Washington Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan still remembers his first glimpse at T.J. Oshie‘s medical report when he acquired the then 28-year-old forward from the St. Louis Blues in 2015.
“I was like, ‘Holy f—, this guy’s got some miles on him.’ He had all these things on the report,” MacLellan recalled this week. “I didn’t have any idea this was going on. We ended up doing the trade anyway, but I wondered how long this would last.”
“If you had asked me if he’d play a thousand games back then, I would’ve said ‘no.'”
Oshie, now 37, became the 390th skater in NHL history to reach the 1,000-game milestone on March 16 against the Vancouver Canucks. His intensity, physicality and willingness to compete for every inch of ice made him an impact player for the Blues and the Capitals over 16 seasons.
But that style of play also took its toll. Oshie played over 75 games just four times in his career. Upper-body injuries, lower-body injuries, surgeries, a series of concussions — Oshie has experienced it all.
“It’s got to go down as a thousand of the hardest games ever played in the NHL,” said Karl Alzner, Oshie’s former teammate with the Capitals.
Some players chase benchmarks for goals or points. Ever since he entered the league, Oshie targeted the 1,000-game plateau as his career measuring stick.
“There’s no other milestones that I really set for myself in my career,” he told ESPN this week. “I looked up to the guys that came before me that reached the thousand-game mark, seeing the ceremonies and the silver sticks they’d receive. It’s a pretty cool thing and it’s tough to do.”
Oshie is being honored for his achievement on Sunday, before the Capitals’ home game against the Winnipeg Jets. His teammates will wear his number during warmups. The team and the NHL have gifts to present him.
There were certainly times Oshie wasn’t convinced he’d earn the celebration.
“It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, honestly,” he said. “I think you when you have to go through it yourself, in the fashion that I did and the amount of time it took, it definitely takes its toll. But it was all worth it.”
Oshie’s journey to 1,000 games was an emotional one, on and off the ice.
BEFORE OSHIE PLAYED his 1,000th game in Vancouver, his teammates engaged in one of those decidedly odd, only-in-hockey rituals. They lined up against the boards and, one by one, gave Oshie a swing of their sticks to his backside, his body flinching from the contact.
The most emphatic one was delivered by Capitals winger Tom Wilson. As Oshie stood with his stick raised in front of his face like a Jedi meditating with a lightsaber, Wilson delivered a stick-spank that actually knocked Oshie off-balance on the ice.
“Well, he gives it to me pretty good sometimes,” Oshie said. “And I’ve gotten him a couple times too, but you can look at our sizes. He’s obviously got a little bit of a higher swing speed than I’ve got.”
Oshie gives as good as he gets when it comes these pregame taps of encouragement. As part of the ritual, he delivers the first set of them, and then his teammates reciprocate.
“It started probably back in St. Louis. In warmups, I had gone through and kind of tapped everyone on the butt, and then I started doing it here,” he said.
a grand’s worth of taps pic.twitter.com/nnJ4sByJCI
— Washington Capitals (@Capitals) March 17, 2024
It all started in St. Louis for Oshie. They drafted him 24th overall in 2005 out of North Dakota, one spot ahead of Andrew Cogliano. Oshie debuted in the NHL during the 2008-09 season and would play 443 games with the Blues over seven seasons.
He was an important part of their core, along with players such as David Backes, Alex Steen and Alex Pietrangelo, and later Vladimir Tarasenko and Jaden Schwartz. But his profile grew by leaps and bounds in 2014 when…
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