CALGARY — A sign of just how things are changing for Jeremy Roenick, that lovable blabbermouth:
Now, others are doing most of the talking about him; and they're saying some nice, good and believable things about his play and his deportment around the San Jose Sharks, his latest (and probably) last NHL job.
Now, that's not to say Roenick pressed his own personal mute button; he's still willing to chat with the members of the Fourth Estate; he just isn't as apt to make outrageous, outlandish statements that end up in all the headlines.
Instead of being known for what he says off the ice, Roenick is making news for what he's doing on the ice. In some ways, it's a refreshing change — and hearkens back to a mostly forgotten era when Roenick was one of the most complete players in the game.
It wasn't an era forgotten by Sharks' general manager Doug Wilson, however. When Roenick turned pro as a teenager with the Chicago Blackhawks in 1988-89, he lived with Wilson's family for a time in the Windy City, a strategy designed to ease the transition from the Thayer Academy to the big leagues (with a 28-game stop with the QMJHL's Hull Olympiques in between).
Mike Keenan was running the show in Chicago then and it was Keenan's presence behind the bench that Roenick has often credited for turning him into an edgy, two-way force. Consider that in the four seasons between 1990 and 1994, Roenick amassed 411 points, scored 50 goals twice, 40 two other times and made it to one Stanley Cup final with the Blackhawks. At the age of 37, with retirement looming this summer, the Sharks coaxed him back for one more season, Doug Wilson calling to offer him a job, coach Ron Wilson endorsing the decision.
So here we are, two weeks in, and Roenick spent Monday night's laughably easy 4-1 win over the Calgary Flames on the No. 1 line, alongside Joe Thornton. He picked up two assists, giving him five points for the season in seven games played. He entered the game with three goals, leaving him two short of 500 for his career.
The Sharks are a modest 5-3-1 in the early going, thanks for a tough early-season road schedule, but two of their three losses came with Roenick on the sidelines, nursing what coach Ron Wilson described as assorted bumps and bruises.
"The two games he's missed, we've sorely missed him," assessed Wilson, "not only in the line-up, but probably more importantly, the things he says on the bench and in the locker room. He's content where he is right now in his career and what it means to be able to go out on a good note. He's scored three goals and played really well."
Wilson was doing most of the talking the other day about Roenick, who played for him on the 1996 United States Canada Cup team. Somehow, the player that made a significant contribution to that victory became a sideshow in his last two NHL stops — Los Angeles and Phoenix. Anyone who watched Roenick play so hard for the Ken Hitchcock-coached Flyers during the '03 and '04 playoffs had a right to wonder what happened.
"I said to him: You were a caricature of yourself," continued Wilson. "When you start talking about yourself in the third person, then you obviously are a caricature of yourself. He's not unlike a lot of the veteran guys who missed a year and then some. If you want to call them the vocal group of the players' association and the sting that went along with the negotiations and missing a whole year and forgetting to put the work in after that year. JR is a perfect example of that."
For his part, Roenick had one good observation about his current role with the Sharks, likening it to being one of the middle men on a tug-of-war team, not at the front or the back, but just helping to pull on the rope. Otherwise, it was mostly familiar platitudes about team goals and the comparative unimportance of his pending milestone — something that he would savor after his career, but not push for at the expense of team goals.
Wilson had a few more meaningful observations about Roenick's turnaround.
"He's lost a lot of weight," said Wilson. "I talk to him all the time: 'What was your ideal playing weight in your best years?' He had three years, over a hundred points in Chicago and he weighed 185. He's been playing the last two years at 210.
"As with most players, your weight goes up as you get older and you mature physically, but in the new NHL, carrying the extra pounds makes absolutely no sense. It's not a bump-and-grind kind of game the way it used to be. In the eighties and nineties, when he was a dominant player, you had to muscle your way through a lot of things. You had to bulk up.
"He's down to 195 and sinking. I think if he gets to around 190, he's going to feel that much better as a player. He's going to be faster.
"We all go through it, towards the end of your career. Naturally, after 30, unless you're on performance-enhancing drugs …
Wilson paused, as everyone around him inhaled, wondering where he was going with that comment.
"That's the danger in professional sports now. There's so much money to be made, the temptations — as your body deteriorates — are incredible. The idea is to lose some weight. The example you use with people is, 'put on a 10-pound weight vest and go for a little light skate around the rink — and you'll see what 10 extra pounds mean.' Now, if you take those extra 10 pounds off, without losing any strength, you've got to faster. You've got to feel better. You've got to have more energy. That's physics — and JR's getting there. More important, he feels good about himself. He doesn't have to say all these things to hide in a fog-bank about what he's actually doing on the ice."
Wilson played long enough to know how a losing environment can change a players' mindset.
"You forget your priorities," he said. "You forget how to win. You just try and protect yourself and your own numbers. Plus-minus doesn't matter anymore. You start to cheat. That happens when your team is not doing well, for whatever reason. You go in with the right intentions, but then it starts to slip and then it's like, 'survival mode.'"
With two more goals, Roenick will become only the third American-born player after Mike Modano and Joe Mullen to score 500 in the NHL. Wilson is giving him every opportunity — for now anyway, he's displaced Jonathan Cheechoo on Thornton's right side on a line that also includes Milan Michalek.
"The goal he scored the other night, five-on-three, he hid in a seam and then popped out and boom, put it in the net," said Wilson. "I'm sure right now, that No. 500 is a weight you carry around. You get closer it'll be harder to score. I told him today (Monday): 'Just relax, you've scored 498 times, two more is not that big a deal, it's just a number.' But it's something he would be emotional about. He's an emotional person."
And right now, the Sharks are content just to feed on that emotion.