CALGARY — When Dennis Wideman came to Calgary in the summer of 2012, the Flames were still in denial. They were a franchise that was trying to win a Stanley Cup with a lineup that couldn’t even make the playoffs, and in Wideman they’d vastly overpaid a free agent defenceman who had been a train wreck in the playoffs with Washington the previous spring.
He signed a five-year, $26.25 million deal with Calgary, then bombed, producing just 10 goals and 43 points over his first two seasons. Last summer any NHL general manager could have walked away with the Kitchener native for a mid-round draft pick — as long as he took the entire contract in the deal.
Even the head coach was fed up. You knew that when Bob Hartley healthy-scratched his highest paid player in only the second game of the season back in October. “I felt like he was wanting to do that before. I wasn’t completely surprised,” Wideman said on Wednesday morning.
“It was two years. It was two years,” repeated Hartley. “Sometimes, you need to make some steps. You need to make people accountable.
“You sit out kids? It doesn’t affect no one. When you tell a veteran that he is going to sit, and if he doesn’t change he might as well get a season ticket because that’s going to be the best seat in the house for him, then you put the ball in his hand.”
If there is a button that Hartley has pushed in error this season, it has not been visible from outside the coach’s room. Getting Wideman’s attention, and finding a way to make him the team player that he has become, only seems more vital now that captain Mark Giordano is injured and gone for the remainder of the season.
“Credit to Wides, he’s been a changed player. A changed man,” Hartley said. “It’s quite a story, to go from being scratched the second game to having a letter put on his jersey towards the end of the year — in a season where we’re right in the thick of things. And it was an easy decision (to give Wideman the alternate captaincy left open when Curtis Glencross was traded). I went around to a few players, to a few members of our organization, and it was an easy ‘Yes’ from everyone. People saw the same thing that I saw. That’s probably one of the best turnaround stories that I have seen in my career.”
Wideman, of course, won’t admit to an epiphany. Players are usually too proud to admit to the slippage that his game suffered, and he is no different.
“I don’t think I feel any different. On-ice, stuff is going better. Maybe (the ‘A’) has changed me,” he said. “I had my first son (Emmett) this summer. Maybe that changed me a bit.”
Today, Wideman stands as a microcosm for a Flames roster that is teeming with career seasons. He has a dozen goals and 41 points — his best numbers since he was on Boston’s blueline six seasons ago. And with Giordano gone, Wideman’s usual 24 minutes of ice time each night has grown to just a shade under 30 minutes per night.
This is the same defenceman who, in his final playoff run with Washington, was on the ice for eight of Boston’s 13 even-strength goals in Round 1. He went minus-7 in 14 playoff games that spring.
Today Wideman, who will be 32 by month’s end, is a 30-minute man on the blueline of the NHL’s most surprising story of the year.
“Leadership. Good habits. Playing to his potential. I had to find a way to get to him, and he’s done it,” said Hartley. “Hey — you grow, you learn. Players get better, coaches get better.
“The chair that we had in our defensive scheme, we had no one who could fill those minutes apart from him,” Hartley said. “We wouldn’t be in this race if it wasn’t for Dennis Wideman.”
Who knew?
