THN Archive: Bruins Icon Tim Thomas Shares His Different Path to the NHL in 2008 Profile

Tim Thomas went from selling apples and delivering pizzas in Jr. A to playing overseas to becoming one of the best goalies in the NHL by 2008. He shared more about his upbringing and unorthodox playing style in a story available on THN’s Archive.

On and off the ice, goaltender Tim Thomas made headlines for his actions. And in this cover story from THN’s Dec. 15, 2008 edition (Vol. 62, Issue 12), THN senior writer Ken Campell put together a major profile of Thomas’ all-around impact on the NHL and the game itself.

(And don’t forget, for complete access to THN’s complete 76-year exclusive archive, you can subscribe to the magazine.)

As a player who was more or less an afterthought at the NHL level – he was drafted 217th overall by the Quebec Nordiques in 1994 – Thomas bounced around the minor pro and European leagues in the early stages of his professional career. But by the 2005-06 season, he carved out a home for himself with the Boston Bruins and slowly but surely became the Bs’ starter. By the time he spoke to Campbell for the cover story, Thomas was settled in as Boston’s No. 1 netminder. It took him until age 31 to find his top-shelf game, but he never felt like an overnight success.

“I don’t feel like I’ve come out of nowhere,” Thomas told Campbell. “I haven’t been hiding as much as people think. Hiding in plain sight, I guess.”

Thomas’ agent at the time – current Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito – never lost faith in him.

“For years, people would laugh at me about Tim,” Zito said. “I had lots of hockey people tell me he would never play. And I would always say, ‘What the hell am I supposed to tell this kid?’ He has a .946 save percentage and people are saying he can’t play. All he ever did was stop the puck. A few years ago when I was younger, I used to get flabbergasted and frustrated.”

Thomas was a battler between the pipes, always determined to lay out his body at any angle necessary to stop the puck. He used that dynamic style to win two Vezina Trophies as the NHL’s top goaltender in 2009 and 2011, and he became the first goalie to win a Stanley Cup, Vezina and Conn Smythe trophy in the same season since Bernie Parent did so in 1974-75. 

He never worried much about getting style points for his brand of play.

“I don’t watch that much of myself, but I do watch chances with the goalie coach and I don’t think I look as different as other people think I do,” Thomas said. “If I do look different, it’s usually on the second or third opportunity and that’s OK because I’d rather look ugly making a save than look pretty being scored on. Sometimes you look really bad getting scored on, too. It’s a trade-off, but it’s one I’m willing to make.”

Earlier in his career, Thomas could be demonstrably mad when he allowed a goal. But that wasn’t about showing up his teammates for letting him down. For him, it was all about the burning desire to be victorious night in and night out.

“It’s probably because I just want to win so badly,” Thomas said. “It’s definitely not me being mad at my team or anything. I’ve tried to stop that, I don’t know if I have or not, because I’ve realized it might send the wrong message to my team.”

Thomas – who left Boston one year after winning a Cup – wound up making headlines off the ice when he refused to meet with then-American president Barack Obama in the traditional get-together between the Cup-winning team and the USA's political leader. He finished up his playing career in short stints with Florida and Dallas before retiring after the 2013-14 season. But he told Campbell he didn’t want or need the increased attention that being a proven winner created.

“I’ve always been shy about it, it’s terrible,” Thomas said about his spirituality away from the game. “First of all, I don’t like to have the attention, period. I just want to play hockey. Maybe I don’t feel as though I’m a good enough example. I probably am, but I still swear way too much, especially out on the ice.”

Vol. 62 Issue 12, Dec. 15, 2008

By Ken Campbell

So you're a 27-year-old goalie and you’re sitting up in a tree in northern Manitoba in May, a time of year when the black flies are only about as big as your head. Deep down, you know you’re just as good as a lot of those guys who are playing for the Stanley Cup; you’ve always known it. But here you are – up in a tree in the middle of nowhere in pitch-black darkness with nothing but a bow and arrow and a knife.

On the ground below is a 500-pound black bear with Todd Bertuzzi’s disposition. It’s circling your tree and popping its jowls so loudly you can hear its teeth knocking together.

And in case you were wondering, yes, bears are capable of climbing trees. Perhaps the thought you’ve been screwed over in hockey isn’t quite the uppermost in your mind at the moment.

“For the first time since I was nine years old, I was afraid for my life a little bit,” said Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas. “I was pointing down the tree with my bow and arrow and a knife in my teeth and if I heard what I thought was the bear coming up the tree, I was going to take a shot and then grab the knife and get ready to stab him. For an hour my face was getting eaten by mosquitoes, but there was no way I was taking my hand off the bow to scratch or swat at them.”

The guide finally came along at about two in the morning – he must have had other commitments – and Thomas was able to get down from the tree without either him being mauled or the bear becoming summer sausage and a rug for the family room, the way another bear did on a hunt the year before. Almost a decade later, Thomas tells the story with remarkable matter-of-factness – partly because his bear hunting exploits have become legendary and partly because he really doesn’t think it’s any big deal.

The story has legs because people have become fascinated with Tim Thomas lately, something having to do with the fact he has emerged as perhaps the best goalie in the NHL and odds-on favorite for the Vezina Trophy through the first quarter of this season. Thomas has not only been the Bruins’ backbone in goal, he has also allowed a team that many thought would make the 1995 New Jersey Devils look like offensive juggernauts to actually play with some flair. While Thomas sat atop most of the goaltending categories through the quarter pole, it was no coincidence the Bruins were sixth in goals scored and were both taking and giving up 31 shots a game. Teams can play that way when they know they have a goalie capable of making the big save.

“You don’t play a less cautious game,” said Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli, “but you have more confidence. When the goalie is going and he’s making the stop, you get into a different position defensively because you know the stop is going to be made.”

And it’s not as though Thomas hasn’t been doing this for a while. This is his fourth year as a full-time player in the league and, since he arrived in the NHL in 2005-06, he has recorded a .916 career save percentage. That’s better than Miikka Kiprusoff, Ryan Miller, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Evgeni Nabokov and Marty Turco, and only slightly less brilliant than Tomas Vokoun (.919), Roberto Luongo (.918), Henrik Lundqvist (.918) and Martin Brodeur (.917).

Thomas has arrived, people. Deal with it. And with the prospect of unrestricted free agency this summer, he’s finally about to be paid like it. Think somewhere around three years and $15 million. He doesn’t look like everyone else all the time, but like Reggie Dunlop in "Slap Shot", he’s workin’ on it.

So little space, so much to tell when it comes to the Tim Thomas Story. That he rose to stardom by taking the scenic route to the NHL is nothing particularly unique for an NHL goalie. Hey, there’s only 30 starting jobs and there are parts of Canada where if you shake a tree, good goalies actually fall out. But few, if any, of them have quite come from the humble background Thomas can claim. And fewer of them would have done it without developing a good-sized chip on their shoulders.

People in the hockey industry seem stunned at Thomas’ “overnight” success in his 30s, just don’t count Thomas among them. He has played for Team USA in five world championships; was a two-time All-American at the University of Vermont; won the Ken Dryden Award as the top goalie in the ECAC; and, had an outstanding career in Europe before sticking in the NHL full-time at the age of 31.

Thomas maintains if you’d have talked to any hockey fan in Finland six or seven years ago, they’d have been able to tell you who Tim Thomas was. Of course, Toto is real big in Sweden and David Hasselhoff can’t walk the streets in Germany and neither of them could get arrested over here. Sure, Thomas’ act played really well in Karpat Oulu, but as far as the NHL was concerned, well, he might as well have been hiding in the dark in a tree with a bow and arrow and a knife.

“I don’t feel like I’ve come out of nowhere,” Thomas said. “I haven’t been hiding as much as people think. Hiding in plain sight, I guess.”

Bill Zito is the NHL’s Official Agent For The Downtrodden, so it’s no surprise he represents Thomas. At different times during his career, Zito has represented Glen Metropolit and John Madden, two inner-city kids who grew up in housing projects in Toronto and were never drafted. He had Brian Rafalski and believed in Kimmo Timonen when he was a 10th round pick the Los Angeles Kings gave to Nashville for future considerations. Sami Salo was the third-last player taken in the 1996 draft, but Zito saw great things.

And he was steadfast in his support of Thomas in the face of GMs who never gave the goalie a chance. When you’re getting ditched by the ECHL’s Mobile Mysticks after four days, it can sometimes be difficult to keep the spirits up. But Zito always told Thomas that not only could he be an NHL goalie, he could be one of the better ones.

“For years, people would laugh at me about Tim,” Zito said. “I had lots of hockey people tell me he would never play. And I would always say, ‘What the hell am I supposed to tell this kid?’ He has a .946 save percentage and people are saying he can’t play. All he ever did was stop the puck. A few years ago when I was younger, I used to get flabbergasted and frustrated.”

In the NHL, respect is slow in coming, but it is coming. On this year’s ballot for the All-Star Game there are 10 goalies listed for the Eastern Conference, but Thomas isn’t one of them. Anyone who has asked the NHL how it can find room on the ballot for Kari Lehtonen and Vesa Toskala but not Thomas has received a lot of “Hummanah, hummanah,” but that didn’t stop Thomas from being fourth in balloting through late November with more than 47,000 votes. That was just a shade behind the front-runner, Carey Price of the Montreal Canadiens, who had in excess of 384,000 as a result of an online ballot-box stuffing campaign not seen since the Rory Fitzpatrick debacle.

“It’s pretty clear what happened,” Zito said. “They screwed up.”

It’s not the first time the hockey establishment has underestimated Thomas. He only ended up at Vermont – on a team that turned out to be a powerhouse with future NHLers Martin St-Louis and Eric Perrin – because nobody else recruited him out of high school. Zito had to cajole Jarmo Kekalainen, then the GM of IFK Helsinki in Finland, to sign him in 1997.

“We had a pretty good team going that year and we thought that if we had a pretty good goaltender we’d have a chance to win it,” said Kekalainen, who is now an assistant GM with the St. Louis Blues. “We went out and got Tim Thomas from the East Coast League and he ended up playing unbelievable for us and we won the championship. We got him back for the next year and we probably would have won the European League if we had gotten him earlier. But I’d be lying if I said I saw this coming, the way he’s playing now. I just had an argument with a GM the other day. We were talking about Boston and how well they’re doing and he said, ‘Oh, I’m not so sure they’ll be able to go far with that goalie.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean? He’s got the best stats in the league.’”

Much of the lack of recognition and respect has to do with the fact Thomas doesn’t look like everyone else. People in hockey see him as more of an acrobat than a goaltender. Some see him as a guesser who has been lucky enough to be right more often than not over the past couple of years. Others see him as a flopper. But the same people who subscribe to conventional wisdom when it comes to the game know very well that if all Thomas were relying on was athleticism and acrobatics, he would have been driven out of the league faster than Jim Carey. The same way he marvels at people who find his story intriguing, Thomas doesn’t see a desperate lunger when he watches himself play.

In fact, he’s a lot like Curtis Joseph was in his prime, a goalie who never gives up on a puck and isn’t particularly concerned that he sometimes looks as though he has been wound up too tightly. The fact is, he has worked on his fundamentals over the past couple of seasons, but won’t apologize for how he looks going post-to-post.

“I don’t watch that much of myself, but I do watch chances with the goalie coach and I don’t think I look as different as other people think I do,” Thomas said. “If I do look different, it’s usually on the second or third opportunity and that’s OK because I’d rather look ugly making a save than look pretty being scored on. Sometimes you look really bad getting scored on, too. It’s a trade-off, but it’s one I’m willing to make.”

Thomas remembers his very first NHL training camp in 1997, three years after being taken 217th overall by the Quebec Nordiques. The team had moved to Colorado by then and had already traded for Patrick Roy and had Jacques Cloutier as the goaltending coach. Thomas had no technique and here he was, working after practice with perhaps the most technical butterfly goalie in the history of the game.

“I remember at the main camp in Colorado, (Roy) would stay out and work with the goalies through some drills and I think he got a little frustrated with me,” Thomas said. “‘No, no, no, you cannot do dis dat way.’ I was making the save, but I wasn’t making the save the way they thought it needed to be made. In some cases they were right, but in a few cases I still do it my way.”

Thomas has worked with goaltending instructors and has also toiled very hard to slim down what was once by his own admission a rather frumpy-looking body. But that still doesn’t stop him from having a Burger King cheeseburger the day before every game, except of course when the Bruins play back-to-back.

And the results have been there. Earlier this season, Thomas became just the second goalie in NHL history to record back-to-back 1-0 shutouts and had a shutout streak of 154:43 going.

“He seemed pretty much in control tonight compared to some of the nights we’ve seen him,” said Bruins coach Claude Julien after the second 1-0 win, Oct. 28 over the Vancouver Canucks.

Thomas is willing to go along with all of this technical stuff, but underneath still lurks a guy who gets his kicks diving across the crease for a puck that looks impossible to stop. Perhaps that’s because doing it his way has served Thomas so well all his life. To truly determine what makes Thomas the person he is now, you have to go back to the suburbs of Flint, Mich., and the late 1980s.

Thomas was a teenager at the time General Motors closed several of its plants in Michigan, throwing 30,000 people out of work. The plight of the locals was so bad it spawned Michael Moore’s first big documentary, Roger & Me. At one time, it was speculated the rat population in Flint outnumbered the humans.

It was against this backdrop that Thomas played his youth hockey. Times were difficult, so much so that his parents, Tim Sr. and Kathy, hocked their wedding rings in order to pay for him to attend a hockey school in Michigan. (True story.)

Tim Sr. would help make ends meet by selling apples door to door in the fall. Tim Jr. would help out at first, then took over the practice started by both his grandfathers years before.

You can tell this is getting good, can’t you? But Thomas sees nothing unusual about it. He sees nothing terribly unique about waking up early in the morning and going to buy bushels of apples at a nearby orchard, then going to junior college for the morning and selling apples in the afternoon, then going through a Jr. A hockey practice before finishing the night by delivering pizzas for Domino’s.

“What’s intriguing to other people just seems normal to me,” Thomas said. “I just don’t understand.”

Thomas can talk about apples the way his teammate Andrew Ference can go on about political conspiracies and the environment. Early in the fall, he’d sell McIntosh and Golden Delicious. Later, he’d show up with Northern Spies, good cooking apples that kept their crunch a lot longer. He’d walk up to the door and impress people by breaking the apple in half with his bare hands and giving them a bite.

“You go up to the door with the apples and say, ‘Hello there. Just delivering some of my apples from the farm again this year and I was just wondering if you’d like any while I was passing through,’” Thomas said. “My grandfather had been working the same neighborhood since the early ’70s and a lot of people were like, ‘Oh yeah, the apple guy. I want some of those.’ If you got somebody to take a bite, then they were almost always sold because they were better than anything you could get in the store. People would usually be pretty impressed when you’d break it in half with your hands.”

The temptation for Thomas now is to go to everyone who doubted him and say, “How do you like them apples?” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) But that is so unlike him. It’s the same way he doesn’t seem to be caught up in his contract situation, one that is delicate for both him and the Bruins.

You see, Thomas will be 35 years old next season and because multi-year deals to players 35 and older stay on the books and can’t be wiggled out of in any way, there is a certain amount of peril associated with signing hockey’s senior citizens to long-term deals. On the other hand, Thomas has proved he is one of the best goalies in the game today and should be right there with Ryan Miller vying for the starting spot on the 2010 U.S. Olympic team. Dominik Hasek, Martin Brodeur, Curtis Joseph and Ed Belfour all had productive years well into their late 30s. And if the Bruins are unwilling to step up with a good long-term offer, other teams will surely be more than happy to do so.

That would put the well-travelled Thomas on the move once again. Not that he would mind, except he has finally found a home in the NHL and recently moved his parents to Boston. His parents sell everything from NASCAR merchandise to dishes to used clothing on eBay, so it’s not as though they needed to be in Michigan anyway. His mother, who until recently was being treated for breast cancer, has been getting some of the best medical care in the world in Boston.

“It’s expensive, but it’s probably the best in the world,” Thomas said. “You never know with cancer, but a month ago they said, ‘See you in a year.’”

To be sure, Thomas has matured through his journey to NHL stardom. He still bolts from his net like the second coming of Eric Heiden when he is scored upon in overtime or a shootout, something he said he has become conscious of and tries to do less now.

“It’s probably because I just want to win so badly,” Thomas said. “It’s definitely not me being mad at my team or anything. I’ve tried to stop that, I don’t know if I have or not, because I’ve realized it might send the wrong message to my team.”

Thomas has learned to be more patient, perhaps from those days of sitting for 12 hours a day in a tree waiting for a bear to come along. He also relies on his spiritualism to help him. His younger brother, Jacob, is a youth minister with the Church of Christ in Texas and while he does embrace spirituality, he’s a little reticent to talk about it.

“I’ve always been shy about it, it’s terrible,” he said. “First of all, I don’t like to have the attention, period. I just want to play hockey. Maybe I don’t feel as though I’m a good enough example. I probably am, but I still swear way too much, especially out on the ice.”

Well, if goaltenders wandering through the hockey wilderness are looking for a patron saint, they’ve found one in Thomas, a plucky guy who would become the fourth-oldest first-time Vezina winner in league history if he wins it this season. (Gump Worsley, Johnny Bower and Lorne Chabot were older than 35 when they won their first Vezina.)

“Most of the motivation is just proving it to myself,” Thomas said. 

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