Archive: 15 Years Ago, Slick Green Was An Elite NHL Defenseman for Capitals

The Washington Capitals have struggled in recent seasons to be an elite-level team. And in this cover story from THN’s March 16. 2009 edition (Vol. 62, Issue 20), then-senior-writer Ken Campbell wrote about star Caps defenseman Mike Green and his ascent to being a top NHL blueliner.

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When Green arrived on the NHL scene in 2005, it took some time for him to acclimate himself to hockey’s best league. He needed time to apprentice with Washington’s American League affiliate in Hershey, but by 2006-07, it was clear he was an elite-level talent. And then-Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau was impressed at the growth in Green’s game.

“He used to do a lot of standing still and watching the play instead of creating the play,” Boudreau told Campbell about Green. “He’s so much better this year than he was last year, and he was a lot better last year than he was the year before.”

Green would go on to play 880 regular-season NHL games, and he was named to the league’s first All-Star Team on two separate occasions. He retired in August of 2020, and although he never won a Stanley Cup, Green always brought great commitment and hard work to the table.

“He got a lot of his work ethic from watching working-class people,” Green’s father, Dave Green, told THN. “They get up in the morning, they go to work. They come home and do what they have to do at home, you take care of what needs to be done around the house. He paid attention to that.”

GREEN MEANS GO!

By Ken Campbell

March 16, 2009

Ever since Mike Green turned pro four years ago, he has been teaching himself how to play the guitar. Tried the drums. He’s brutal. Gave it up. But when it comes to the six-string, like Ferris Bueller, he never had one lesson. Just picked it up and started learning chords.

“I like the old stuff like Staind or Goo Goo Dolls or the Foo Fighters,” Green says. “If somebody asked me to play the whole song for them, it’s tough, but I could probably play half or three-quarters of the song. I just pick it up and play for an hour a day if I’m home.”

All right, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume Bruce Springsteen is not soiling himself as he reads this.

But Paul Coffey? Now he might have something to be worried about, because if any defenseman is ever going to break Coffey’s NHL record for goals in a season, it’s going to be Green, the Washington Capitals scoring machine from the blueline. Last year, Green led NHL defensemen in scoring with 18 goals and, despite missing 13 games this season with a shoulder injury, he had 23 to lead all defensemen again through late February. That’s a long way off the 48 Coffey scored in 1985-86, but the kid is just 23 and doesn’t figure to hit his prime for another couple of years.

Even if he doesn’t do it, Green has the skill set to spend a lot of years putting up point-per-game seasons and a 40-goal campaign is certainly within his grasp. To give you an idea of how productive he has been this season, consider that as of late February, Green was outscoring the entire defense corps of 12 teams and tied with three others.

And while Green isn’t exactly revolutionizing the defense position, he and Dan Boyle of the San Jose Sharks are doing their part to redefine it. Green has a unique skill set, but where he gives his opponents fits is in his unpredictability. Teams have such a hard time stopping him because they don’t know where he’s going to be – high slot, on the lip of the crease, at the hashmarks, coming in from the faceoff dot. From the top of the faceoff circle to the hashmarks, there might be only one player in the league who’s more dangerous than Green and that’s Alex Ovechkin, who freelances on the other point for the Capitals on the power play.

Green has an uncanny ability to find seams in the offensive zone, get to them, get the puck on his stick and get a shot off in a hurry. And he’s not the least bit shy about going high glove either.

“Just imagine how tough that is for the other teams,” says Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, who deserves a healthy amount of credit for Green’s metamorphosis into a sniper. “Your head is on a swivel when he’s out there and that’s the time he picks to go. Not only that, you have to look after two guys who do that.”

It is Green’s shot, which comes off the blade of an Easton Stealth with a custom toe curve to help cradle the puck, that has made him so dangerous – to opponents and to teammates courageous enough to stand in front of the net. Green says he has never had his shot clocked because the Caps don’t hold a team skills competition. (A cynic would suggest that until a couple of years ago, a Capitals skills competition would have been a contradiction of terms.) But even though his release is what makes Green’s shot so lethal, he figures his slapshot is somewhere in the 100 mile-per-hour range.

Most defensemen try to keep their shots low and hard and put them through a maze of players and nobody does that better than Chris Pronger. But Green goes high almost all the time when he shoots and he does so with deadly accuracy. He dares goalies to get their glove up in time and they rarely do.

Capitals forwards parked in front of the net on the power play have to keep their heads up or they may lose them. It’s an occupational hazard when playing with Green.

“I always shoot up top, I don’t want to give that away, but I guess I just did,” Green says. “I find I have a better opportunity of scoring in close, or at least from the top of the circles, if I go high on a goalie. The goalies are so good down low with their feet that a lot of times, the only option is to go high.”

It hasn’t always been this way, you know. In four seasons with the WHL’s Saskatoon Blades, Green never scored more than 14 goals in a season. But Boudreau, who was coaching the Capitals’ farm team in Hershey when Green broke in as a pro in 2005, did a lot to change Green’s game. Not only did he prompt Green to use his shot more, the biggest adjustment Boudreau made was to encourage him to be more proactive, particularly when his team is on the attack.

“He used to do a lot of standing still and watching the play instead of creating the play,” Boudreau says. “He would get the puck and stop and watch what other guys were doing.”

It’s no coincidence then, that Green emerged as the top-scoring defenseman in the NHL when Boudreau took over the Capitals early last season. Green still doesn’t make the best decisions in his own zone and plays a high-risk, high-reward game at times, but there is little doubt he has found more of a balance in his game.

It’s a tug of war with which Green has always struggled, but his plus/minus this season suggests it’s becoming less of a problem. Considering 15 of his 23 goals came on the power play, his much improved plus/minus is a legitimate barometer to measure how much his game has matured.

“He’s so much better this year than he was last year,” Boudreau says, “and he was a lot better last year than he was the year before.”

Soooo, it’s not an enormous leap of logic to suggest there is still room for Green’s game to grow even more in the coming seasons. Defensemen typically don’t peak until their late 20s, which gives Green another five or more years of untapped potential. After all, look how far he has advanced the past couple of years. In 2004, the Capitals had three first round picks and used the third on Green at No. 29 overall.

Twenty-three other teams, seven of which took defensemen, could have had Green. The Caps chose Ovechkin first overall that year, which has turned out to be a pretty decent selection. But if both Green and Washington ultimately realize their full potential, that draft day in 2004 will be remembered as the day the Capitals laid the foundation for their dynasty.

To be sure, their No. 1 and No. 29 selections have the potential to rival the Canadiens, who picked Guy Lafleur No. 1 and Larry Robinson at No. 20 in 1971, and the New York Islanders, who took Clark Gillies fourth and Bryan Trottier 22nd three years later.

One year after being drafted, Green was the last cut of the 2005 Canadian national junior team that had a defense corps featuring Dion Phaneuf, Cam Barker, Braydon Coburn, Brent Seabrook and Shea Weber. Green was devastated he didn’t make it and promises he’ll take a much different approach when he auditions for the 2010 Olympic team, which he will be a shoo-in to make this time.

“I learned from that camp that you’re not going to just walk onto a team and you have to make sure you have a good camp,” Green said. “If I ever get a chance to go to a camp again, I don’t ever want to be in that situation again. I was OK, but I thought I could’ve been better.”

Canada ultimately won the gold medal that year, so it’s difficult to argue with the choices coach Brent Sutter made for the team. But looking at Green’s game now, it seems unfathomable that Danny Syvret and Shawn Belle cracked that lineup and Green did not.

TSN analyst Pierre McGuire remembers the 2005 tournament well and was mystified Green didn’t make the team.

“I kept saying to (play-by-play man) Gord (Miller), ‘I think they made a mistake,’” McGuire says. “He has such a great skill level. In my mind, he has more offensive upside than Scott Niedermayer, even if he doesn’t skate as well. His peripheral vision puts him on another level. He’s a super high-end guy in my opinion.”

And he’s one who seems to have a good balance of humility and grounding. To understand why that is the case, you have to turn your attention to the blue-collar area of northeast Calgary where Dave and Kate Green raised their three children. Dave has been a laborer for the City of Calgary for the past 35 years and Kate held down two jobs – selling insurance by day and stocking local drug stores with greeting cards by night. She did that so her children could play sports at a high level.

Dave Green said his son has learned his lessons from observing his parents and the other hardworking people around him while he was growing up.

“He got a lot of his work ethic from watching working-class people,” Dave says.

“They get up in the morning, they go to work. They come home and do what they have to do at home, you take care of what needs to be done around the house. He paid attention to that.”

We’ll let Kate give you the play-by-play of a typical day.

“I would take the kids to school in the morning, go to the office and pick the kids up and bring them home, feed them lunch, go back there for a few more hours in the afternoon, come home and we’d do the dinner thing, then we would go out and do the sports at night and then I would go and do the cards. I would go and do the stores after the kids went to bed. The Shoppers’ Drug Mart stores were open until midnight so I would work from 8 p.m. until 12. I usually got up at about six in the morning and went to bed at one in the morning.”

Kate Green kept going at that frenetic pace, even after her son began to live his dream of playing in the NHL. But just days before Mike signed a four-year deal worth $21 million last June, Kate suffered a massive heart attack. She had actually had five minor heart attacks throughout the day before suffering a near-fatal one that night. She needed immediate surgery to put metal stints in her veins and install a pump in her heart. The front ventricle of her heart was not working and needed to be regenerated with the surgically installed pump.

Mike was devastated by the news, his mother says. He spent much of the rest of the summer doting on her and ensuring she was all right. It was only about a week before he had to report to training camp that his mother began to get healthy, although she still has a couple of good days followed by a couple of terrible days and remains on disability

“Not very well,” Kate says when asked how her son first handled the situation. “He was very protective and very worried. It wasn’t that he didn’t cope with it because he coped with it on the exterior very well. He was very protective and wanting to take care of me. He kind of wanted to shield me, maybe a little bit too much. I’ve had to say to him, ‘Michael, I have to continue living.’”

Kate Green still hasn’t traveled to watch her son play this season, although fortuitously, Dave was on the team’s annual dads’ trip when his son broke the NHL record by scoring goals in eight straight games. Kate can’t even watch the games on television. She has to get Dave to make a DVD of the game and needs to know the result before she can watch. Some of that is because of her heart troubles, but also because watching her son and his style of risk-reward play has always made her nervous.

“He’s pretty wild to watch,” Kate says. “I have old videotapes of him and the stuff you see on those tapes makes you say, ‘Oh my God.’ He has always made us bite our nails. I’m very much like Mrs. Ovechkin, even when I’m fine. I’m wandering the hallways or sitting by myself because I’m playing the game myself. I think all hockey moms are like that, at least from the ones I know.”

Mike Green might be mature beyond his years, but he’s still just 23. He collects skateboards with elaborate artwork and has them all over the walls of his condo in Arlington, Va. Like most young males, he loves MMA and UFC, which is a little strange considering his fight – if you can call it that – with Scottie Upshall in the playoffs last year is the only time he has dropped the gloves as an NHLer. Just recently, Green went to an MMA card in Washington with Ovechkin, Donald Brashear and Nicklas Backstrom.

“We were sitting right up at the cage,” Green says. “It was my first fight up close. I have so much respect for that sport. To go through the training they do for one fight and then to go into the ring, a cage, with somebody who wants to knock you out, that takes a lot of courage.”

Last year during the playoffs, Green got a mohawk haircut, which is a pretty young-guy thing to do. The fans took so much to it that Green now sports a “faux-hawk” with his hair trimmed tight on the sides and longer on top. He loves skateboards and wakeboards and drives a Lamborghini that is so low to the ground that his father just rolls out of it. He and Ovechkin are talking about how they’re going to do their hair for this year’s playoffs, a conversation they can have now because they know for sure they’re going to be there this season. And they might just stick around for a while.

There is talk of getting their hair dyed red, but Green says nothing has been finalized yet.

“We’re going to do something for sure,” he says. “We’ll surprise everyone.”

Or maybe not.

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