Playoff hockey back in Toronto as Wilson plays the villain
As NHL playoff hockey returns to Toronto for the first time since 2013, a local boy whose family couldn’t afford to attend many games when he was younger will be in the building.
Ditching the Maple Leafs jerseys of his youth, Tom Wilson will try to beat his hometown team as his Washington Capitals attempt to rebound from a double-overtime loss that evened the first-round series at a game apiece. The Capitals’ Game 1 overtime hero, Wilson the Toronto native is back and ready to be public enemy No. 1 at Air Canada Centre.
“A couple years ago I got booed off the ice at the end of a game in my hometown, so we’ve crossed that one off the list,” Wilson said last week.
“I’m going to go out there to play my game and it’s going to feel good to beat anyone in the postseason, and obviously pretty cool to go in. The ACC is going to be absolutely electric, and there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s going to be charged up and fun to play in, and so as a hometown guy it’s going to be fun to go back and play there.”
Toronto coach Mike Babcock ruffled some feathers when he pointed out that Wilson is “not as big of a concern” as other Capitals players like Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. Wilson agreed with that even after scoring in overtime to win Game 1, but the 23-yearold power forward specializes in getting under the skin of opponents and opposing fans.
“He’s probably so excited to go in there and be the villain and just do his thing,” Capitals winger Brett Connolly said. “He’s a guy who does a lot of dirty work and (plays) a lot of hard minutes and sticks up for his teammates and gets in fights with guys that maybe you don’t want to at the time but he’s going to do it anyways because he’s a good teammate.”
Loved by teammates and despised by opponents, Wilson perhaps fittingly had a Darcy Tucker Maple Leafs jersey as a kid, a nod to the kind of player he has become. It speaks to how rare playoff games in Toronto have been recently that it was only 10 Maple Leafs playoff games ago that Tucker levelled Sami Kapanen in the final game of a 2004 second-round series loss to the Philadelphia Flyers.
Fast forward 13 years to Saturday, and Kapanen’s son, Kasperi, scored twice in Game 2, including the winner in the second overtime to send the series across the Canadian border tied at 1. Toronto was always going to be jacked up for the first home game of the playoffs but perhaps even more so now that the Maple Leafs have some serious momentum.
“It’ll be a great environment, it’ll be a playoff atmosphere,” Washington coach Barry Trotz said Sunday on a conference call.
“You’ll get chills down your spine when you’re on the bench for both teams.”