He stops. He looks. And then he acts. Or reacts.
When you look at a player like Joe Thornton and see him outmuscle an opponent to make a play or get to the front of the net for a scoring chance, you think of a power forward like Cam Neely or Mark Messier. You want him to be that swashbuckling, powerful player all the time.
But there's more than one way to be strong or powerful to a team without leaping buildings in a single bound. And it's clear every time you watch Thornton stop, look and than act or react to what he can do to create a scoring chance.
"I am what I am," Thornton told me in a late March visit to St. Louis. "I can't control what other people think of me."
When the subject of Boston and the blame he took as the 24-year-old injured captain who had no points as the Bruins went out in the first round of the 2004 playoffs against Montreal, Joe stopped me. He wanted no part of the blame game that went on in the aftermath of that series.
Larry Wigge has covered the NHL since 1969. The longtime NHL columnist for The Sporting News, Wigge is now an NHL.com columnist and a frequent contributor to the website.
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But you could tell he clearly felt betrayed by management ... somebody ... for being made the scapegoat for the Bruins' playoff loss in 2004 when he was playing in spite of having a painful cracked rib.
"I think I lived up to expectations," he said, looking me square in the eyes. "I played my heart out for the Bruins every shift, and that's all you can ask for."
About the playoffs, Joe ...
"The last playoff I played in was in Switzerland and we won it all," said Thornton, who skated for Davos during the 2004-05 NHL lockout and had 24 points in 14 postseason games. "That's the one I refer to."
A power forward with scruples? Now you've got the picture.
Even after the San Jose Sharks, Thornton's new team, knocked off the Nashville Predators in the first round of the 2006 playoffs, Joe refused to gloat over the fact that the Bruins had failed to even come close to making the playoffs after he poured in 92 of his NHL-leading 125 points in 58 games after the trade from Boston to San Jose on November 30 for forwards Marco Sturm and Wayne Primeau and defenseman Brad Stuart.
"I've got a lot of friends back in Boston," Joe said quietly after the first big wave of reporters tried to get Thornton to say something, anything, about redemption from the bad rap he got there ... that he couldn't help lead a team, or win in the playoffs. "I loved my eight years in Boston. Let's not go there, OK?"
Where Thornton likes to go is in those heavy-traffic areas behind the net and along the boards. Just try to take the puck away from him.
"The bottom line is getting a goal," Thornton said. "It doesn't matter who gets it, does it? My dad taught me growing up that you compete hard and play together as a team. That means finding a way to get the puck into their net and keeping it out of your net, right?"
And seeing Thornton wind up with 20 goals and 72 assists in 58 games for the Sharks (125 points for the season), plus increasing Jonathan Cheechoo's 28 goals in 2003-04 into a league-leading 56 goals and the Sharks going from a struggling 8-12-4 before the trade to a rousing 36-15-7 afterward is all the equation I need to know.
"I can't describe how he makes some of his passes," Cheechoo told me. "They seem to come out of nowhere. He squeezes them through spaces a puck can hardly fit."
Seen as the savior of the franchise since being selected No. 1 overall in 1997 by the Bruins, Thornton took the brunt of criticism as each season ended short of the team's first Stanley Cup since 1972. What we have here is a case where too much pressure, too much praise -- and blame -- is often put on one player we perceive as a difference-maker. And sometimes a player needs a chance of scenery to achieve that lofty plateau.
The Sharks welcomed Thornton as a playmaker, not a bulldozer.
"Throughout his career, Joe seems to be more of a playmaker," Sharks coach Ron Wilson observed. "A quarterback isn't expected to rush for touchdowns, is he? To me, Joe is that quarterback that you want setting up behind the net or at the mid-boards where you can take advantage of his vision and passing ability.
"I don't understand why you want a guy standing in front of the net who passes as well as Joe Thornton passes. How can he make plays if someone is shooting the puck at him?"
A powerful analogy to be sure.
"He gutted it out," Minnesota Wild center Brian Rolston, who was with Boston in 2003-04, told me earlier this season. "Joe probably shouldn't have been ... he really gutted it out for our team. When you have an injury like that, every move hurts, and he played through a lot. He showed a lot of heart."
Sharks' General Manager Doug Wilson on his star player:
"How can anyone question the character of a guy like Joe Thornton? That's absurd. He's one of the most self-driven athletes I've ever watched."
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But enough of living in the past. The future for the Sharks can be seen deep in the depth their lineup presents each night with Thornton centering the first line with Cheechoo and Nils Ekman and captain Patrick Marleau centering the second line with rookies Steve Bernier and Milan Michalek on the wings.
"Call them 1a and 1b," Thornton, ever the team guy, said.
"Having Joe's creativity out there opens up a lot of things that you don't think about before you have a guy like him around," admitted Marleau. "It affects everybody out there."
At 6-foot-4, 225 pounds, Thornton is a presence on and off the ice. He's a force on most nights. And he's only 26.
"Great teams over the past few years have had two great centers," Ron Wilson said. "Look at Colorado and how well they did for so many years being able to send out Joe Sakic's line first and then Peter Forsberg's line. Same thing in Detroit with Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov. And it was no coincidence that Tampa won the Stanley Cup in 2004 with Vinnie Lecavalier and Brad Richards centering Lightning's top two lines.
"I spent a lot of time coaching in Washington and trying to figure out how to stop Pittsburgh, when the Penguins had Mario Lemieux and Ron Francis at center. And I also remember trying to game-plan against Boston, when the Bruins put Joe Thornton out there in all of the important situations and how his grit and determination was tough to hold off the score sheet."
Thornton has quickly found a home in San Jose. He met his girlfriend, Tabea Pfendsack, when he was playing for Davos in Switzerland and the two of them are building a life together in Northern California. He loves the water, telling us of a day a couple of summers ago when he was driving his boat on Port Stanley, near Joe's Ontario home, and he first met a young Shark named Cheechoo. It seems Thornton is more of a laid-back guy in leisure time.
"He's more of a Sunday-NFL-football-on-the-couch kind of guy," laughed teammate and cousin Scott Thornton.
This shouldn't be a character issue. Not when you're talking about Joe Thornton.
"How can anyone question the character of a guy like Joe Thornton?" Sharks General Manager Doug Wilson said curtly when he and I were glancing at a TV screen in the first round of the playoffs and listened to some of the criticism of Thornton by a Boston TV guy. "That's absurd. He's one of the most self-driven athletes I've ever watched."
It was at that point that Wilson recalled how he and the Sharks' scouting staff had poured over information and personalities of Thornton and Patrick Marleau before the 1997 Entry Draft in which Boston had the first pick and San Jose the second.
"I remember how impressed we were with him in 1997 and it basically came down to picking either Joe or Patty Marleau," Wilson said. "I know we felt we couldn't go wrong with either of those players, because they were both such self-motivated and talented individuals."
And when Doug Wilson was first negotiating with Bruins GM Mike O'Connell in November about a potential trade for winger Sergei Samsonov and defenseman Nick Boynton before Thornton's name came up. Wilson said there was no worry about character and motivation before he snapped up that deal.
"If I have to motivate somebody I don't want them," Wilson said bluntly. "We want self-motivated people who know where we want to go. This is a people business. If I get guys who really care and throw them together, we'll go places. They don't play for me or (coach) Ron Wilson. When they come back to the bench it's all about peer pressure and that can be a powerful thing.
"Players play, the coaches coach and the managers manage. I don't believe in overlapping."
When you look at the Sharks success since the November 30 trade for Joe Thornton, there has clearly been no overlapping.
"This is a dominant player in the NHL," Doug Wilson said after the trade. "He is a leader who scores points -- and, more important, makes other players around him better.
"It's not often that a player like Joe Thornton becomes available, a player at the right age that fits to help us get stronger character that someday will bring a Stanley Cup to San Jose."
That Stanley Cup might be a little closer to San Jose now that Joe Thornton stops, looks and acts, or reacts, to create another scoring opportunity for the Sharks.
