Legends of the spring in the NHL

Landeskog, Perry and Wilson come to the fore in the first round

Stanley Cup hockey is the land of the moving conclusion. You can’t locate it, no matter how long you jump. You can’t say a 3-1 series is over when it’s actually just beginning, and you can’t hoist a player and a team into the headlines when they’re just as likely to revert to the mean. It’s a mean season, all around.

Toronto thought it had eluded its history when it seized a 3-0 lead over Ottawa, but now it’s 3-2, and fifth-graders in Oakville and Etobicoke can tell you how many goals William Nylander, Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner have scored in all the times they could have ended a series and didn’t. Edmonton looked obsolete in falling behind Los Angeles, 2-0, but now leads the series 3-2 with the next game in Edmonton. A wrap? Hardly.

Carolina had a 3-1 series lead over an enfeebled New Jersey team that was missing its best player, Jack Hughes, and much of its defense. Game 5 was in Raleigh. So the Devils took a 3-0 lead. Carolina did win, 5-4, but it took a second overtime, plus endless pressure on goalie Jacob Markstrom, who finally cracked. Carolina now plays the winner of Tampa Bay-Florida, a series Florida leads 3-1 although home teams in that series are 1-3.

There is no clear Stanley Cup favorite but there are three clear favorite stories as we began to sort out the first act of this four-act stageplay. Their faces and methods are familiar, even if playoff hockey is the only kind that you watch.

GABRIEL LANDESKOG

In 2020 Landeskog ran into Colorado teammate Cole Makar, whose skate blade nicked Landeskog’s knee. The Avalanche was in the midst of a tough playoff series with Dallas.. The injury was pronounced “not serious” by all concerned, and the Stars won the series in seven. And Landeskog, the captain, kept playing, all the way through 2022, when Colorado nailed down the Cup against Tampa Bay. The snapshot moment came in the third period, when Landeskog used his foot to block a shot by Nikita Kucherov, and Nathan MacKinnon had to drag his teammate to the bench, avoiding a too-many-men call.

What followed was a harrowing 3-year roundtrip, through doubt and boredom and a rapt faith in the powers of rehab. The knee pain never left Landeskog. As it turned out Makar’s skate had sliced off part of Landeskog’s kneecap. Underneath, it had damaged the cartilage, which is not positioned well to accept blood flow and thus doesn’t heal. Eventually Landeskog agreed to cartilage transplant surgery, which helps civilians handle everyday duties but isn’t guaranteed to restore an athlete’s power. Only Lonzo Ball, of the Chicago Bulls, had tried it, and his results were mixed at best.

Landeskog had scored twice in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals back then. He did not play the next season, nor the next, nor this one. He finally began skating in the early spring, and the Avalanche dressed him for Game 3 of this first-round series, again opposing Dallas. In Game 4, Landeskog got free at the blue line, took a pass from Brock Nelson, and gunned the puck past Dallas goalie Jake Oettinger. He emerged with a smile that he’d repressed for 1,041 days, the gap between goals, and was immediately mobbed by his teammates on the ice as the Ball Arena crowd chanted, “Landy! Landy!”

Nothing about this story is routine, especially not the main character. Landeskog became the Avalanche captain when he was 19, youngest in NHL history. He was the fulcrum of Colorado’s return to prominence, which now includes eight consecutive playoff appearances.

“I’m glad my (three) kids got to see me play,” Landeskog said. “I think they thought I was lying when I said I actually play hockey.”

Since the NHL is not a Disney movie, not even in Anaheim anymore, the Avalanche lost Game 5 to Dallas and are down, 3-2, in the series. But if they do win the series — and, really, teams like this shouldn’t be playing each other this early — they have a chance to skate around with the Cup again. MacKinnon, the reigning Hart Trophy winner and the new captain, would take the Cup from Gary Bettman and then hand it to an appropriate teammate. You get one guess.

COREY PERRY

The 2003 NHL Draft was a blood tranfusion. Seventeen of the 30 first-round picks became All-Stars. Every one of them played at least one regular season game. Four of them played in the 2024-25 season. Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, the top pick, is retiring, but Corey Perry, Brent Burns and Ryan Suter remain. All four are involved in these playoffs. Asked if he would be the last man standing, Perry said he’d probably vote for Burns, the Carolina defenseman. Those who know Perry are putting their bets elsewhere.

If the Edmonton Oilers can get to May 16, Perry will celebrate his 40th birthday in uniform. He played 81 games this year and had 19 goals. The last year he had more was 2016, when he had 34 for Anaheim. In the Oilers’ first-round series with Los Angeles, he spent some quality time on the front line, with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. That’s three Hall of Famers, most likely, and Edmonton won in Los Angeles Tuesday night to assume a 3-2 series lead.

Perry is still effective in his 20th year because his game never depended on his legs. Instincts, hands, reach and general insistence have earned Perry the bulk of his 448 goals. He’s one of the few players who embraces crease abuse as the price of doing business, and his smirk and his vocabulary have made him a lightning rod, which is always useful in the spring. As ex-goalie Brian Hayward once said, Perry loved to stake out space, put the puck in the net and then fall on the goalie. “That was the fun part for him,” Hayward said.

“People didn’t realize how big he is,” said former teammate Sean O’Donnell. “He had that baby face and that little head, and he’d get to the crease and score, and you never knew how he did it.”

There is nothing significant that Perry hasn’t won. He and Ryan Getzlaf were kids when the Ducks won the 2007 Stanley Cup. By then he had won a Memorial Cup and a World Junior. He also won the Hart Trophy, the league’s MVP, in 2011, when he scored 50 goals, and also a World Championship.

But when the rebuilding Ducks bought him out in 2019, Perry began a frenetic quest for another championship. He was in Dallas in 2020 when the Stars lost the final to Tampa Bay. He was with Montreal in 2021 when the Canadiens lost the Final, again to Tampa Bay. Sensing a pattern, he signed with Tampa Bay, which meant he was on the ice in 2022 when Colorado was celebrating. He was with Edmonton in 2024 when the Oilers roared back from a 0-3 hole and forced a Game 7 at Florida, which they lost. NHL executives know this isn’t happenstance. Tuesday night’s playoff game was Perry’s 220th.

Edmonton should have been swept by the Kings on Sunday night. It doesn’t have stalwart defenseman Mattias Ekholm. It had to ditch goalie Stuart Skinner, for his own protection. The Kings have dominated long stretches of play and are a better team in every world except the one occupied by McDavid and Draisaitl. This would be their fourth consecutive year of elimination at the hands of Edmonton, and easily the hardest to handle.

If it happens, maybe the Kings should ask Corey Perry how to get to the Final. They could also consider signing him.

TOM WILSON

As SportsNet reporter Elliotte Friedman said the other day, there was a time when each team in the NHL had five versions of Tom Wilson. That might be a bit of an exaggeration; the other teams would run out of healthy players. But his point was that there is only one left. Wilson is a guided missile, at 6-foot-4 and 220, and only he has the codes. No one is safe from Wilson’s seismic hits, ones that can cause headaches among spectators who watch in slow motion. Yes, there were always mean players in the league. The rules and the speed of the game have sidelined all those who can’t play. Wilson can.

Although Alex Ovechkin is a full participant, Wilson has become the focus of Washington’s first-round series with Montreal. At the end of the second period of Game 3, Wilson and Josh Anderson, a longtime antagonist from Toronto youth hockey days, staged a brawl that spilled over the boards and into the Canadiens’ bench area. It was not frivolous, and linesman Kyle Flemington was the unfortunate third party. Wilson then pantomimed a crying toddler, dabbing his eyes, a gesture believed to be directed toward Montreal’s 21-year-old Juraj Slavkovsky.

The Capitals lost that one, and on Sunday they were in a 2-2 tester with the young Canadiens, playing in front of the loudest home audience in the league. In the third period, Alexandre Carrier was near the boards, trying to transition the puck into Montreal’s attacking zone, when he got pulverized by the NHL’s Death Star. Wilson shouldered Carrier at full speed and sent him flying, although Carrier got up and skated to safety on his own power. It got more painful for the Habs when Brandon Duhaime scored as a consequence of that hit, and the Capitals went on to win, 5-2. They lead the series, 3-1, as it returns to Washington.

“They don’t make them like Tom Wilson anymore,” said Capitals coach Spencer Carbery. “There are so many qualities, all in one player….they’re not there. They’re not in this league.”

If they ever build a bridge in D.C. to honor Wilson, it will be a suspension bridge. He has been sidelined six times by the league’s Player Safety officials, once for 20 games. He was suspended in the second round of Washington’s drive to the 2018 Stanley Cup, and he sent Brandon Carlo, then with Boston, out of the building in an ambulance, which Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy called a “predatory hit.”

But Wilson isn’t on a seven-year, $45 million contract just because he’s unsafe at any speed. This year he scored a career-high 33 goals and had a career-high in ice time. Intimidation grows when the intimidator is so distinctive and rare. The Caps surprised everyone by notching the best record in the Eastern Conference, and if they can finish Montreal they might be headed for hockey in June. If so, heads will be swiveling, with a warhead on the loose.