This article originally appeared in The Hockey News vol. 33, issue 25, on March 21, 1980
BY STEVE WINTER
No player epitomizes the heart and soul of the Washington Capitals better than their 22-year-old captain, Ryan Walter.
Take, for example, a recent game at the Capital Centre between Washington and the Vancouver Canucks. Moments after the opening faceoff, Walter chased a loose puck along the right wing boards, where he came face-to-fists with the Capitals’ favorite opposing villain, Harold Snepsts.
Snepsts took two shots at the Washington captain, one legal, the other not-so-legal. As Walter turned to skate toward the play, Snepsts wrapped his arms around Walter and started throwing wild punches in the direction of Ryan’s CCM helmet.
Walter, struggling for position, landed a few punches against his towering opponent before the two linesmen intervened to restore order.
Across the ice, Vancouver forward Stan Smyl made the unfortunate mistake of challenging Washington’s 6’-4” resident giant, Paul Mulvey. With no Vancouver player in sight to lend assistance besides goaltender Glen Hanlon, the 5’-8” Smyl took a substantial beating before Hanlon pulled Mulvey to the ice, drawing a fairly obvious, automatic game misconduct.
“I look at the playoffs very realistically,” Walter says. “We’ll be there.”
Over at the penalty box, Ryan Walter was smiling. With backup goalie Curt Ridley now tending the net, Washington pumped home seven goals in the first two periods, en route to their sixth win in three weeks.
Although Walter was ony partly responsible for Hanlon’s early exit, it was his first-period shorthanded goal on a brilliant individual effort which gave the Capitals a 3-1 lead and practically closed the door on the Canucks.
“That’s a perfect example of Ryan Walter and his second effort,” said defenseman Rick Green, who watched Walter take a center-ice flip from Guy Charron and cut around defenseman Dennis Kearns before beating Ridley with a high wrist shot. “He just plugged his way right through, overpowered the defenseman, and managed to put it away.”
Ryan Walter leads his team by just such an example.
A soft-spoken, extremely polite individual off the ice, he plays his game with uncanny desire and intensity, setting an example for the young, up-and-coming Capitals in this, their sixth season in the NHL.
Walter was selected captain of the team prior to the current season by way of a secret team ‘vote’, staged by then-Capitals’ coach, Danny Belisle. Only 21 years old at the time, Walter had become the youngest captain in the NHL. Although Belisle’s tactics drew continual criticism as the season wore on, the ultimate result has turned out for the best.
“I can’t say enough about Ryan Walter,” says his current coach, Gary Green, who replaced Belisle on November 14. “His overall intensity and drive makes this hockey team go.
“He’s got great leadership qualities, and he’s an excellent captain for us. I couldn’t see anyone else different as captain of this team.”
Quite obviously, Walter fell under considerable pressure as the 1979-80 season began, although he contends the captaincy never directly affected his play.
“True, I had a bit of a rough start, but I really don’t blame the captaincy,” Walter said. “Perhaps there was an adjustment at the beginning, but I think I just had a bit of a slow start—I mean points-wise. Y’ know, once you get into a slump, it’s hard to get out of it.”
As the season wore on, Walter shook off the slump, and after the Capitals survived that early-season rash of injuries which decimated the club for an entire month, his scoring punch and hard work guided the Capitals toward respectability.
“We all knew it was going to be tough for Ryan because of his age to be captain of our team,” said defenseman Robert Picard. “But he came along and has done a really good job. He’s obviously our leader out there—hitting, skating, and doing all the things he’d been doing before becoming captain.
“I guess now he feels he has to do it a little more, and he does it real well.”
Another thing Walter does well is play the game by the book—the book written by Gary Green, who immediately upon arrival in Washington installed the “Green System”, which caught many of the players, fans and media by surprise.
But not Ryan Walter.
“I was always brought up with a system he said, “and I think it’s very important, because in critical situations you always go back to basics. And if those basics that you go back to are a system, then you’re going to come out right. If you have to go back to your own ‘what do I do now?’, then you’re going to have trouble.
“Gary’s system organized our drive. Even when we were losing, the system was the key; and when we finally wound up winning, well, that was as a result of the system.”
Nobody appreciates Walter’s dedication to the system more than Green himself.
“Walt is used to playing under a system from junior hockey,” Green said. “There, he played under a very good system (with the Kamloops Chiefs and the Seattle Breakers) and he knows what a system can do.”
Walter knows that a system can unify a hockey club, just as Green’s system has unified the Capitals.
“I’m pretty much in favor of any system,” Walter says, “but Gary’s got a good one. We use it, and it works. It works well.
“In fact, it’s not just one system; actually there are three or four systems that Gary’s got to play different teams. We can adjust defensively, offensively, or in the neutral zone. Whatever he wants us to play, we adjust to it.”
A perfect illustration of Green’s system with interchangeable parts was the role it played during the Capitals’ 5-5 tie with the Moscow Dynamo.
“Against the Russians, we just totally cut off the middle,” Walter said. “The centermen weren’t allowed to go any farther than the top of the faceoff circles. We cut the middle off completely, and the Russians simply didn’t know what to do.
“That’s just one example of how we can adjust, and how we have to adjust for the playoffs.”
Aah, the playoffs. Now there’s a point upon which everybody on the Capitals agrees.
“There’s only one goal—personal, team, or anything else on this club—and that’s the playoffs,” Walter said. “Once we get there, you never know what can happen, but we look at it very realistically.
“We’re going to be there.”
If nothing else, Ryan Walter is a realist. At the end of the 1978-79 season, he was selected runner-up to Minnesota’s Bobby Smith in the balloting for the Calder Trophy as NHL Rookie-of-the-Year.
The selection of the Calder Trophy recipient falls under the auspices of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association—the fraternity of journalists from the 21 NHL cities who observe each professional player perhaps three or four times a year. And yet when the Toronto Star conducted their own private poll of the NHL coaches, Walter was the overall choice as top rookie.
“It would’ve been nice to win the Calder Trophy,” Walter said; “but it was flattering just to be considered against rookies as good as Bobby Smith, Wayne Babych and all the other good first-year players.
“But the coaches’ selection was really the most satisfying thing. It’s not being recognized by the media or the fans that counts, but to be respected among your peers; that, I appreciated.”
Walter left enough of his NHL peers looking over their shoulders and shaking their heads during the 1978-79 campaign, when he scored 28 goals and 56 points, after missing all of training camp and the first two weeks of the season with a freak knee injury.
“It was a weird sort of thing,” said Washington’s number-one choice—the second player selected overall in the 1978 Amateur Draft. “I was back home in British Columbia and I’d just finished a workout one day, when my little brother wanted me to play catch with a lacrosse ball.
“I turned and reached for the ball—the wrong way, I guess—and something gave out in my knee.”
More than 3,000 miles away, the shock waves were felt in the office of Capitals’ GM Max McNab, who’d already seen more than his share of misfortune with his struggling team.
Walter underwent immediate surgery to repair cartilage damage and quickly worked his way into the lineup. After an understandable slow start, he soon became a Capital Centre favorite with his non-stop hustle and solid two-way play.
“When you play against Walter,” says Bobby Clarke, “you’re in for a night’s work.”
In fact, from the day he first signed as a Capital, the media and management labeled Walter a carbon copy of the man who epitomized the qualities of hard work and desire, the great assistant coach of the Philadelphia Flyers, Bobby Clarke.
Walter indeed plays a Bobby Clarke-type game. Like Clarke, he possesses a great deal of ‘hockey instinct’, but in the long run, he’s achieved more from hard work than from pure talent.
“Walter’s intensity and drive make this hockey team go,” says Caps’ coach Gary Green
“He’s certainly a fine hockey player,” says Clarke of his counterpart 120 miles to the south. “The only way you can really judge a player on another team is when you play against him. And when you play against Ryan Walter, you’re in for a night’s work.”
On most nights, it’s the opposing team’s top scoring line that finds itself paired against Ryan Walter, and as Clarke says, that’s never easy.
“Ryan plays the game with a lot of intensity, and he likes to play the body,” said Gary Green. “As a result, he gets a lot going for us.
“You’ll notice around the league, sometimes all it takes is one guy to throw a few hits, and the momentum gets going. Walt does that for us.”
Walter stirred up enough attention in three full seasons in the WCHL to warrant the Capitals’ number one selection in 1978.
In his first full season with the Kamloops Chiefs (1975-76), he scored 35 goals and 84 points, totals which he far surpassed each of the next two seasons. In 1977, the Chiefs became the Seattle Breakers, and the native of New Westminster, B.C. contributed 54 goals and 71 assists while racking up 148 PIM.
Last year, with the Capitals, Walter finished fifth on the team in scoring, despite playing in only 69 games. A quick glance at this year’s stats finds Walter on top of the club’s scoring list with 19 goals and 31 assists after 64 games.
But perhaps more impressive is that Walter is one of only two Washington Capitals (the other being Swedish forward Bengt Gustafsson) to have played in every game to date.
“We’re starting to make our move now,” Walter said. “You’ll see. We’ve got the personnel here to become contenders. We’ve got the goaltenders, our defense is playing excellently, and I think the forwards are playing as well as they can.
“And the system is prevailing. Things are just starting to fall together, and this is when we need it.”