Wilson wants to change narrative
Tom Wilson has always been aware of what’s being said about him on the internet, occasionally scanning his Twitter mentions or other social media references to him. Searching his name and “trash” or “dirty” or “predator” will produce no shortage of results. Sometimes he’s tempted to defend himself before thinking better of it. More often he’ll put his phone away in favor of spending time with his girlfriend or a teammate, a relief from the online negativity.
But as Wilson spent the first 16 games of the season suspended by the NHL Department of Player Safety for an illegal check to the head of St. Louis Blues forward Oskar Sundqvist, the Washington Capitals forward had a lot of time to kill. Maybe he was just curious or maybe a little masochistic, but Wilson wanted to read through the different labels his name was attached to.
“I read a lot of it,” he said. “And it’s interesting. I like to be as educated as I can. A lot of people say a lot of bad things about you, so at the end of the day, I want to know what they’re saying.”
The many opinions on Wilson range from one extreme to the other, that he tries to injure his opponents and is a black eye on the league, or that he’s a victim of the NHL’s inconsistent justice system. The ones Wilson cares about most are those of his teammates, who don’t see a headhunter but a well-rounded player who helps them win. But following his fourth suspension since the 2017 preseason, there’s a part of Wilson that’s accepted his reputation and another that hopes people will be saying something else one day.
There’s a difference between wanting to be the villain and being portrayed as the villain so much that you eventually start to embrace it. Wilson said he enjoys hearing opposing fans boo him as much as he relishes being cheered in Washington, but, “I’d be lying if I say you don’t see it or you don’t feel it.
“You never truly want to be hated.” Wilson was polarizing even as a kid, when he played in the Greater Toronto Hockey League and towered over his competition as he does now at his current size of 6-foot-4 and 218 pounds. He was already so talented that he probably should have been playing a level up, and he remembers other parents chirping at his mother and another player’s father threatening to fight Wilson’s in the stands.
His on-ice controversy spilled over to his family this past postseason, too. Wilson deleted the Twitter app on his phone during the playoffs, but he was still using Instagram, and after he was suspended for an illegal check to the head of Pittsburgh Penguins forward Zach Aston-Reese, he saw someone post his family’s Toronto address there.
“At the end of the day, if people want to target me, that’s fine, but you always have a soft spot for your family,” Wilson said. “I just texted my parents, like, ‘Just so you know, beware what’s in the mail.’”
He’s earned the ire of opponents as well. “You also understand there are instances where guys get hit and it’s part of the game. It happens fast and it’s intense out there,” Penguins star Sidney Crosby said when asked earlier this year about Wilson’s hit on Sundqvist. “When a guy does it a handful of times, you start to question what the intent is.”
Wilson doesn’t expect sympathy, and he’s remained so defiant that he won’t get any. Even as he admits he must change how he hits, he says it’s because the league has changed, becoming more about skill and speed than physicality. That’s true - the NHL now is very different from the one he grew up watching or even the one he first played in as a rookie in 2013 - but it’s also not an admission that what he was doing anything wrong before, rather that the atmosphere shifted and he now has to shift with it.
Of his four suspensions, he still vehemently disagrees with two of them: his first suspension, for interference on St. Louis’ Robert Thomas in a preseason game, and “the third one, I think you know my stance on, along with a lot of the rest of the hockey world,” he said. That was the illegal check to the head of Aston-Reese that cost him three playoff games. In NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s 31-page report from Wilson’s first appeal hearing last month, it was revealed that whether the hit rose to the level of a suspension was heavily debated within the Department of Player Safety.
He takes offense to being labeled a “headhunter” because of the 1,000-plus hits he’s delivered in his career, he was suspended for a head shot twice, with both coming in the past six months. “In both of them, my shoulder is completely down. I’m not targeting a head,” he said, adding that many will grouse at that logic anyway.
At the suggestion that what some might want to hear from him is remorse, he said, “I don’t think I need to tell the media the remorse I’ve had.
“I think anyone who knows me knows that I’ve had that. Right after I made that hit [on Sundqvist], you can see my face on the jumbotron. I wasn’t expecting that outcome. I don’t know what people want me to say. No one knows how I felt, and if I say I felt bad, then people are just going to say, ‘Oh, you felt bad? Look at him, he’s hurt.’ So, my family knows how I felt, my close friends know how I felt, and no one else really needs to know. But all that I’d have people know is that I have a ton of respect for the players that I play against, and I have a ton of respect for the players I play with. And when anyone gets hurt on the ice, you always hope that they’re OK.”