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Saturday, June 23, 2012

Bruins Ship Benoit Pouliot To Lightning For Essentially A Bag Of Pucks


I hate to break the bad news folks but we've seen the last of Benoit Pouliot in a Boston Bruins uniform.

Haha the underachieving former first-round pick had a pretty forgettable 2011-12 (16 goals, 16 assists in 74 games) so he's been traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning for forward Michel Ouelett and a fifth-round draft pick, 131st overall (which turned into forward Seth Griffith).

There was hope last summer when the B's signed Pouliot that he would suddenly become the player he has only shown brief glimpses of. Instead, he was exactly that up and down guy. It seems like the few goals he scored were almost all highlight-reel tallies. Yet there weren't nearly enough of those and he was buried on the third line for the most part. Finally, he was a restricted free agent and would have been eligible for salary arbitration (double what he made in 2011-12) so this made the most sense.

Like Pouliot, Ouelett will be a free agent on July 1 and looking at his career numbers, I feel like it's a long shot that he'll be signed by the B's let alone make any type of dent on the roster. He's played in 190 career NHL games with Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Vancouver but his last NHL appearance was three games in 2008-09 with the Canucks.

For his career, Ouelett has 52 goals and 64 assists for 116 career points. He's 30-years-old and he was a fourth-round draft pick, 124th overall by the Penguins in 2000. All I can say is that he would look great in a Providence Bruins uniform.









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