Ron Wilson said when the Washington Capitals canned him last spring that he wanted to take a year off from the coaching grind.

	Ron Wilson was 192-159-51-8 in five years behind the Caps' bench.

But he didn't figure that the NHL's next opening would be in San Jose. He probably figured Calgary, or Florida, or some other push-rock-up-mountainside gig would come open before the team he touted on TSN to reach the Stanley Cup finals.

Still, he shouldn't be all that giddy about it. In replacing Darryl Sutter, he takes over a team of veterans who have lived through more than its share of coaching changes and is unlikely to get all giddy about a new plant foreman. And the young players who have never experienced a December firing are wondering where they stand with the new guy.

Worse yet, he takes a job bestowed by a new ownership group that gave Sutter only a one-year contract, and acted on it 58 games before the year was up. These, plainly, are men who do not wait for the light to turn the right shade of green.

Wilson has a nice line of patter, as he showed in Anaheim and, for a while anyway, in Washington. He chews a mean piece of gum behind the dasher. He has a history of success cobbling together a formidable power play. And he succeeds, again, for a while. He got the Mighty Ducks to the second round, once, and the Caps to the Cup finals, once.

And maybe his voice is just fresh enough to convince the players to do all the things Sutter harped on them to do over five seasons. It isn't as though they are built to be anything more than what they are -- a disciplined, hard-nosed team of grinders with just enough effervescence to separate them from most eighth-place teams.

But it won't be as easy as just changing the suit behind the bench. It never is. The Sharks didn't lose because the coach suddenly forgot where his car keys are. They lost because they lack a credible power play, sufficient depth at the blue line, because they didn't sign goalie Evgeni Nabokov and defenseman Brad Stuart before the season started, because they spent most of the first third of the season on the road and couldn't win when they got back to San Jose.

Boy, Ron Wilson better be good.

But he has to be especially good with team captain Owen Nolan, who can disappear now and then. He has to be especially good with defenseman Jeff Jillson, who has taken slowly to the demands of the position. He has to be especially good with Mike Ricci, who is as close to an icon as the city has.

And he has to be especially good with those owners, who have shown not just iffy patience with their last coach but with the payroll as a whole. They sat quietly by while Detroit, Colorado and Dallas got dramatically better, while Minnesota cheat all logic by jumping out to a quick lead in the Northwest, and while Edmonton, Anaheim, Vancouver and Los Angeles tinkered to be good.

The result? A team standing boldly in 13th place, with a new coach and a befuddled fan base, wanting to know what happened to that Cup finals so many people, including Ron Wilson, said would be theirs.

So now he gets to prove he knew what he was talking about back in October -- knowing that he won't be given a lot of time to be wrong before the owners start voting their stock again, this time with the very players Wilson liked so much that day on the TSN set.

At least in Calgary or Florida, he knew what he would have been getting.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com