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TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs will be Ron Wilson's fourth turn as a head coach in the NHL, and possibly his most challenging.
Of the previous three situations – with the Anaheim Ducks, Washington Capitals and San Jose Sharks – which does he feel is the most similar to the journey he is about to embark on in Toronto?
With the expansion Ducks, Wilson didn't win a first-round playoff series until his fourth season. He steered the Capitals to the Stanley Cup final in his first of five years there. The Sharks were a team in disarray when he took over in December of 2002, but after plenty of regular-season success, he failed to guide them past the conference final in five seasons.
“I guess you could say that this situation is a combination of all three,” Wilson said yesterday, “but closer to San Jose because we went from the oldest team to one of the youngest teams with a lower payroll and we got results. That team might win a Stanley Cup next year or the year after if they let the group mature together.”
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Wilson, 53, verbally agreed to a four-year contract, worth about $6-million (U.S.) last weekend and is expected to be formally introduced at a media conference today in Toronto.
When Wilson was fired by the Sharks on May 12, Leafs interim general manager Cliff Fletcher immediately attempted to woo Wilson to his first coaching job north of the border since he was an assistant with the Vancouver Canucks in the early 1990s.
The two met in Charlotte, N.C., on May 27, then again in Toronto a week ago.
Wilson returned home with an offer and took five days to allow it “to percolate” before phoning Fletcher to commit to coaching the Leafs, the team that drafted him and with which he played 64 games in the late 1970s.
Wilson will enter his 15th season as an NHL head coach with 518 wins (third on the active list behind Mike Keenan's 626 and Bryan Murray's 620).
“I know this team will be young,” Wilson said. “One of my strengths is working with younger players. The only problem is there are not many younger players on the farm that can come in and help. There are younger players on the Leafs. Hopefully, I can help them.
“In the new NHL, a lot of players develop in the NHL and aren't given the time to play in the minors. You're almost forced into playing some young players,” he said. “So it's not only important as head coach, but you need a group of assistants capable of working with young players.”
Wilson never has been subjected to the scrutiny he will face in Toronto. But he did survive the pressure cooker of the 1998 Stanley Cup final with the Capitals, as well as the 1996 World Cup of Hockey and 1998 Winter Olympics with the United States team.
“Scrutiny from the outside is irrelevant,” Wilson said. “You need consensus in the inside. We need to stick together and we need to buy into the plan. It might take two years, but everybody from the scouting staff to the general manager to the coach has to stick together for a long time.”
Wilson is quick-witted and cynical. But he also has the ability to make his players laugh and takes the challenge to motivate them head on.
In the World Cup, he showed his players a scene from the movie Patton, in which U.S. General George S. Patton (as portrayed by George C. Scott) delivered an inspirational speech. The screening must have worked because his team beat Canada to win the tournament.
Coaching hockey always has been a big part of Wilson's life. His father, Larry Wilson, who died in 1979 at 48, played for the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks and found himself briefly behind the Detroit bench after his playing days concluded.
Born in Windsor, Ont., Ron Wilson followed his father to minor-league stops in Buffalo, Dayton, Ohio, and Providence, R.I.
Before Wilson's first game as an assistant coach with the Canucks, another Vancouver assistant coach at the time, Jack McIlhargey, who played under Larry Wilson for four years in the minors, told the younger Wilson his father would have been proud of him.
“Any time something like that happens, it's emotional,” said Wilson, whose uncle, Johnny Wilson, played for the Red Wings, Blackhawks, New York Rangers and, late in his career, the Maple Leafs.
“I think my uncle is just as excited as I am about this. He'll get a kick out of coming here for a few games and hanging out here.”
