Ryan Hartman prides himself on being cool under pressure.
That included one of his first big tests as a dad.
Hartman’s wife, Lauren, gave birth to their son, Keyes Grady (eight pounds, nine ounces), just before midnight on Aug. 16. A couple of days later, the newborn was fussing around 5 a.m., and mom needed sleep — badly.
“You need to take him,” she said.
So Hartman, 30, tried to give his wife some peace and quiet. Hartman put Keyes in the car seat and took him on a drive, hoping it would settle him down and put him to sleep. They started in their Edina neighborhood and popped by a Starbucks.
Hartman typically puts on some music on these rides with Keyes — sometimes it’s Beethoven, as he read somewhere it helps with brain development. “Just trying to give him an edge,” he said.
Hartman knew teammate Marcus Foligno, who has three young daughters, lived in the area and was up early, so he texted him to see if he could pop by. They caught up in the driveway around 7 a.m., with Foligno’s girls coming out to meet the newest member of the Wild family.
The late summer birth gave Hartman some quality time with Keyes before training camp started. They bonded over these drives and bedtime stories and watching football. The kid already has more Chicago Bears gear than he’ll ever need.
The experience has clearly changed Hartman, known for his edge and toughness on the ice. Will it soften him a bit?
“No,” he said, smiling. “I think it’ll give me some dad strength.”
The Wild are relying on Hartman this season, his sixth with the organization and the first year of a three-year, $4 million average-annual-value extension. His numbers on the surface didn’t look bad last season — 21 goals, 45 points — but he is often lumped in with other veterans who underperformed as the team missed the playoffs. Perhaps it’s because of the standard Hartman set a couple of years ago with his career-high 34-goal season. Or maybe because of his three-game suspension late in the season as the Wild were still fighting for their playoff lives.
“A lot of things happened last year with injuries,” Hartman said. “I had a few dry spells where I wasn’t scoring. I had different roles playing down the lineup. I tried to be responsible defensively and adding secondary scoring, which is huge with our team. But I do feel like I can put up 30 goals in this league. I’ve done it.
“Anytime you can score 21 goals and people consider it a ‘down year’ — you can take it as a negative, but it just shows what people think. I think I can produce 25 to 30 goals. I tried to prepare my body this year to play more minutes. I’d like to play a bigger role and help this team achieve what we want.”
To play a bigger role, Hartman got smaller. He said he dropped between 10 and 12 pounds, largely through a change in nutrition. He got a membership to a company out of Colorado that coordinates private chefs and meal plans for athletes, from NHLers to MLB players like Pete Alonso. It’s similar to a Keto diet, focused on organic foods — nothing processed.
“There’s always a balance of things you go through in your career,” he said. “The last few years, I tried to put on some muscle to be stronger on the puck. I had the 30-goal season and planned to stay with what I did. But I started playing more minutes and I think being lighter might help.”
Hartman’s issue with his game last year was consistency — how he handled slumps. The team struggled with secondary scoring beyond its dominant top line of Matt Boldy, Joel Eriksson Ek and Kirill Kaprizov. Hartman bounced around everywhere from the top line to the fourth line.
“Everyone goes through droughts for a week stretch where you’re not feeling it,” Hartman said. “You try to make it a one-off — maybe one bad game. Don’t let those one bad games turn into three, turn into five. Every player, coming in early in your career, consistency is always the thing. I’ve been in the league long enough to know when I’m not playing good hockey. When I get into those droughts, I started trying to come out of them by trying to score. But when I played my best hockey, I’m playing hard and physical, and that’s how the ice opens up for me. When I score, I’m not trying to score. I’m playing the right way.”
Perhaps Hartman’s expected role to start the season will help with that. While Hartman was given a chance to start training camp on the top line with Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello, it looks as if he might end up with Foligno and new acquisition Yakov Trenin. That’ll be a greasy, hard-to-play-against line, and it fits his identity.
No matter where Hartman starts, coach John Hynes expects a lot out of him. Last season, Hynes could see there was more upside to the veteran forward’s game. He appreciates Hartman’s versatility — his ability to play wing, center and both special teams units. He’ll get a chance to bolster a penalty kill that finished near the bottom of the league.
“He has that competitive gene that when the temperature gets turned up, when there’s pressure in games, when you need a big play, he doesn’t shrink,” Hynes said. “He can perform in those environments and I think that’s hard to find sometimes. … Now how can we help him and work together with getting him to a level where he’s impacting games regularly? He’s got the big moments and he’s had these parts of his games where you see there’s some real potential there. We need him to be good. I know he wants to be good.”
Hartman said Hynes, who took over for Dean Evason after he was fired in late November, was upfront and demanding with him during the team’s exit meetings and follow-ups over the summer. He was also positive.
“He expects a lot out of me,” Hartman said. “I expect a lot out of myself. I’m harder on myself than anyone else is.”
Team president and general manager Bill Guerin signing Hartman, Foligno and Zuccarello to extensions last September — a year ahead of free agency — put a lot of faith in the core. There’s a responsibility there — a pressure that comes with it, especially for a franchise that has made it out of the first round just once in the past decade.
Hartman believes the Wild are contenders and should be in the playoffs every year. It starts with the veterans leading the way, especially helping with adversity and tough moments during the season.
“We’re all leaders in that room, we’ve got some young guys that have stepped up and helped our team,” he said. “The onus is on the veterans in this group to keep that locker-room presence. The best leadership is showing. You can talk all you want about ‘do this and do that,’ but how are you going to tell a guy to do something you’re not doing? If you want to tell me to work harder, you better be working just as hard. That, as a group, we all need to step up and be better.”
Hartman said the Wild were too easy to play against last year, a departure from their identity of previous seasons. Part of that was due to injuries to some of their bigger, tougher players, like Foligno. But it was a mentality that needed to be fixed. Hartman said he would have loved to play against Minnesota last year, and that’s not something opponents would tell him often in his previous seasons here.
“Every guy I knew we played, having conversations with them, they hated coming here and playing against us,” Hartman said. “We have to get back to that. We’d make it hard on you defensively and physically. We want teams to see us on the schedule and their first reaction to be like, ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s how it’s been in the past.
“They’d come into Minnesota and they’d know they’d be in for a hard, skilled game. If you want to go up and down the ice and play a north-south game, we can beat you there. If you want to play physical and fight, we can beat you there.”
Hartman acknowledged that part of that is also staying on the right side of that edge and not taking bad penalties (or himself out of the game). He’s had his share of run-ins with the NHL Department of Player Safety over the years. Hartman was fined last January for what was ruled an intentional high stick on Winnipeg’s Cole Perfetti, who claimed it was retribution for Brenden Dillon injuring Kaprizov in a previous game.
Hartman also got suspended in early April for three games for throwing his stick in the direction of officials and “verbally berating the officials in an appropriate manner” following a 2-1 overtime loss to Vegas. That was the fourth time Hartman had been suspended and third time in a 13 ½ month period.
He knows eyes will be on him and realizes he has to be smarter in certain situations, but he won’t fully change his game.
“I’m still going to be myself and continue to play hard,” Hartman said. “I’ve got to defend guys on our team. I’m not going to let guys take liberties with Kirill. A lot of issues I’ve had with player safety have to do with Kirill. A lot of those are defending our best player, and I’m not going to change that whatsoever.
“I want to be on the ice. I don’t want to be getting suspended and being out of the lineup and losing money. All of that sucks. I can’t let that deter me. Maybe I can be smarter in areas. The incident of throwing the stick on the ice after the loss, that’s very preventable. I’m going to play the same way, but maybe not be too out of control.”
The referees’ eyes won’t be the only ones on Hartman this year. Keyes’ will be, too (‘Keyes’ is also Ryan’s and his late grandfather’s middle name). Having a kid has provided a new perspective for Hartman. There’s a greater purpose there.
“You want to make a name for yourself,” he said. “Carry on your name. But you want him to be proud of you. You want people to see you. ‘Oh, that’s his son.’”
(Top photos: Matt Blewett / Imagn Images and courtesy of Ryan Hartman)
