Former Winnipeg Jets captain Blake Wheeler has always responded best when he took some extra time to think.
His snarky, sarcastic and sometimes conceited attitude tends to disappear 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 personnel in Winnipeg probably don’t like me very much,” Wheeler said candidly on the radio. More than high performance podcast this week. “But it was never personal. An hour after every game I could have a good conversation even though I had the worst game of my life. Ten minutes later I’m still here. I can’t figure it out anytime soon.”
“As an emotional person, that was my battery every match. Tapping into the emotion,” Wheeler added in conversation with his leadership coach Dan Leffelaar, who also serves as a podcast host. “What was really challenging for me as a leader was that after the match you have to dial that back and talk to the media in a respectful way. And I’m a 10 out of 10 on the emotion scale for the past three hours. I can’t get there.”
To those on the outside, it may have seemed like an older player wasn’t quite living up to his expected point production based on a high annual salary.
But for Wheeler it was so much more than that.
“I thought about this 24 hours a day, as captain of the Winnipeg Jets,” he said. “Like: how can I get 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 me for many reasons. The worst year in terms of panic attacks before every match. I was in a really bad place and I became someone I wasn’t proud of.
It plagued him throughout the 2021-22 season, leading to an offseason change that saw him hire Leffelaar as his leadership coach, who helped change his actions over the course of the 2022 offseason.
“You break down all the time, every practice, every game, and then you can say whatever you want,” Wheeler said of how he conducted himself as captain in Winnipeg.
“You earned the right to say what needed to be said. And if you think this is an asshole, call me an asshole. I was okay with being the guy who said things no one wanted to say. Because I backed it up every day, I believed.”
That mentality no longer seemed to work in the Jets’ locker room. So Leffelaar suggested reaching out to some teammates who weren’t as responsible for Wheeler’s past tactics with a phone call during the offseason and seeing what they thought needed to be changed.
That suggestion shook Wheeler to the core. But despite this, he put his pride aside and chose to return for the 2022-2023 season a changed man and a different leader.
“Go figure out how you might be falling short,” he mused. “It was horrible to expose yourself there like that.”
After overcoming that hurdle, Wheeler vowed to show up to camp with a fresh perspective on his role and leadership within the organization.
But then things took a serious turn. 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 is pulled from underneath it. ‘Oh, by the way, you’re not the captain anymore.’”
Wheeler seemed to take the hit in stride and said all the right things in the media, supporting Bowness’ new Jets. But deep down, the intrusive thoughts kept Wheeler from pushing the boundaries of his new-found leadership training/practice.
“Embarrassed probably doesn’t do justice to 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 was bought out the final season of his contract and played the following season – his last – with the New York Rangers.
He broke his leg with the Rangers in early 2023, but managed to work his way back into the lineup for the postseason. It wasn’t the storybook ending the 1,172-game veteran was hoping for, but it was seemingly the ending.
After hearing his name was in discussion for a professional tryout at the place where it all started in Boston this fall, the rumor mill ramped up and no offer was made by the Bruins.
Although he has now 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 in life as a father, without having to worry about anything other than eating at set the table. taking his children to school and keeping gas in the tanks of his vehicles.
“My body, can I still play hockey? Hell, yeah. I can still play,” Wheeler said. “It’s just the emotional thing, getting up 82 times… I don’t want to do that. There is only a limited amount of gasoline in the tank for that.”
