Nobody wants to see anyone get hurt, but there’s no doubt that villains liven up NHL hockey. And however short your list is of the NHL’s most-loathed black hats, it’s likely you’ve got Tom Wilson somewhere on there. He might be trailing Nick Cousins and Brad Marchand, but he’s still lurking somewhere back there (perhaps waiting to hit them from behind).
Wilson has now been suspended six times in his career, and fined three others. During a run of play spanning 2017 and 2018 he was suspended four times, which meant he missed three playoff games, 18 regular season contests and a sprinkling of pre-season games to boot.
The answer to “Should this particular offence require an in-person hearing?” is held in the details just printed above, which nullifies any benefit of the doubt and leads to suspensions that balloon like compound interest.
This is the thing with running around reckless in NHL games – you might get away with one here, you might get a break with a soft call another time, but if you do it enough, the chickens usually come home to roost. And for Wilson, the coop is full.
Against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday night, Wilson received a double-minor for one of the most baffling stick-lashes I can recall. He cleanly checks Noah Gregor, who then gets his stick across Wilson’s chest for a little pull-away “get-off-me” type jab, to which Wilson responds by one-hand whipping his stick across Gregor’s mouth, appearing to crack the speedy Leafs forward’s teeth. It was a rapid escalation in violence that seemed to catch even Wilson off-guard.
The second view is best:
To pinpoint the exact no-no moment, after Wilson brought the stick up like a golf swing:
We now go to a referee, to get their take:
Correct.
And Tom is immediately, fully aware of his mistake.
There’s some real Of Mice and Men “Lennie just killed another mouse by petting it” vibes to this Tom Wilson suspension, in that he himself seems genuinely baffled by what occurred.
And further to that, there’s not even much public outcry about the play compared to most other incidents which warrant in-person hearings. The moment seemed devoid of malice, but was rather instinctual. (Which might be worse?) Wilson was just playing, he reacted emotionally for a second, and damn near knocked a guy’s front teeth through the back of his throat.
The most generous review of what happened is that Wilson tried to smack him across the chest with his stick and Gregor was shorter than Wilson anticipated. Even if you don’t review it generously though, it feels unlikely that Wilson’s sincere thought was “I’m going to whip-lash my stick right across this guy’s teeth nearly unprovoked” (though some would disagree with me there). To me there’s some physical mistake that compounds the mental one, but this is a level of recklessness that gets you suspended every day of the week.
It reminded me a bit of this one by Zack Kassian on Sam Gagner, which shattered the latter’s jaw:
Kassian got five regular season games for his bit of dangerous flailing, which felt a touch more violent and malicious.
You could make the case that Jacob Trouba got away with a whack to the head of Trent Frederic here (he was fined $5,000)…
…but the Wilson and Kassian incidents seem more comparable.
What stands out to me more than anything is how this is all cumulative for Wilson. If he hadn’t done all the previous things he’d done, maybe he’d get a game or two. The Capitals have enjoyed the fruits of Wilson’s intimidating style, but this time they’re about to bear the downside of his up-swing.
The Caps are just three points out of a playoff spot behind the Red Wings, with two games in hand. They’re also just four points back of the Flyers, also with two games in hand. That means they have two teams they can root for to falter, and all they’d need to do is take care of their own business by maybe winning nine of their remaining 14 games or so (that would get them to 93 points). But the truth is, the Capitals aren’t a loaded team, they don’t have a ton of impact players, and so this suspension decimates them.
Combine that with the fact Washington has the third hardest remaining schedule in the NHL, and suddenly what was a totally feasible mountain to scale has become much longer and steeper. It’s not inconceivable the Capitals could make or miss the playoffs by a point or two, and that Wilson could have swung a game or two of the five-plus he’s likely to miss.
It’s tough to feel sympathetic. The NHL has done a pretty darn good job eliminating its most dangerous plays, and as a result, it finds itself with far fewer dangerous players. As I said, the villains are mostly gone. But Wilson has shown himself susceptible to the big mistake. We love players in the game who play on the “edge,” but when a team rolls out a guy who consistently falls to the wrong side of it, it’s fair they suffer the consequences along with that player.
The Caps aren’t done, not by any means. But in their quest to grab the East’s final playoff spot, Tom Wilson’s latest “accident” does nothing but hold them back.
