Ted Green with Jack Kelly
He was known around the hockey world as “Terrible” Ted Green, tough-looking defenceman from Manitoba who liked to mix it up with the best the NHL could throw at him. Green finished his NHL career with 1,029 penalty minutes over 11 seasons, all with the Bruins, and another 304 with the New England Whalers and Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association.
In the WHA, Green won three Avco Trophies with New England and Winnipeg.
At 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds, Green was not big, but he was robust. He had made a name for himself as a member of the 1959 Winnipeg Braves, who won the Memorial Cup that year. The Bruins, a horrible team at the time, scooped him up in time for the 1960-61 season, when he played but one game. By the next season, he was a regular and played 66.
Green amassed more than 100 penalty minutes in six of his seasons with the Bruins before a life-threatening, stick-swinging incident with Wayne Maki in an exhibition game, kept him out of the 1969-70 season and left him with a metal plate inside his head.
His teammates did vote him a complete share of Stanley Cup money for that year. He had required three operations to survive and the left side of his body was paralysed. He donned his familiar No. 6 and returned to form the next season, finishing with 42 points in 78 games, among his best seasons offensively in a career that saw him selected to the NHL’s second-all-star team in 1968-69 when he had 46 points and 99 penalty minutes in 65 games.
In 1972, he did win a Stanley Cup with the Bruins, but was gone by the next season to the upstart WHA. Green, who now wore a trademark big white helmet, won an Avco Cup with the Whalers and then returned home to play for the Jets, where he won two more WHA championships (1975-76 and 1977-78) playing at Winnipeg Arena. He finished his NHL career with 48 goals and 206 assists for 254 points in 620 games along with 180 points in 452 WHA games.
