REPUTATION OF HARD KNOCKS
There’s much more than meets the eye with rugged Capitals forward Tom Wilson
The stands had emptied and even the dressing room was vacant when the Kaufman family gathered in a side room in the bowels of Capital One Arena, awaiting the benefactor who made this night possible.
Tom Wilson skated that evening with the idea of producing for the Washington Capitals against the Columbus Blue Jackets.
But win or lose, 20 nights a year, he welcomes families backstage for a peek under hockey’s hood.
They are families awaiting their wishes to be granted through Make-a-wish Mid-atlantic or families who have a parent in the military, and Wilson sees a dressing room tour and chit-chat as a chance to get their minds off a debilitating illness or time overseas — off life, really.
“It can be a bright spot in their month — or their year,” Wilson said.
So as Wilson showered up, the Kaufmans fidgeted.
What to ask an NHL star? “I want to ask him if he’s married,” 11-year-old Gabriella said.
“He’s not married,” her mom, Jamie, shot back immediately.
“How many fights did he have?” Gabriella’s 10-year-old brother, Gage, asked.
“I don’t know if he keeps track,” Jamie said.
And then here came Wilson, 6-foot-4-inches and 220 pounds of apologies.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “And sorry we lost.”
“Sorry you didn’t fight,” Gage said.
“Yeah,” Wilson said, and looked down. “I thought about it.”
Tom Wilson has movie-star looks, a Us$31-million contract, a Stanley Cup ring and a charity to support families who need it, and he’s in an impossible spot.
He laces up his skates and plays on the same line with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom — perhaps the two best players in Capitals history — because he is skilled enough to warrant that job.
Each night he skates that 220-pound frame at speeds more regularly reached by much smaller men, and he evaluates in real time whether he should power into an opposing player or pull back.
The choices are stark.
Hit, and he’ll almost certainly be questioned. Pull back, and he just might question himself.
“You have a reputation,” he said, “you have to deal with it.”
Wilson deals with it every day. There was a time when players who dish out hits the way Wilson can were valued rather than vilified. That time is not the dawn of 2020.
Since he entered the league as a 19-year-old rookie in 2013, he has been suspended four times, including once in the playoffs and once for a hit in the preseason that cost him the first 14 games after the Capitals won the Stanley Cup. And yet in his own dressing room, he is embraced, even at 25, as a leader and a foundational piece for what eventually will be a post- Ovechkin era.
“His type of player was the type of player a young Canadian kid grew up idolizing,” goalie Braden Holtby said.
“He’s very intelligent,” GM Brian Maclellan said.
“If somebody told me Tom Wilson would be the next captain there, I would have zero arguments against it,” retired defenceman Brooks Orpik said.
“You get to know him, and you learn about the character — it’s off the charts,” head coach Todd Reirden said.
Read all that, and Capitals fans nod their head, because it affirms what they already know. Read all that, and fans in other markets roll their eyes, smirk or worse.
Wilson is caught, not only between those two hockey groups but between an era in which he would have been celebrated and one that labels him dirty.
As Holtby said, “He would have had success in any decade,” the brawling 1970s or the wide-open 1980s or the hard-checking 1990s all included.
But he’s about to play in the 2020s, when the NHL will continue to employ an active and aggressive Department of Player Safety.
It is a group Wilson knows all too well. It is a group that has asked — has demanded — Wilson change the way he plays.
He has the size and the strength and the speed to inflict damage nightly. The NHL would rather he pull up and back off.
So as he hits the prime of his career and becomes a fixture on the Capitals’ top line, there is an evolution taking place.
“Who is the new Tom Wilson?” Reirden asked. “And what’s it going to look like?”
Tom Wilson grew up a white-collar kid in Toronto. His father, Keven, was a banker. He and his two brothers played hockey on a sheet of ice Keven maintained in a ravine at the base of their backyard.
Old doors, some still with the knobs on them, served as the boards. And young Tom wore it out.
In those early years, Wilson wasn’t always bigger and stronger than his peers. A growth spurt in his early teens shot him over 6 feet. It didn’t make him more athletic. It made him more awkward.
“You’re like Bambi,” Wilson said. “You have to learn how to skate again at 14 or 15.”
He was drafted by the OHL’S Plymouth Whalers and as a 16-year-old, he had to stay in the lineup before he could work his way up it.
And so one night against the Barrie Colts, he fought.
“It just kind of happened,” Wilson said. “I won the fight. And you’re like: ‘All right. It’s not so bad.’ And you see what it does to the team. It brings guys together.”
By his NHL draft year, he was on the power play, playing more minutes, creating more offensively. In 13 playoff games, he produced 13 points. He stood that full 6-foot-4, but man, he could skate, too.
In 2012, the Caps held the 16th overall selection.
Early in his NHL career, circumstance pigeonholed Wilson. NHL rules dictated that in 2012-13, he couldn’t play in the American Hockey League, the top minor league circuit. The choices: Play in the NHL, which might be too much, or go back to junior, which he had outgrown.
Adam Oates, then the Capitals’ coach, pushed to keep Wilson with the big club. So, at 19, here he was, an NHL rookie.
“He was in one of those situations where you see a lot of kids’ careers get ruined by being up at a young age and not playing,” Holtby said, “or being put into a role that might not lead to growing a lot.”
The role: Play on the fourth line. Buzz around. Hit people. Fight. In less than eight minutes a night, have an impact.
“If you’re playing against another team’s top players, make it tough for them,” Wilson said.
“When those guys come over the boards, they know it’s going to be a tough shift.”
As he moved into his third NHL season, his role was expanding just as the league was changing.
Sidney Crosby, arguably the sport’s biggest star, had missed time with concussions.
Player safety moved to the forefront of the discussion. Speed became important. Hitting became a problem.
“I wanted to grow,” Wilson said. “I wanted to learn. I wanted to adapt. And, you know, the hits that I’ve made, they’re bodychecks. They’re hard hockey plays.
“But I think — I hope — there’s a respect ... you’re out there trying to play the game hard and honest. You see a lot of histrionics entering the game now like slashing and butt-ending and spraying — and licking guys. That’s never been my style.”
The Capitals vehemently defend Wilson and his style. He has, they know, examined his game and how it relates to the way the league is trending. They know he met with the Department of Player Safety to better understand the line he is walking.
They know the time he has spent in front of video monitors, looking at his own hits — none more so than the mid-ice check of St. Louis centre Oskar Sundqvist, the preseason blow for which the NHL originally suspended him 20 games, a penalty later reduced to 14.
“I studied that hit for days on days on days,” Wilson said.
That suspension followed the three-game ban Wilson served during the Caps’ run to the Cup for a hit that broke the jaw of Pittsburgh’s Zach Aston-reese.
In issuing the verdict for the hit on Sundqvist, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman wrote, as part of a 31-page explanation, “I hope that this decision will serve as an appropriate ‘wake-up call’ to Mr. Wilson, causing him to re-evaluate and make positive changes to his game.”
To the Capitals, though, there needs to be some re-evaluation of how Wilson is being evaluated.
“He shies away from a lot of hits just in case something was to go wrong,” forward T.J. Oshie said.
Even with the modifications, eyes still turn Wilson’s way. There are simple physics at work here.
Most 220-pound players can’t skate as fast as Wilson can. Most smaller players are fast enough that they avoid such hits. But Wilson’s combination of size and speed puts him in position for more hits that have an impact.
“There’s been times where he’ll get frustrated with hits and people complaining,” said Orpik, a teammate for five years and someone who knows about physical play and being suspended for it. “And he says, ‘Hey, I let up on him.’ And I’d say: ‘Tom, I know you let up on him. But when you let up on him, you still blow people up.’ ”
He had to harness some of that physical element that is a difference-maker for him ... he had become too important to our team.
In northern Virginia, where he bought a house, and Washington, where his girlfriend has enrolled in grad school at George Washington, he is at ease.
“This is almost home,” Wilson said. “I love it here.”
The six-year deal he signed following the Stanley Cup victory in 2018 means he’s in line to be here at least through 2023-24. But this feels like a permanent marriage because of how valuable Wilson has become to the Caps.
Some of that value comes from his post-sundqvist adjustments.
“He had to harness some of that physical element that is a difference-maker for him ... he had become too important to our team,” Reirden said.
“I had to tell him: Our team cannot afford to not have you on the ice.”
Even if Wilson is processing potential hits more cautiously, he has a presence that impacts games.
When the Kaufman family had spent their time in the dressing room, sat in Ovechkin’s stall, taken all the pictures in all the permutations that they wanted with Wilson, they walked to the elevator, beaming one and all.
Travis Kaufman is a captain in the U.S. army. He has seen combat in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and provided humanitarian support in Guatemala. He has been away from his family — a lot.
“These meetings, they have an effect on both parties,” Wilson said. “It can be very sad to see what some of these people are going through, and some of the kids are mature beyond their years because they’re going through such tough stuff.”
The tough stuff is what hockey fans don’t see when Tom Wilson skates, whether he checks or he turns away, whether he fights or skates off.
He has a reputation. He has to deal with it, even as he wants it to change.
The Washington Post