Ron Wilson says he has nothing to prove
Last Updated: Saturday, February 27, 2010 | 4:44 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
As a coach, Ron Wilson has known great success and great failure. And that is only this season.
Wilson has led the surprising United States men’s hockey team to the Olympic gold medal game against Canada on Sunday. And when the N.H.L. season resumes Monday, he will return as coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the last-place team in the Eastern Conference. Only a couple of months ago, there were calls for his dismissal.“I know I can coach,” Wilson said calmly Friday when asked about the contrast between his two jobs. “I didn’t come into these Games to — I’m searching for the word — justify my coaching career.
“I think I’m seventh in wins and close to sixth in games coached,” he said, accurately, of where of he stands on the career lists. “I’ve been in the N.H.L. for 17 years, so I don’t need a silver or gold medal to top off my career. I’m proud of all the times I’ve coached in USA Hockey.”
Wilson, 54, has coached remarkably well at these Olympics. The Americans have won all five games they have played, including a 5-3 victory in their first meeting with the Canadians. They have never trailed.
“Anytime we’ve made mistakes and need to play better, Ron has been very calm,” goalie Ryan Miller said after the United States trounced Finland, 6-1, in the semifinals Friday. “I think that’s the kind of demeanor the team needed, and it’s just kind of filtered down.”
Wilson has already been behind the bench for one of United States hockey’s greatest achievements: the come-from-behind victory in the deciding game of the 1996 World Cup of Hockey, in which Wilson’s team scored four goals in the last three minutes to beat Canada in Montreal. That game, though little remembered in the United States, is still viewed as a catastrophe north of the border.
He was also behind the bench for one the most embarrassing moments: the sixth-place finish in 1998 at the Nagano Games in Japan, where the Americans won only one of four games, then trashed some of their rooms in the Olympic Village.
“We came here with the expectation of winning a gold medal,” Wilson said after the 1998 debacle. “In life, you find potholes in the road. You try to negotiate around them, and sometimes you fall in them.”
Such are the ups and downs of a hockey lifer, and Wilson is just that. He grew up in Fort Erie, Ontario, across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo, where his father, Larry, skated for the Bisons of the American Hockey League for 13 seasons, longer than any other player.
He holds dual citizenship but said, “even though I was born in Canada, I’m as proud as any American can be.”
Wilson went to Providence College, where he became friends with Brian Burke, his general manager for both the Olympic team and the Maple Leafs. They were coached on the Providence hockey team together by Lou Lamoriello, now the general manager of the Devils.
Wilson was a good player. He became the Friars’ career leading scorer and was picked for the 1976 Olympic team, then went on to a respectable career as a fourth-line forward for the Maple Leafs and the Minnesota North Stars.
After his playing career, Wilson turned to coaching. He spent four years as the first coach of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, five as coach of the Washington Capitals — where he reached his only Stanley Cup finals — and another five with the San Jose Sharks.
In 2008-09, Wilson and Burke were reunited with the Maple Leafs. They have lost often in their season and a half there, but they do not have the same quality of players in Toronto as they do with the United States national team.
“When you’ve got great goaltending, a very mobile defense and skill up front, as coaches we just try to stay out of the way,” he said Friday.
“You just simplify everything. There’s five or six things that are really important that you have to work on. That’s what your focus is. You don’t come in and dazzle them with 35 drills and change your practice every day — just keep it very simple and basic and work on a couple things.”
He mentioned the team’s successful penalty killing, which is handled by an assistant, Scott Gordon of the Islanders. The team’s power play is coached by John Tortorella of the Rangers.
Wilson’s international hockey experience has proven useful as well. Where Burke values “truculence” in his N.H.L. teams, including in Wilson’s Maple Leafs, the Americans have been restrained in the strictly officiated Olympic tournament.
“I just love our discipline throughout this tourney,” Wilson said. “We haven’t ever hit back at somebody or retaliated to any slight. We’ve turned our cheek, and it’s been to the team’s benefit that we’ve played that way.”
Wilson went into the 1998 Olympics as a World Cup champion who was expected to lead the United States to the gold medal. This time, he came into the Olympics as the coach of a last-place N.H.L. team and with expectations lowered.
But the Americans are within 60 minutes of winning gold medals.
“I want to help these kids realize their dream,” Wilson said. “Since they were little kids, since they were born, they’ve all dreamed of, one, winning the Stanley Cup and, two, winning a gold medal in the Olympics. If I can help these 23 young men accomplish that, it’ll be a good thing for all of us.”
