Wyatt Johnston Is the Youngest (and Least Surprising) Alternate Captain in the NHL This Season
The 21-year-old just keeps surpassing expectations on and off the ice
On January 18, the Dallas Stars traveled to Colorado to play an Avalanche team that, as of this writing, is looking more and more likely to be Dallas’s first-round opponent.
That January game was a dud for Dallas, though. The first game in a back-to-back set saw the Stars go with Casey DeSmith in net, then essentially sit back and watch their goaltender deal with a barrage of Colorado chances without pushing back nearly enough in the other direction. Dallas would suffer a 6-3 score that wasn’t even as close as a three-goal difference made it look, and they would be more than happy to head home and thump the Detroit Red Wings in Dallas the next day.
But there was one very special thing that happened in that Colorado loss. If you checked the roster report for that game, you noticed that, at just 21 years, eight months, and four days old, Wyatt Johnston was wearing an “A” as an alternate captain for the Dallas Stars.
As near as I have been able to tell, that game made Johnston the youngest alternate captain in the NHL this season. (We’ll get more into my level of certainty about this fact later on.)
Johnston was wearing an “A” that January day in lieu of Roope Hintz, who had suffered an upper-body injury a few days prior after taking a hit from Auston Matthews. Johnston has since worn the “A” again for road games in the absence of Hintz or Miro Heiskanen—or lately, both.
Last year, the Stars had four alternate captains: Tyler Seguin, Miro Heiskanen, Esa Lindell, and Joe Pavelski. Seguin and Lindell wore the “A” for home games, while Pavelski and Heiskanen did so on the road. At the beginning of the 2024-25 campaign, the only change was that Roope Hintz would step up to become an alternate captain for road games in place of the retired Pavelski.
But what was originally a simple rotation didn’t last long, as three of the four alternate captains for Dallas have missed big chunks of time this year. Heiskanen will be out for the rest of the regular season after Mark Stone collided with his knee in January, while Seguin has been out since early December after having hip surgery, and looks likely to return at the tail end of the regular season at the earliest.
After Seguin went out of the lineup in December, Matt Duchene began wearing an “A” for home games. It was a logical move, given Duchene’s vocal leadership, experience, and production on the ice, and Duchene has continued to be a big reason for the Stars’ persistent presence near the top of the NHL standings.
So when Hintz went out, the Stars were likewise ready with an alternate, uh, alternate, and Wyatt Johnston got the letter on the road. Here’s what DeBoer said of the decision to give Johnston a letter at the time:
“Yeah, that's about as easy of a decision as I've had to make this month. You can tell he's a leader, he's been a leader all the way up, growing up.”
“It's already his third year in the NHL, which is crazy to think at his age. But he goes about his business the way a leader should. Prepares the right way, says the right things, plays the right way.”
“So, a little reward for him of, I'm sure, what's to come, which is going to be a big leadership part here of the Dallas Stars going forward.”
As DeBoer’s last quote indicates, Johnston’s alternate captaincy was only planned to be a short-term thing until Hintz returned. But with the subsequent injury to Heiskanen, Johnston once again took up the alternate captaincy for road games.
Lindell, by the way, did double duty as an alternate on the road in addition to his usual home duties in Vancouver last Sunday. I submit that Lindell has a preternatural ability to find a way to do double-duty in any task, whether it be killing penalties, wearing letters, or making a new pot of coffee after finishing the last one. (How much you wanna bet he builds a new deck onto the house every time he stays at an AirBNB?)
When the Stars signed Johnston last week to a five-year contract extension at $8.4 million (average annual value) per season, Jim Nill had this to say about the Stars’ alternate captain:
“Wyatt has established himself as one of the best young forwards in the NHL,” Nill said. “His skill, maturity, and dedication to the game has already made him a valuable contributor and we believe he will be a huge asset for us moving forward.”
Nill has good reason to think that, too. It’s not normal for a player drafted late in the first round to jump from the OHL right to the NHL the way Johnston did in 2022, let alone to stay there. Not only did Johnston make that initial jump, but he hasn’t missed a single playoff or regular season game for Dallas since the 2022-23 season began—despite starting this season recovering from a minor injury in training camp.
Johnston led the Stars in goals in 2023-24, both in the regular season and in the Stars’ 19-game playoff run to the Western Conference Final. He’s third on the team this year while also leading all forwards (other than newcomer Mikko Rantanen) in ice time, averaging over 19 minutes a game. Johnston plays on the Stars’ penalty kill as well as the top power play unit, and he’s proven himself more than worthy of Pete Deboer’s trust in any situation.
And while Johnston comports himself with a quiet professionalism off the ice, when it comes to his skills like stickhandling, Johnston is the furthest thing from normal:
Johnston’s being named an alternate captain is both eminently sensible and utterly fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, some NHL teams prefer not to name replacement captains or alternate captains at all during the year, especially if the absence is only a short-term one.
The New York Rangers and Boston Bruins, for example, haven’t named replacements for their since-traded captains Jacob Trouba and Brad Marchand. And since trading Marchand before the deadline last Friday, and with alternate captain Charlie McAvoy still recovering from an injury suffered at the Four Nations Face-Off in February, the Bruins have even played a couple of games with only one player—alternate captain David Pastrňák—wearing a letter of any kind.
Philadelphia likewise has played with only one captain and one alternate since trading alternate captain Scott Laughton to Toronto at the deadline. John Tortorella doesn’t strike one as the type to casually appoint alternate captains, and, well, he hasn’t.
Suffice it to say, teams don’t toss out letters in cavalier fashion (though the Ducks came close last year, as we’ll see). Even though the alternate captaincy can sometimes be more of a ceremonial distinction than a logistical one, there are good reasons to have a responsible, trusted player in that role, even if it’s not one of the highest-scoring player on the teams.
On the ice, players with letters are very useful. That’s because of NHL Rule 6, which states:
6.1 Captain - One Captain shall be appointed by each team, and he alone shall have the privilege of discussing with the Referee any questions relating to interpretation of rules which may arise during the progress of a game
Only the Captain, when invited to do so by the Referee, shall have the privilege of discussing any point relating to the interpretation of rules.
6.2 Alternate Captains – If the Captain is not on the ice, an Alternate Captain on the ice shall be accorded the privileges of the Captain.
That doesn’t mean NHL officials always explain things to a team’s satisfaction, but it is helpful to have players on the ice who are explicitly permitted to ask clarifying questions about the officials’ ruling. Often, captains (or alternates) will then take that message back from the officials to their coaches on the bench.
Off the ice, the letters have a different meaning. Sometimes, alternate captains are asked to perform certain duties as part of the lettered leadership group, which might involve anything from coordinating team activities and keeping track of money for team dinners, to approaching the coaching staff on behalf of the team to raise a concern or make a request.
How those responsibilities shake out can vary widely depending on the team, and it goes without saying that Jamie Benn, as one of the longest-serving captains in the NHL, plays a much larger role that fans don’t often see in this regard.
It’s fitting that Benn has been playing on Johnston’s line so often since Johnston first came into the NHL two years ago, given both of their penchants for leading by example. Johnston and Benn will likely play together on Friday night in Winnipeg as well, with a certain superstar named Mikko Rantanen on Johnston’s other wing, too. Youth isn’t always wasted on the young.
Addendum: Research
If you want to know what it takes to find out who is in a team’s leadership group, then read on.
The NHL does not, as far as I can tell, keep a convenient log of all players holding alternate captaincies, even though the captains and alternates are listed on the roster report for every NHL game. There are outside databases that attempt to list all of a team’s captains and alternates, like Elite Prospects. But after a cursory inspection, I’ve found them to be incomplete at best, which isn’t shocking, given how teams (like Dallas) have to add or subtract letters during the season because of trades, injuries, and so forth.
If teams aren’t listing this information on their websites anywhere, you’d basically have to scrape the (A) or (C) next to the player names on every roster report to generate a running count of every team’s captain and alternates in each game. And given how little practical impact a team’s captaincy has on the game itself in most respects, there probably just isn’t demand for that level of detail.
In order to get even a tenuous grasp on who’s wearing letters for every team, you’d have to go look at every game’s roster report for every team, or at least a representative sample. Then you’d have to compare them to provisional databases like this one. And then you should also check games before and after the trade deadline to see whether things have changed. It’s one of those nightmare tasks that you could spend a good chunk of time trying to do, only to wind up with a list that could be outdated the next day. And you’ll almost certainly miss a few names who wore a letter for the odd game along the way.
In reality, you’d have to be some kind of obsessive weirdo to spend time on figuring out what players had a fancy letter stitched to their sweaters on every team just to see whether Wyatt Johnston is, in fact, the youngest player wearing an “A” this year. I mean, we do know he’s the 56th-youngest player in the NHL, and while younger players like Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini, Lane Hutson, and Adam Fantilli all seem destined to wears letters before too many years go by, I don’t believe any of them are doing so this year, based on recent roster reports and beginning-of-season lists like this one.
Quick aside: While you perform this task, you’ll also have to complete ignore false, rage-inducing Google AI search results, such as this one:
If you follow the tiny little link after the final line, it will take you to two tweets, one of which lists the actual leadership group (which does not include Celebrini), and the other of which is this tweet:
You’ve probably realized what happened here: Google AI takes that last line from a beat reporter’s tweet and uses it to Give You An Answer which just so happens to be 100% the opposite of the actual answer to the question you asked.
Which is to say, Macklin Celebrini is not part of the San Jose leadership group. But Google AI is still garbage. Only this garbage is now capable of both the putting in and the putting out. The marvels of technology.
Anyway, speaking of obsessive old weirdos like me, here’s a (surely incomplete) list that somehow appeared on my computer Thursday evening.
Man, I don’t know who compiled that, but they definitely need to get a life, am I right folks.
So after spending [an amount of time redacted for reputational purposes] poring over roster reports and team articles and looking at player images, I believe that Wyatt Johnston is the youngest player to be regularly wearing an “A” this season, and very likely the youngest to wear one at all this year, unless someone like Luke Hughes wore a letter for one game just to mess with me or something.
The next-youngest alternate captain after Johnston this year is, I believe, Matty Beniers, who was also named an alternate captain for the Seattle Kraken at the start of this season as a 21-year-old. But Beniers was just a month shy of his 22nd birthday at the beginning of the season when he was named an alternate. Johnston won’t turn 22 until May of this year, which will come four months after January, when he first sported the “A” for Dallas in that Colorado game. That means Johnston beats (i.e. was younger than) Beniers for the “youngest player to be an alternate captain this year” honor by at least three months.
You’ll also notice 22-year-old Mason McTavish’s name in pale green on the above table. That’s because the Anaheim Ducks caused me some consternation (as they have done for two decades now) in establishing Johnston’s bona fides this year, as they apparently just never announced who their alternate captains were this season after using a rotation of alternate captains last season that included Mason McTavish, who was born in January 2003.
Last season, McTavish occasionally wore an “A” at just 20 years old. But this year, the Ducks have apparently decided not to give McTavish that letter again, opting to go with Radko Gudas as the captain and Alex Killorn, Cam Fowler, and Ryan Strome as alternates for the dozen or so games I looked up throughout this season before and after Fowler got traded.
I kept McTavish on the table up there because everyone seems to think he’s still “in the rotation,” but if you want to go over all 65 of the Duck’s roster reports on the Very Great NHL Web Site, be my guest. I looked in October, and he wasn’t on any of ‘em, and Strome appears to have taken over for Fowler after the latter was traded to St. Louis.
Either way, McTavish likely held the distinction of being the youngest alternate captain last year, but not this one. Even if he did wear an “A” in November or December of this year, McTavish would’ve been older than Johnston was when he did so. And if McTavish truly has not been an alternate captain at all this year, as seems to be the case, then I don’t know what on earth Anaheim is doing, giving letters to kids and taking them away the next year. Don’t they know that’s how tantrums start?
But if there’s one player who is in no danger of throwing a tantrum, it is surely Johnston, who will celebrate his next goal the same way he celebrated his first one: with the dignity and grace of a player who expects to score a whole lot more, because he probably will.
These are the articles that separate you from the hoi polloi of hockey writers (and writers in general). 👍👍
Esa Lindell always puts his grocery cart back in the cart bay, and that’s facts.
I patently refuse to research this any further but it would make sense to me if McTavish hasn’t worn an A this season—their coach threw some wild shade at him that he later walked back, publicly questioning McTavish’s ceiling.