ups who are 6-9, 250. It’s freakish, his work ethic. It doesn’t come around. I’m not saying there aren’t dedicated athletes — for sure there are workers who are dedicated, who work hard — but I’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who works harder than him in any sport.”

Now that he’s retired, the NHL’s all-time leader in games played by a defenseman has surely earned a break from that hard work. One has to wonder whether he’ll take it.

(Top photo: Brian Babineau / Getty Images)