At 6-foot-5, 220 pounds, Bruins forward Justin Brazeau is hard to miss. And yet, the hockey world did just that year after year, overlooking him despite his size and offensive production.
Bruins responded after being called out by Montgomery
Brazeau was a late-round pick in the Ontario Hockey League. He was never drafted by an NHL team. Even after leading the OHL in goals, no NHL team even gave him a look in the AHL. After four minor-league seasons split between the ECHL and AHL, he still did not have an NHL contract or any NHL experience to his name at age 25.
Now, the 26-year-old Brazeau looks like a lineup lock for a Bruins team that has the third-most points in the NHL and is ramping up for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Brazeau has five goals in 18 games since earning his first NHL call-up in February. His size was an element that had been missing from Boston’s fourth line much of the season, but so too was the way he used it: To forecheck, to win battles down low, and to get position in front of the net, where he has displayed soft touch and smart decision-making.
His two-way contributions at 5-on-5 are reflected in the Bruins outscoring opponents 10-6 with him on the ice and having an expected goals share of 58.5%. He has earned power-play time and scored two of his goals there.
That Brazeau can play at the NHL level seems obvious now. The question is: Why did it take so long for anyone in NHL circles to believe in him? Why did so many people miss this obvious ability for so many years?
“It was just a mistake by NHL teams,” says Stan Butler, who coached Brazeau for four years in the OHL with the North Bay Battalion.
Butler has been a believer in and advocate for Brazeau longer than most, but even he needed some gentle prodding initially. Brazeau wasn’t exactly high on most OHL teams’ draft boards, or even on them at all. The 13th round of the OHL Draft, where Brazeau was eventually selected 254th overall in 2014, is the land of dart throws. Most players drafted that late never actually play in the OHL, never mind the NHL.
But Butler decided Brazeau was worth a flyer for his North Bay squad after getting some glowing reports from one of his former players, Danny McDonald, who had coached Brazeau in his small Northern Ontario hometown of New Liskeard.
The then-16-year-old Brazeau was a great athlete (he also played basketball, volleyball and golf in high school) and he was in the middle of a major growth spurt (by Brazeau’s account, he grew five inches over the course of one season).
But he was raw as a hockey player, a label that would stick to him for years. One area of his game in particular was a big question mark that would dog him on scouting reports at every level from there on: His skating.
“He comes from a very small little town where they don't have summer ice. He never went to hockey school. He never went to power skating,” Butler explained in a recent phone interview. “So, if you look at a lot of guys he was competing against, they were way ahead of him in their training. So, my thought was pretty simple: He's a very good athlete, good at everything, right? And because of that, his athletic ability, once he got the opportunity to go to North Bay and skate every day and have a proper coach and get weight training and all that stuff, I was confident that if he could just stay in the game long enough, that his talent would override all the hurdles he had to overcome.”
Brazeau made his OHL debut with the Battalion the following year, which was a victory in and of itself. He had just six goals and 13 points in 65 games that first season in 2015-16, nothing that was going to put him on any NHL radars in his first draft-eligible year.
As Brazeau’s OHL career went on, though, Butler saw the traits that would come to define Brazeau’s slow rise to the NHL: He kept working, he kept getting better, and he refused to be boxed in as just a grinder or depth forward.
His numbers jumped to 22 goals and 37 points in his second OHL season. Then 39 goals and 75 points in his third. In his fourth and final season with the Battalion, he set a club record with an OHL-leading 61 goals and finished second in the league in points with 113, four behind NHL second-round pick and future Dallas Stars star Jason Robertson.
“I think for me, the biggest thing has just been confidence,” Brazeau said. “I mean, when I started out my junior career, 13th-round pick, you make the team as a second-year guy, you're not really sure. You obviously belong because you made the league, but you're kind of trying to feel your way out, trying not to make too many mistakes.
“And I think by year two or three, I just kind of realized like, ‘I can play in this league. I can make plays.’ And I've always been a guy who likes to go to the net and do that sort of stuff, so I think just the confidence in getting there more often, coach having more confidence in you, putting you out on power plays and stuff like that definitely helps.”
Brazeau still wasn’t the fastest skater, but Butler, who once coached another big, raw, kind-of-awkward teenager named Zdeno Chara, believes the focus on pure speed was always misguided. Brazeau got to where he needed to get to.
“He's like the wide receiver in football that, he catches the pass and no one catches him, but everybody says he's slow,” Butler said. “He doesn't turn the puck over. You'll see that in the NHL. He doesn't turn the puck over, so he doesn't have to go get it a lot. And he uses his big body, he's got very good hands, and he's got a lot of good hockey sense.”
Still, there were no NHL contract offers waiting for Brazeau when he became a free agent after that record-setting 2018-19 season. He would eventually sign an AHL contract with the Toronto Marlies, the Maple Leafs’ affiliate, and then report to the ECHL Newfoundland Growlers for all but one game of the 2019-20 season. The refrain was the same as always: Teams simply didn’t believe Brazeau was, or ever would be, a good enough skater to hang at higher levels.
Brazeau’s second pro season was spent entirely with the Marlies, but it was a tough, COVID-shortened year, and his numbers weren’t very good (four goals, one assist in 21 games). His contract was up in the summer of 2021, and Brazeau wondered if his time in the AHL was as well. He considered moving to Europe to play there or attending university to further his education.
But as that summer went on, the Bruins expressed interest in Brazeau and eventually signed him to a minor-league contract. He would have to start with more time in the ECHL with the Maine Mariners, if for no other reason than to get back into AHL shape. Without a contract, Brazeau had not been training or skating on a professional program that summer.
“When he came into my office,” Providence Bruins coach Ryan Mougenel recounted, “I said, ‘Just, I'm sending you down. You're gonna play 24 minutes a night. You need to get in shape as quick as you possibly can, because I think you can be a real good player for us.’ Says a lot about the kid. He went down, did everything we asked him to do, came back and has never missed a beat.”
Mougenel was one of several people in the Bruins organization who already had some familiarity with Brazeau. Even before coaching against him in the AHL, Mougenel had seen Brazeau in North Bay when he was teammates with Mason Primeau, son of Mougenel’s close friend and former Bruin Wayne Primeau.
Mougenel would see the next part of Brazeau’s development up close and personal every day. After that 18-game conditioning stint in Maine, Brazeau established himself as a regular with the Providence Bruins and quickly moved up their lineup, posting 31 points in 51 games in 2021-22.
In the two years since then, he emerged as one of the P-Bruins’ top scorers, putting up 45 points in 67 games last season and 37 in 49 this year prior to his call-up while playing on lines with the likes of top prospects Georgii Merkulov and Fabian Lysell.
Mougenel came to believe what Butler believed, that Brazeau had an NHL future if someone gave him a chance. He hoped it would be the Bruins that eventually gave him that chance, but wasn’t sure if or when that would happen as this season began.
“One of the feedbacks that I would always ask people is like, do you think he can play in the NHL?,” Mougenel said. “I’d ask some of the people that I'm close to in hockey, and nobody really had a definite answer. So, I think that was always a hesitation, if he was ever gonna get an NHL contract. I deep down felt that he would, hopefully here. But to say that I thought that he'd be in the NHL this year is definitely a little bit of a stretch. But listen, it takes a lot of courage from our management to do that, and more importantly to understand that he was ready to do it.”
That NHL contract finally came in the form of a two-year, two-way deal signed on Feb. 19, the same day Brazeau would make his NHL debut. Bruins coach Jim Montgomery hadn’t worked with Brazeau as much as Mougenel at that point, but he had been impressed with the big winger in training camp in both 2022 and 2023.
“In training camp, I remember saying to people that he's like a poor man's Dave Andreychuk,” Montgomery said, referencing the big-bodied Hockey Hall of Famer who made his living in front of the net. “Just because he seems to get to every puck below the goal line. He makes subtle, little smart plays. And you see his ability, he has nice touch.”
Brazeau also spent the summer in Boston for the first time in 2023, training with Bruins players and working to lose weight in his never-ending quest to improve his skating. That, too, did not go unnoticed.
“You trust your players are going to be working out and doing everything they can,” Montgomery said, “but when you see and witness the transformation in someone’s body, like we did with him, and the dedication it takes and the financial commitment it took from him, it’s very noticeable.”
When Brazeau finally made his NHL debut, it was a great story of perseverance even if it never went much further than that. There were no guarantees that Brazeau was going to get more than a game or two in Boston. But then he scored in his first game. He had three shots, a hit and a block in his second. He had an assist in his third.
Brazeau kept playing well, so Montgomery kept him in the lineup. He had a nine-game point drought at one point, but Montgomery made it clear that he still liked how Brazeau was playing during that stretch. As for Brazeau’s speed, Montgomery is seeing the same thing in the NHL that Butler saw in the OHL and Mougenel saw in the AHL.
“The report was, could he play at the NHL speed?,” Montgomery said this past week. “Well, the more he’s been in the NHL, the faster he looks. That’s the sign of a smart hockey player. When you get to another level, there’s always an adjustment in speed, and sometimes guys can’t make that adjustment. He’s made it.”
What does the future hold for Brazeau? In the short term, he’s mostly been part of an effective fourth line of JBs with Jesper Boqvist and Johnny Beecher. But there’s also a third-line job up for grabs that Brazeau might have as good a chance to win as anyone. He got a shot there Saturday night in Washington and didn't look out of place at all skating with Morgan Geekie and Jake DeBrusk.
Longer-term, there will continue to be plenty of skeptics who doubt that Brazeau will grow into anything more than the fourth-liner he is now. Butler, for one, believes Brazeau will continue to prove those doubters wrong.
“I don’t think he’ll be a fourth-liner for a long time,” Butler said. “He’ll move up the food chain. He’s always done it.”