Brent Burns arrived at the 2003 NHL entry draft as a Brampton Battalion forward from Barrie, Ont., and left it as the Minnesota Wild’s 26th overall pick. On draft night, he was listed as a forward. More than two decades later, he is still in the league, still skating through the 2025-26 regular season with the Colorado Avalanche and still carrying the longest active Iron Man streak in the NHL.
The number is the first thing that stops you: more than 990 consecutive games played. Burns is 41 years old, the oldest player in the NHL in this article, and his streak has run through his years with San Jose, Carolina and Colorado. For a player who started as a forward, the line from draft day to now reads like a story the Wild could not have fully known they were starting on June 21, 2003.
Minnesota did not get much immediate offense out of Burns, but it got a look at how much there was to work with. He played 36 NHL games in the 2003-04 season and scored 6 points, then spent the 2004-05 lockout year in the AHL with the Houston Aeros, where he appeared in 73 games. When the lockout ended, he came back to Minnesota in 2005 and coach Jacque Lemaire moved him to defense for the rest of the season.
That switch changed everything. Over the next five seasons, the Wild used Burns primarily on the blue line, and the former forward gradually became one of the league’s most unusual defensemen. Almost exactly eight years after drafting him, Minnesota sent Burns and a second-round pick to the San Jose Sharks in a trade that brought back Devin Setoguchi, Charlie Coyle and a first-round pick.
Burns went on to win a Norris Trophy after leaving Minnesota, then added a World Cup of Hockey championship and reached a Stanley Cup Final trip. His Minnesota years now look less like a beginning than a conversion point, the place where a power forward became a defenseman and an elite career took its shape. That is why Burns still feels like one of the NHL’s most interesting figures, and why he remains a credible Hockey Hall of Fame conversation long after draft night in 2003.
