No captain, my captain
Tradition-rich NHL teams are no longer giving players the ‘C’
Henrik and Daniel Sedin were Vancouver mainstays for 18 years, and while it was Henrik who formally wore the “C” on his chest as the team captain for eight seasons, the two shared the privilege and the burden of being the twin faces of the Canucks.
In a first season without them, Vancouver general manager Jim Benning just didn’t think his young, rebuilding team was completely ready to replace them, and he didn’t feel it was right to make one player the public voice of the locker-room just yet.
Rather than award one player a “C” so soon after the Sedins’ retirement, four players — Alex Edler, Bo Horvat, Brandon Sutter and Chris Tanev — wear an “A” as assistant captains, sharing a leadership responsibility that can often be too heavy for one player alone.
“Being a Canadian team in a Canadian marketplace, I feel that there’s a lot of extra responsibility on a captain,” Benning said. “We have a lot of good veteran leadership in our group, and we felt like we’re going to just go with the assistant captains this year and let Bo (Horvat) keep developing as a player so he doesn’t have to bear that responsibility all on his own.”
There’s always been a mystique around the captaincy in the National Hockey League. Practically, it’s the captain who often converses with the referees ingame, but it’s also the captain who often faces the brunt of the media scrutiny, a pressure that’s magnified if he or the team is not performing well.
A handful of players might have a “C” on their jersey in the National Football League, the National Basketball Association did away with the uniform distinction in 2011 and most Major League Baseball teams don’t have a captain. But traditionally in hockey, just one player is considered the captain, while others might wear an “A” denoting an assistant or alternate captain. While the post is considered sacred by some, more teams are opting not to name a captain, or at least take their time doing so.
Six NHL teams — Detroit, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Vegas and the New York Rangers — are currently without one, and last season, four teams didn’t have captains; the Hurricanes had co-captains, which the team changed this off-season in favour of awarding Justin Williams the ‘C’, despite him approaching unrestricted free agency at the end of this season.
With several tradition-rich teams from the NHL’s Original Six among the group embracing a captainless season, could the sport one day go the way of others and do away with awarding one player a “C?”
Vegas, the upstart of the group, however, may be the best example of why having a captain might be overrated. The Golden Knights didn’t want to force one person into the captaincy in their inaugural season, when players were still getting to know each other after an expansion draft. After a surprising run to the Stanley Cup final, their philosophy in their second season is that they have “23 captains.”
“Last year, it was a different situation than any of us had ever been in before, so we needed 23 different leaders to be able to come together and build as a team,” forward Reilly Smith said. “I think we kind of just roll that over into this year and try to work in a similar attitude and a similar mindset where it takes all of us. Right now, on NHL teams, there’s not one guy in the lockerrooms who makes all of the rules anyway.”
To Smith’s point, most NHL locker-rooms have some sort of a leadership council in place, and that helps alleviate some of the burden from a lone captain. But speaking to his role as the Carolina Hurricanes’ captain, Williams referenced the importance of having a clear representative of the locker-room.
“People want your opinion on a lot of things because you’re essentially the voice of the players within the dressing room,” Williams said. “And nowadays, the players’ voices mean a lot more than they did 10 years ago. Usually, it was just, ‘We’re doing it this way,’ without any advice. Now it’s a little bit different. The players’ voices matter, and coaches and management, they listen to that ...
“If anything, I think other sports will come toward us. I think it’s a very solid foundation. It’s something that people really essentially work for. People aspire to be leaders. It’s an awesome thing, and I don’t see that going away any time ever.”
Some teams award the “C” to their best player and face of the franchise, as the Washington Capitals did with Alex Ovechkin in 2010 and the Edmonton Oilers with Connor McDavid in ‘16, when he was just 19. Among the most popular topics in Toronto this summer was who of the Maple Leafs’ two best players would ultimately be named the captain: Auston Matthews or John Tavares? The answer was neither. The team is punting for now, choosing to go without a captain this season. Such a move figures to alleviate some of the weight for those players in an already pressure-packed, championshipstarved market.
“Of course, there’s pressure,” Ovechkin said. “You try to be a leader on the ice and off the ice. But I think I learned a lot from previous leaders. The team has to help you a lot as well because I’m pretty sure lots of young guys became captains on their teams, and experienced guys helped them a lot. I had the same thing ... Through all those years, I had help from more experienced guys.
“The first year, it was totally different than now. Obviously, my (English) language was not that good, and sometimes if I wanted to say something, it was hard to do that. But through all those years, I learned a lot.”
Two years ago, the Florida Panthers made Derek MacKenzie, a career fourth-line forward who’d never scored more than nine goals in a season, their captain because he set a good example in the locker-room. But then Florida took the unusual step of having MacKenzie pass the torch to talented centre Aleksander Barkov before this season, though MacKenzie remains on the team. Asked about how the transition to the new role is going, the 23-year-old Barkov said it’s “nothing special,” crediting a group of veterans for helping guide the team’s younger players.
Benning is hopeful the same thing is happening in Vancouver’s locker-room, just without the “C” stitched onto any jerseys.
“We want our young players to concentrate on playing and doing the things that they need to do to be successful in the league and not having to worry about talking to the media every day about the team,” Benning said. “It distracts them from developing as players, and we don’t want to do that.”