Former Winnipeg Jets captain Blake Wheeler has always provided his best responses when taking some extra time to reflect.
His snarky, sarcastic, and sometimes stuck-up attitudes tend of wear off once he lets his guard down and actually speaks from a place of reflection, rather than passion.
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“That’s where some of the media staff in Winnipeg, they probably don’t like me very much,” Wheeler said candidly on the Beyond High Performance podcast this week. “But it was never personal. An hour after every game I could have a great conversation, even if I had the worst game of my life. It’s just 10 minutes after, I’m still up here. I can’t come down that fast.”
“As an emotional person, that was my battery every game. Tapping into the emotion,” Wheeler added in conversation with his leadership coach Dan Leffelaar, who also serves as the podcast host. “What was really challenging for me as a leader was after the game, you’ve got to dial that down and talk to the media in a way that’s respectful. And I’m like a 10 out of 10 on the emotion scale for the last three hours. I can’t get there.”
For those on the outside, it may have just seemed like an older player not quite living up to his expected point production based on a large yearly salary.
But to Wheeler, it was so much more than that.
“I was thinking about this 24 hours a day, being the captain of the Winnipeg Jets,” he said. “Like, how can I be better? How can I make our team better? From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, everything I do is structured around that. That was the worst year for a lot of reasons for me. The worst year in the sense of having panic attacks before every game. I was in a really bad place and I became somebody who I was not proud of.”
It ate at him through the 2021-22 season, leading to an offseason change – one that saw him hire Leffelaar as his leadership coach, who helped change his actions over the course of the 2022 offseason.
“You bust your ass all the time, every practice, every game, and then you can say whatever you want,” Wheeler said of how he behaved as captain in Winnipeg.
“You earned the right to say the thing that needed to be said. And if you think that’s being an as****e, then call me an as****e. I was okay being the guy to say the thing that nobody wanted to say. Because I was backing it up every day, I believed.”
That mentality no longer seemed to do the trick in the Jets’ dressing room. So Leffelaar suggested reaching out to some teammates that were not quite as responsible to Wheeler’s past tactics, by way of phone call during the offseason, and see what they felt needed to be changed.
That suggestion shook Wheeler to the core. But despite it, he pushed his pride aside and opted to come back a changed man, and a changed leader for the 2022-23 season.
“Go find out how maybe you’re falling short,” he reflected. “To put yourself out there like that was horrifying.”
Having tackled that hurdle, Wheeler vowed to show up to camp with a fresh look on his role and leadership within the organization.
But then things took a serious shift. Rick Bowness arrived in town and immediately stripped Wheeler of his duties as captain.
“I’m on a really good trajectory,” he said of his start to the 2022 offseason. “And then the rug gets pulled underneath. ‘Oh, by the way, you’re not the captain anymore.’”
Appearing to take the hit in stride, Wheeler said all the right things in the media, representing a supportive player for Bowness’ new-look Jets. But deep down, the intrusive thoughts kept Wheeler from pushing the envelope on his new-found leadership training/practice.
“Embarrassed probably doesn’t do justice how I felt,” he added. “I remember the first time I went out for our first game of the season, and I didn’t have the ‘C’ on my jersey anymore. I felt humiliated. I felt like everyone was staring at me.”
The year did not go so well for Winnipeg, with the Jets falling short of their postseason goal due to another first round exit. Wheeler had the final season of his contract bought out and went on to play the next season – his last – with the New York Rangers.
He ended up breaking his leg with the Rangers early in 2023, but managed to work his way back to the lineup for the postseason. It wasn’t the storybook ending the 1,172 game veteran was hoping for, but it seemingly was the ending.
Having heard his name up for discussion for a professional tryout back where it all began in Boston this fall, the rumour mill ran dry, and no offer was extended by the Bruins.
Although now having taken a step back from the duties and spotlight of captaincy in a Canadian market and hockey in general, the 38-year-old has found peace living life as a dad, without worrying about anything other than putting food on the table, getting his kids to school and keeping gas in the tank of his vehicles.
“My body, can I still go play a hockey game? Hell, yeah. I can still play,” Wheeler said. “It’s just the emotional, getting up 82 times… I don’t want to do that. There’s only so much gas in the tank for that.”
