In many ways, Milan Lucic is the perfect Bruin.

Tough, accountable, intimidating, open to hard work and perfectly willing to sacrifice for the betterment of the hockey team, Lucic is all of those things — and possibly the most menacing fighting force emerging in the NHL.

The 6-foot-4, 220-pounder already has left a wake of bloodied victims in his path of punch-throwing destruction on the young season, and Lucic got his just reward Tuesday afternoon.

Lucic is also the anti-Kessel, and that’s exactly how he was treated this week when player and organization came to an early accord on a three-year deal with a pretty fair pricetag. The pact will pay Lucic $12.25 million over three years (a sum first reported by CBC’s Jeff Marek), and leaves the B’s with a cap hit of $4,083,333 for the incredibly popular winger over the next three years.

Lucic gets more money than he’d ever dreamed of to keep playing a brutal, beautiful game he loves dearly, and the team locks up its search-and-destroyer on skates through 2012-13.

The Bruins never seemed to be in a hurry to sign Phil Kessel as he approached restricted free agency. No tangible urgency that the team couldn’t function without Kessel in the fold, and his September trade met with a monumental shrug of the shoulders from those inside the B’s dressing room.

Considering that Kessel netted more than $5 million a year from a Maple Leafs team that vastly overpaid the goal-scorer with visible warts still attached to his game, this time Boston landed a bargain in a player that’s positioned to wear the captain’s ‘C’ someday in his Bruins future.

“At the end of the day we want players that want to be here. We want to grow the team with those types of players,” said B’s general manager Peter Chiarelli, speaking after the Kessel trade. “I think it’s a great city and I think we’re really growing as an organization. We’re on the cusp of some pretty great things.” 

Chiarelli made it a point to state that the team craved players that wanted to be in Boston, and Lucic has regularly expressed his love for his adopted home city — to the point where he talked about potentially moving to the Hub full-time at the conclusion of last season.

With the Lucic deal now in place, however, the Bruins have more than $42 million committed to next season’s team with plenty of pieces still needed to backfill the roster. There’s also the matter of the $56.8 million salary cap that’s likely going down next season amid a stagnant economy.

But while there may be some tough decisions at play again next summer for Chiarelli & Co., there was simply no way the B's could willingly allow Lucic to hit any kind of open market. His one-of-a-kind combination of hulking strength and maturing offensive instincts were simply too valuable for a player so in tune with the hockey market he’s developed in. Lucic is entering his all-important third year in the NHL, and should keep building on career-highs set in every major statistical category last season. The Bruins are paying for future returns from Lucic, which is always good business.

The B’s front office also learned a valuable lesson in the Kessel situation where the threat of an offer sheet — even if the offer sheet never actually materialized — backed Chiarelli into a corner and forced a deal with Toronto. There was no way the Bruins could allow themselves to be similarly squeezed into a position of reduced leverage next summer with an asset like Lucic.

The East Vancouver native has made such an impact in two-plus years here that it’s hard to imagine a Bruins team without him. There would have been off-the-charts fan outrage if Lucic somehow slipped through Boston’s fingers after this season. Any kind of Lucic departure would have been a crushing blow to a Bruins team building upward over the last three years, and it was to be avoided at all costs. Even if that meant paying Lucic a tad more than David Krejci was awarded in his three-year, $11.25 million contract last summer. 

Putting a team together in the new salary cap era of the NHL is all about stockpiling cheap, young talent playing on reasonable entry level contracts, and choosing correctly with the players to whom you eventually “show the money."

Lucic is the heir apparent to the brawling, goal-scoring legacy of tough guys throughout Bruins history like Cam Neely and Terry O’Reilly, and there couldn’t be a better investment by the Bruins at this stage of the budding power forward’s career. 

Perhaps the best part about the deal is that the 21-year-old Lucic will still be a 25-year-old restricted free agent at the end of his new extension — albeit an RFA with arbitration rights — and the Bruins will retain the right to match any offer he should receive.

But that’s three years in the future.

In the here and now, the deal essentially reveals what many had already guessed at as the summer unfolded. Chiarelli has wisely chosen to retain Lucic with the same amount of money Boston potentially had earmarked for Kessel, and the B’s executive also has put himself in a position to make serious runs at retaining Blake Wheeler (RFA), Mark Stuart (RFA), Tuukka Rask (RFA) and Marc Savard when free agency beckons next July. The Bruins picked the thunderous, punishing man-child forming into an on-ice force over the dainty, reluctant finesse winger reliant on speed and a rote curl-and-drag move off the half wall.

It's hard to argue with that kind of logic.

Lucic was a crucial piece given Boston’s punishing style of play and predilection toward oversized wingers willing to battle for pucks in the corners. Nobody fights and plays the fear factor game better than Boston’s top left winger, and there’s still plenty of ceiling left in Lucic’s maturing on-ice game as he gains experience in and around the net. Thirty goals and 60 points along with his normal board-shattering hits aren’t out of the realm of possibility over the next three seasons.

Now the B’s hulking winger will be able to stretch his own personal boundaries in a Boston uniform knowing that he won’t be going anywhere for a long, long time.