Story on Doug Wilson

The Union – Sports:

It seems like it was almost yesterday, yet it was a decade-and-a-half ago.

Doug Wilson, the marquee player for the first NHL expansion team in years was seated alone on a bus destined for the old Los Angeles Forum. It was a bus trip to nowhere yet everywhere.

For the moment, he was anchoring the newest addition to the National Hockey League. He was the poster child for the San Jose Sharks credibility. Wilson was the symbol of courage, maturity, and focus of hockey’s newest franchise. He was the Captain of the South Bay’s hockey ship.

You could not help but find him approachable, friendly, and caring. As I boarded the bus, he greeted me as if he had known me for years, welcoming my questions, acting as if he had waited all day for me to agitate him on his way to another losing date with the Los Angeles Kings. In retrospect, he probably wished he had sat with another player. He is not the type of man who would ever admit it.

His tenure consisted of two tough seasons. They tested the mettle of the common man. An avalanche of losses was a by-product of expansion. They were good times, but they were also laden with difficult pills to swallow. Records were set for futility in those early days. It was all a part of the NHL’s new landscape that included a San Jose team of Minnesota North Star castoffs complemented with a partial entry draft.

A great look at Sharks GM Doug Wilson.

What’s not mentioned about these first two years is that Wilson was also playing in some pain from a cracked vertebra, an injury that contributed to the end of his career, and a couple of daughters JUST old enough to be in that first “crush” phase over Pat Faloon…

He has always been very accessible to the fans and open and honest in his comments to them. The first two jerseys I bought (in our collection of about 50 now) were a first-year Sharks jersey with 24 on the back, and an Ottawa 67′s jersey, which he gleefully signed for me one night and which sits in storage waiting for me to fit into it again so it can visit the Tank. To this day, I’ve put only two numbers — Wilson’s #24, and from my days as a King’s fan, Dave Taylor’s 18, although I’ve been considering adding a Black jersey with Mike Grier’s 25 to the mix.

Wilson and Kelly Kisio (who’s been somewhat forgotten in the area and doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a Shark) were the two players who really held this team together early and made the team *watchable* in its early years. While Dean Lombardi deserves serious credit for his work on the Sharks, it was Wilson who took the 80% of a champion that Lombardi had and molded it into the true contender it is today.

As someone who’s gotten to watch the soap opera that is a hockey team on a daily basis from the day it was announced into existance, it’s been a true joy to see Wilson’s work as a GM. The one big difference between Lombardi and Wilson to me is that Lombardi’s lawyer roots made contract negotiation a contest, where Wilson sees it as a situation to find the place where everyone wins, leading to fewer holdouts and controversies (and hopefully happier players).

To me, if there’s a word that defines Wilson, it’s one that I don’t think we normally attribute to a hockey player: grace. He’s got a gentleness to him, an automatic cameraderie around him. He’s not only a kick butt judge of hockey talent and a sharp manager of his organization — he exudes that aura that makes you feel he plans to succeed by making those around him successful. And so far, it’s worked.

I think the Pacific division is going to turn into THE powerhouse division of the NHL — because between Wilson, Lombardi and Brian Burke in LA you have three of the sharpest GMs in the league, and that’s going to make hockey out on the west coast a lot of fun (which is likely going to piss off the east coast media… I sure hope it does….).

My one worry about Wilson — if you go back and look at pictures of him from his playing days, he doesn’t seem to have aged at all. Has he been stealing from Dick Clark’s stash?

(hat tip: Kukla)

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