Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins skated away with the 2011 XM NHL Hardest Shot crown after firing a rocket that set the radar guns off at 105.9 MPH. That blast is a record for the three-time defending champion who performed the feat in front of a crowd of 18,176 at the RNB Center in Raleigh.

Chara’s closest competition was Nashville Predator Shea Weber who actually was sitting in the lead after the first round after shooting a 104.8 MPH laser.

Chara, a Slovakian native who stands a towering 6ft-9 and tips the scales at 255, credited the new sticks and thinks his 105.9 won’t stand the test of time.

“Records are meant to be broken. I don’t know, it could be all the way to 110. It’s really with the technology of the sticks and the players getting stronger and bigger, the record could be pushed to that number.”

Known for his crushing body checks and hard slapshot, Chara has scored 121 NHL regular season goals in 897 games. In the 2009 hardest slapshot competition, he broke Al Iafrate’s record that had been sitting comfortably from 1993 until that time. The speed of that blast registered 105.4 on the gun.

Here are the full results of the competition:

Brent Burns: (98.4 mph) vs. David Backes: (96.9 mph)

Tyler Seguin (95.7 mph) vs. Cam Fowler (93.7 mph)

Patrick Sharp (94.6 mph) vs. Anze Kopitar (94.5 mph)

Shea Weber (104.8 mph) BEATS Zdeno Chara (104.1 mph)

Dustin Byfuglien (102.4 mph) vs. Rick Nash (91.4 mph)

Steven Stamkos (101.9 mph) vs. Alex Ovechkin (98.2 mph)

FINAL ROUND

Zdeno Chara (105.9 mph) vs. Shea Weber (103.4 mph)

The NHL All Star Game will be played on Sunday January 30 with the puck drop scheduled for 7PM.

Here are the full rosters and how the All Star Draft played out.

Used with permission of the author.

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