Cam Neely trade still helping the Bruins win games

There’s plenty of things we can keep ourselves up at night worrying about. Are aliens real? What will happen to the Patriots when Tom Brady and Bill Belichick retire? Would the Friends spinoff have been better if Ross was the main character instead of Joey? And the truth is, we don’t know the answers to those for certain.

Here’s one question probably no one asks, but it’ll get answered for you anyways. Is there ever any trade chains in sports? For example, if a guy played for a team 40 years ago and he was traded then the guy he got traded for got traded, and etc, etc, etc, could it be possible that the team is still benefitting from having said player on their roster way back when? In other words, did it not go to complete waste via free agency? Yes. Yes it happens.

Just look at Bruins hierarchy right now and you’ll see Cam Neely, who was an excellent NHL player–for the Bruins. So NESN took a look at the old Neely trade, broke it down, and showed us how that trade links to their current roster.

Yup, old Sea Bass to the rescue.

So, as you can see, this thing links all the way down to Martin Jones, Colin Miller and the pick that ended up being Jacob Zboril, who, admittedly, I’ve never heard of. But hey, he was a first rounder in 2016, so he must be doing something right.

Truth be had, I kind of knew about this sort of thing in the past. Like 7 years ago, I realized how much the Bruins got out of Joe Thornton but didn’t realize you could date something like this back to someone as old as Neely. After all, I can’t trace my family tree back more than four generations before it’s in Gaelic, which no one I know can speak or read. All I know is they shipped up to Boston in the 20th century.