When you think of Tom Wilson you don’t think of goals.
Fans of other teams especially don’t think of goals, they think of hits, and most probably think of the borderline or illegal hits. However, over the past few seasons, Tom Wilson has started to develop some goal scoring abilities with the Washington Capitals.
Goal scoring was not a big part of Wilson’s career early on. In his first four seasons in the NHL, he never scored more than seven goals in a season. In his first 313 games, he scored just 21 goals. In his last 209 games, he has scored 57 goals.
Opportunity plays a big part of his increased goal scoring. Early in his career, he played mostly third and fourth line roles while in the last few seasons he’s played on top lines, mostly with Alex Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov or Nicklas Backstrom. It’s still no given that just because you play top line minutes and with great players that you will score goals. You have to capitalize on the chance, and Wilson has.
He’s now scored 90 career goals, 78 in the regular season and 12 in the postseason. There are some nice goals in there, and we will go over some of those right now.