Dowd Looks to Land in Middle of Fourth Line

In the wake of winning the first Stanley Cup title in franchise history late last spring, the Caps didn't suffer much in the way of offseason attrition, at least not in terms of sheer numbers. Goaltender Philipp Grubauer was traded to Colorado after three excellent seasons as a backup in D.C., and center Jay Beagle signed a four-year deal with Vancouver as an unrestricted free agent after a decade of yeoman's work in Washington.

When Beagle departed the District, he was the third longest tenured player in the organization, behind only Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. From the time he first stepped on the ice here in Arlington more than a decade ago, Beagle's motor never stopped running. A tireless worker in practice and in games, a face-off wizard and a strong penalty killer, Beagle was a crucial - if underrated - piece of the Caps' puzzle for almost a decade.
With Beagle now in Vancouver, a couple of American ex-Canucks are now among several players in Washington with a chance to move into the Calgary native's role as the Caps' fourth-line center and lone right-handed pivot. Jayson Megna played 59 of his 113 career NHL games with Vancouver, and Nic Dowd played the last 40 of his 131 games in the league with the Canucks. Both are 28, both are right-handed, and both come from the southern states where football is king - Megna was born in Ft. Lauderdale and Dowd hails from Huntsville, Ala.
Dowd came out of the burgeoning hockey program in Huntsville, following in the skate-steps of older brothers Josh and Matt. Dowd played in the NAHL and the USHL during his amateur days, and the Los Angeles Kings ventured a seventh-round pick (198th overall) in the 2009 NHL Draft. Following a highly successful collegiate career at St. Cloud St. - where he was an All-American and also a Hobey Baker Award finalist in 2014 - Dowd turned pro at the tail end of the '13-14 campaign.

Late in the 2015-16 season, he ascended to the NHL, debuting for the Kings and getting a five-game trial in Los Angeles. He's been in the NHL continuously since then.
Dowd's parents are British. His dad is a doctor and his mom a nurse, and they came to the States in the 1970s, settling in the Huntsville area, where hockey has flourished in the last couple of decades.
"I always tell people this," Dowd declares, "the youth hockey organization in Huntsville until you're about 14 or 15 is pretty great. The Huntsville Amateur Hockey Association is awesome."
Dowd's path to the NHL was far from conventional, but looking back on it now, he was blissfully unaware of the odds he was facing, coming from a non-traditional market and being cut from a USHL team.
"Early on, everyone believes they can play in the NHL, right?" says Dowd. "That's just the norm. What do you want to do when you grow up? I want to play in the NHL. I think living in Alabama, I was probably a little naïve to the competition and the rest of the world, compared to these Canadian kids that grow up and they're kind of in the middle of all this throughout their entire life.
"But honestly, when I was a sophomore in high school, I was 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds, and I played on the [junior varsity] team. Then I went to boarding school and I played on the varsity "B" team, and then my senior year I finally made the varsity "A" team. Not until I was drafted by L.A. did I even think it was a possibility."

Kudos to those L.A. scouts, by the way. Dowd was the last of the Kings' 10 choices in the 2009 NHL Draft. Eight of the 10 have gone on to play in the league and six - including Dowd - are now upwards of 100 games in the NHL. When the Kings opted to choose Dowd, he was an 18-year-old who had finished fourth on his team in scoring. That team, the Wenatchee Wild of the North American Hockey League, began its existence that very season.
"For me, I was in there when they had 15 teams," says Dowd of the NAHL. " I think the year after I left they jumped to 30, which obviously waters down the talent a little bit but it gives opportunity to kids that may not make that league or have the opportunity to play there because of travel or maybe they don't get to a tryout or whatever.
"When I went into that league," Dowd remembers, "I originally made a team in the USHL and then was cut and sent down to a team that drafted me (the NAHL St. Louis Bandits), and then was traded a couple of weeks later to Wenatchee. I can't speak highly enough of that league. The organization that I went to, I think it was their first year, with Bill Stewart as the GM and Paul Baxter as the head coach. It was huge for my career. At that point, I was pretty fragile. A lot of my buddies made the USHL, but I was cut. I almost quit, but I got traded to Wenatchee. So I went out there and thought I would give it a try. Paul put me in an opportunity to succeed, and I had a great year there and loved it."

The season at Wenatchee and the draft day call from the Kings were a springboard to a good season playing for Jeff Blashill's Indiana Ice of the USHL in 2009-10, and then it was on to St. Cloud St. where he majored in bio medicine. Dowd played four seasons of NCAA hockey, and he is a mere two classes away from attaining his bachelor's degree.
"I get a lot of grief for that," he admits. "My wife [Paige], she graduated. I have two classes left; I've been dragging my feet on them. It was good, it was challenging. I actually think being in school and playing hockey helped me quite a bit.
"I think the biggest thing to take away from pro hockey is that being in school allowed me to focus on something other than hockey when I wasn't at the rink. It's tough in pro hockey to get your mind off of your job; there are a lot of things weighing on you, and your family relies on you. It's challenging. When you go to school, you're allowed to focus on school, and then you're allowed to focus on hockey. It's good to split time."
Dowd not only managed to split time, he excelled in the classroom as well as on the ice. He was named to the NCAA West First All-American Team in his senior season, and he also had the extreme honor of being one of five finalists for the prestigious Hobey Baker Award.

"It was definitely a dream," recalls Dowd. "I didn't think I'd ever be up for anything like that. I was actually really excited to be an All-American, too. You just don't ever fathom that - there are so many kids in college hockey. To be selected as one of those five guys was really special.
"I went to a university that was on the upswing, and St. Cloud was known for giving kids opportunities, because a lot of more touted players went to other universities. At St. Cloud, [coach] Bob Motzko did an unbelievable job of recruiting and I fell into a place that allowed me a lot of opportunity and I was able to blossom from there."
For a guy who was cut from his USHL team and drafted in the seventh round, Dowd had an excellent college career at St. Cloud, improving his point total every season.
"I think that's the biggest thing people don't understand," says Dowd, "is that it doesn't matter where you play, but you need to play. Kids that think that playing in the better league or the higher age group or whatever is going to be better for their development, well that may be the case for some. But for me, as much as I wished I was playing in then USHL or playing in higher leagues, I was able to go to organizations and to a university that gave me ample opportunity and I was able to learn how to become the player that I am."
At the conclusion of his senior season of 2013-14, Dowd headed off to Manchester of the AHL to begin the professional portion of his hockey journey. At the end of his second full season in the AHL in 2015-16, he was recalled to Los Angeles, and he made his NHL debut - becoming just the third Alabama native to do so - during a five-game trial at the end of that campaign.
When Dowd scored his first NHL goal at Dallas on Oct. 20, 2016, he became the second Alabaman to score in the NHL and the first in more than seven decades to do so, since Enterprise, Alabama's Aud Tuten scored for Chicago during the 1942-43 season. Dowd totaled six goals and 22 points in '16-17, his first full season in the NHL.

Midway through last season, the Kings dealt Dowd to the Canucks in exchange for Jordan Subban. After more than eight years as a member of the Los Angeles organization, Dowd was on the move for the first time in a deal consummated a couple of weeks ahead of the holiday roster freeze.
"That was challenging," admits Dowd. "People don't understand how hard it is on hockey players' families. It's a great life, it's a great lifestyle, and we do make great money. But there are a lot of sacrifices our family members have to make, especially my wife.
"I got the call at 10:30 at night, and had a flight out at noon the next day. And we had an entire house in Hermosa Beach that was untouched. My wife spent a week or 10 days packing up by herself. Getting all your valuables over the border, dealing with cars, dealing with taxes, dealing with moving houses, changing addresses, it has its challenges. But everybody goes through it. Very rarely do you have guys who don't have to deal with that in their career.
"We've become good movers. This is my fifth year in pro hockey, and my wife told me we've had nine houses. And if you go down the line, almost every player can tell you that, so it's not just me. It's the name of the game, that's how it works. Until you solidify yourself and you sign a good contract somewhere because you've earned that, that's just how it works."
Now, Dowd is looking to solidify himself in the District, in the hopes of earning and signing that good contract. Washington is far from a blue-collar town, but over the years Caps fans have shown much affection toward lesser light type of players who came to D.C. from other organizations, such as Mike Eagles, Matt Bradley, Dave Steckel and perhaps most notably, Matt Hendricks.

"It's a cliché, but with the personnel that they lost, it is a nice hole to fill, especially with an organization that puts so much emphasis on that role, which is great," says Dowd, of competing for the fourth-line center's role in Washington. "It allows for a lot of opportunity, and I think that's what Jay was able to do over the last decade is to carve himself out a nice niche. I'm excited for that opportunity. I just need to play a responsible game. Face-offs are going to be critical, and I think penalty-killing is going to be huge, and then just playing within myself and chipping in offensively when I can."
It's possible that Dowd could end up being the only player on Washington's 2018-19 opening night roster who was not with the organization last season, when it won the Stanley Cup for the first time. That's not an easy spot to be in, but Dowd seems to have the right personality and disposition to deal with that situation.
"I've learned a lot over the course of two or three or four training camps," says Dowd. "There is only so much you can worry about in coming to a new organization; I've done it once in Vancouver. The guys here have been incredible, from then general manager all the way down to the training staff. Brock Myles has been unbelievable, as has Mark Nemish. Those guys make you feel like you've been a part of this organization for as long as you can remember, so the transition has been very smooth.
"And the players have been really awesome, too. You definitely have to pick your spots. This is a very tight knit group, and that's as it should be. They accomplished something that is really rare and hard to do. I got here [a few days before camp], to make a point of meeting everybody and being comfortable, so that when training camp started it felt like I had been here for a while. You've got to take every day as it comes. It doesn't matter where you are on the roster - it's like trying to split the atom. You're always trying to figure out 'Why am I here? Why am I there? Why am in in this lineup?' And it's just such a waste of time. But it's human nature, right? You're trying to figure it out, and a lot of the time it makes no difference."
Now that he's here in D.C., Dowd hopes to stay for a while.
"My wife Paige does a great job of keeping me focused," he says. "It's been good, and we love the city even though we've only seen the sun twice since we've been here. But it's awesome. Every time I came here to D.C., I would tell people that I wish I could play here because it's such an awesome place, and we were lucky enough to end up here."