Thomas Harley is having a monster season on the ice for the Dallas Stars. If you spoke to him, you’d probably never really know that he’s on the cusp of making his way into the “next great blueliner in the NHL” conversations.
You see, Harley is a pretty quiet guy.
He’s soft spoken and doesn’t speak with the braggadocio of some of the NHL’s superstars. His teammates will often use the word introverted when asked to describe him. He also has an underrated wit and a dry sense of humor that has come out a time or two with the media this season. “He’s one of those you gotta go talk to him, but once you get him going, he’s funny,” Stars goaltender Scott Wedgewood said. “You probably won’t get a lot out of him until you sit down and ask him, but we’ve sat down a lot.”
Harley is a fixture over at the Wedgewood home, popping up on Wedgewood’s Instagram with the two playing video games, playing golf together, or even something simpler like eating a home-cooked meal. He’s akin to an adopted child for Wedgewood and his wife, Brittany. “My wife likes to give him crap and joke with him a little bit, and you can see he’s tentative to be like, ‘can I make fun of this girl’,” Wedgewood said. “They’ve built their own kind of funny relationship when he’s over [and we’re] cooking him food and whatnot.”
As a 22-year-old growing boy, Harley can put away ‘a ridiculous amount of food’, according to Wedgewood. When Scott and Brittany have him over for dinner, they make two servings instead of one for the young defenseman. And when they’re not cooking for him, Harley is learning to cook on his own — one of the key adulting milestones Harley is undertaking now that he’s living in Dallas on his own this season.
Wedgewood has a front row seat for all of it.
“I get a snapchat a couple of times a week of the dinner he made. Either because he’s proud of himself or he’s proving to me that he’s eating food. It’s like, ‘hey you didn’t cook me dinner, so I’m going to prove that I made it myself.’”
He’ll also ask Wedgewood more sensible questions about adulting, such as how much is too much to be spending on bills.
“The most random FaceTimes ever come from Thomas Harley at random times in the day asking me questions that are funny, just little things that to me it’s a pretty simple answer,” Wedgewood said. “He asked me about his tollway bill the other day and was he paying too much. He was just questioning the amount we’re spending going back and forth. Just adulting questions. You got your own apartment, you got your own electricity bills, and stuff like that.
“Being young in the league, it’s nice that he trusts me enough to make those calls and ask those questions, but it’s funny from my side at times.”
It’s easy to forget how young Harley is considering how composed on the ice he’s looked this year. After spending the season working on his defensive game last year, and having a phenomenal playoff run as the Stars made it to the Western Conference Final, he’s in the mix as one of the top-scoring defenseman in the league. (He’s got 14 goals this season, one behind the league-leading 15 currently held by Rasmus Dahlin, Roman Josi, Evan Bouchard, and Mackenzie Weegar.)
For the Stars, having Harley be able to play big minutes in all situations really came in handy when top defenseman Miro Heiskanen missed eight games in January with an injury. The Stars didn’t miss much of a beat and Harley flourished some more. He’s become a staple paired with Heiskanen and taking on those big minutes. It was something that was a huge question mark for the team at the beginning of the season considering the shallower depth they have on the blueline — who could step up if the top guy went down?
Harley answered that resoundingly with composed play beyond his NHL experience to date. But off the ice, he’s still a young kid finding his way in the world as an adult.
“He tells me he’s my only friend in Texas,” Wedgewood said. “When I went down last year for my conditioning stint, he said he took me out to dinner, but I think I paid, so I don’t know how that works if you take someone to dinner and the other person pays.”