Wheeler truly a one-of-a-kind athlete

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This article was published 12/05/2021 (1622 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Say this about Blake Wheeler: Love him or loathe him, we’ve never seen an athlete quite like him around these parts.

The latest chapter in his legacy was written earlier this week with the revelation that the Winnipeg Jets captain quietly played through cracked ribs earlier this season, an experience that would probably rank somewhere between having a tooth extracted without freezing and removing your toenails with a pair of rusty pliers.

Competing in a fast-moving, full-contact sport at the highest level in the world without the ability to properly breathe takes some kind of moxie. No, kids, I would not recommend trying this at home.

It was while listening to the veteran Jets winger speak Tuesday night, after he’d just completed his biggest offensive outing of the season with two goals and two assists in a 5-0 victory over the Vancouver Canucks, that it dawned on me.

This Winnipeg team has truly become Wheeler personified. They are skilled but not without flaws. They can be streaky and moody and unpredictable and downright surly and difficult to deal with at times. It’s not always pretty. And they seem to thrive on an us-against-the-world mentality, which they’ve got in spades right now thanks to a 2-9-0 slide as they head into a first-round playoff meeting with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and the heavily-favoured Edmonton Oilers.

There’s no question many of the core players on the club — from Mark Scheifele, Adam Lowry and Andrew Copp to Josh Morrissey, Kyle Connor and Mason Appleton — have adopted many of the same work habits and personality traits as the deeply-respected Wheeler, which you can see in their play and hear in what they have to say. That’s a compliment, by the way.

True story: Last weekend, Connor was asked by a local reporter about a seven-game scoreless skid he was on, and I swear I thought for a minute I was listening to Wheeler’s voice coming out of Connor’s mouth when he snapped back: “Thanks for reminding me.”

How did Connor respond to that? By scoring in two straight games, almost as if to stick it to the critics. Same goes for Wheeler, who clearly was growing weary of fielding questions game after game about why his team was struggling so much down the stretch. That was certainly the case on Monday night, after a 3-1 loss to the Canucks, where it was suggested to Wheeler that he almost sounded “defeated.” Uh oh. A nerve was clearly struck.

“Those words are pretty heavy and they’re words that you use, not me,” Wheeler snarled. Naturally, he followed that up 24 hours later with a four-point outing, leading his team to a victory that finally clinched third place in the all-Canadian division and might, at least for a few days, call of the mob of angry fans wielding pitchforks.

Question: How many folks around these parts are dealing with sore ankles from jumping on, and off, the bandwagon? Just as the Jets likely weren’t as good as their record suggested earlier in the year, I suspect they’re not nearly as bad as their recent track record would indicate. The truth is likely somewhere in between.

And it seems Wheeler, and many of his teammates, are champing at the bit with the chance to try and stick it to anyone already writing the obituary on their 2021 season.

Jets coach Paul Maurice, who is cut from the same cloth as his captain, is clearly taking that approach. He apparently delivered one hell of a pre-game speech on Tuesday, one that Paul Stastny said was like something out of the mouth of Winston Churchill and Wheeler called “one of his all-time best.” Not surprisingly, it fed into the “everyone is writing us off for dead” mentality, referencing how almost nobody even picked him to make the playoffs.

Yep, that’s right out of the Wheeler playbook, which we saw again this week when he was asked why he remained in the lineup despite being nowhere close to 100 per cent. Wheeler’s struggles at the time were painfully obvious to all observers, especially when it came to his five-on-five play, but he refused to acknowledge he was injured. Because pride, I guess?

Unfortunately, it led to speculation in some quarters that this was just the expected downfall of a rapidly-declining 34-year-old player, which only had Wheeler’s back up even more and has led to plenty of combative exchanges with media this season over Zoom.

“Our team was still winning. You guys didn’t think I had a big part in that, but I still felt like I was able to help the team and that was the most important thing for me,” Wheeler said Tuesday. “I certainly wasn’t myself, but if I was holding us back it’d be a different story. But the team was still going in the right direction.”

Should have he stayed in the lineup? Probably not. Is it a surprise that he did? Definitely not.

“We’re playing in Dallas my first year here and Blake gets hit into the door late in the game and crawls out the door down the hallway. So I pull my card out and scratch his name off and he’s back on the bench about three minutes later. There’s still time on the clock, we’re down a goal, and I’m thinking that’s not possible,” said Maurice.

Turns out this rib issue is just the latest in a long list of ailments Wheeler has secretly played through in Winnipeg.

“Every player is different. So, it’s cracked ribs; it’s a pain thing. He has an incredibly high tolerance for pain and at the same time I’m going to watch that game and if clearly he can’t play the game he’s not going to play. Blake would be a guy that over the time we’ve gotten to know each other, would have a real wide latitude of what I would allow,” said Maurice

“I’m talking about from a coach’s point of view – can he play? He comes in and he says he can play then he can play. He’s done that two or three times a year that I’ve been here. He’s played with a broken heel at one point. The list of injuries he’s played with no one would ever know about and his production never fell off and I’m going after the game, ‘How did he get through that?’ But he just does.”

Now fully recovered, Wheeler seems to have found another gear at the most important time of the year. He has five goals and six assists in the last eight games, which leads the team in that span. His 44 points through 49 games put him in the Top 50 of NHL scoring, which is pretty impressive for a guy who is now just 20 games away from hitting 1,000 in his career and played at least a few weeks of this season gasping for air at the end of every shortened shift.

If the Jets are going to make any noise in the playoffs, it will likely be as a result of following their fearless leader, who has admitted to being hard on his teammates at times as he tries to get them all pulling in the same direction.

No, we’ve never seen another athlete like him around these parts. And we likely never will again.

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @mikemcintyrewpg