The Washington Capitals are still out west after taking down the Vancouver Canucks 5-1 on Tuesday. Thursday, they’ll match up with the Seattle Kraken — a team that ended up beating the Los Angeles Kings 9-8 in overtime their last time out.
The biggest storyline coming into the game is that TJ Oshie, who grew up in Everett, Washington, as a kid, will play in front of his hometown Seattle crowd for the first time in his career.
The veteran Caps forward played 10 seasons in the Seattle Junior Hockey Association when he was growing up. He moved to Warroad, Minnesota when he was 15 partially to advance as a hockey player. Even with the move, he still remained a fan of professional sports teams from his original hometown. That includes the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL with whom he participated in pregame festivities with back in 2018.
“I had the full (Sonics) jersey and shorts for Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp,” Oshie said to El-Bashir on Thursday. “I was a huge Ken Griffey Jr. fan. I actually wanted to name Campbell, my son, Griffey but my wife had other plans.”
Oshie is also of one-fourth Ojibwe descent. The Chippewa native tribe has present ties to Eastern British Columbia which is just up the road from Washington state. When Seattle’s NHL team was revealed to be named the ‘Kraken’, Oshie wasn’t too big of a fan of the decision likely in part due to his native heritage.
“I don’t know,” Oshie said then after a giant shrug. “I guess being from Everett. I was hoping they would go with the Totems.”
Oshie was unable to do battle with the Kraken last season in Seattle after rushing back from injury for the occasion. During the game prior to that meeting, he suffered a lower-body injury against the San Jose Sharks. The attempt derailed much of the rest of his 2021-22 campaign.
“I had a broken foot and I was rushing myself back to try to play in that game,” Oshie explained to The Rink Live podcast last July. “I probably had 50-70 people there from my childhood there that were coming to the game. I was still in a walking boot, but I got the trainers to let me play the night before in San Jose. So I took my foot out of the walking boot, right in my skate, and played the San Jose game. I ended up being so excited on the ice that I had 10 hits in the first 15 minutes of the game. Then my back started going out probably from walking in a boot and not really training and jumping right into an NHL game. We flew to Seattle the next night, we were playing them the next day, and sure enough I couldn’t get out of bed the next day. I had to crawl down to our team meal and see our trainer and say, ‘Hey, guys, I can’t physically walk.”
Oshie will skate on the team’s second line with Evgeny Kuznetsov and Sonny Milano for the game per The Athletic’s Tarik El-Bashir.
#Caps lines and pairs ahead of SEA:
Ovechkin-Strome-Sheary
Milano-Kuznetsov-Oshie
Johansson-Eller-Mantha
Protas-Dowd-Hathaway
Extras: Snively and NAKGustafsson-Carlson
Fehervary-Jensen
Irwin-TvR
Extras: Orlov and Alexeyev pic.twitter.com/kBJlRKEnTl— Tarik El-Bashir (@Tarik_ElBashir) December 1, 2022
Oshie told El-Bashir that he has requested 30-35 passes for friends and family who are attending the game. After the morning skate, Oshie met with some of those family and friends.
Oshie with said family… pic.twitter.com/TAV54mNUk7
— Tarik El-Bashir (@Tarik_ElBashir) December 1, 2022
Expect a big effort from number 77 in this game.
Headline photo: Elizabeth Kong/RMNB
