Many players eager to return to the ice after 10-month layoff NHL opening-night TV games
(All are Wednesday on NBCSN): Pittsburgh at Philadelphia, 5:30 Chicago at Tampa Bay, 8 St. Louis at Colorado, 10:30
NEWARK, N.J. — Jack Hughes of the New Jersey Devils hadn’t had a layoff like this since ... ever?
More than 100 NHL players from New Jersey, Buffalo, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Ottawa and Detroit have not played a meaningful hockey game since the league paused play in early March because of the pandemic. Ten long months.
“I don’t think I’ve had, I guess, 10 months of no games my whole life,” said Hughes, 19, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft. “So, obviously, something new. But I mean, games are like riding a bike, you could say. If you’re a hockey player, it’s something that comes naturally.”
It has been an eternity for Hughes and the rest in a sport predicated on rhythm, repetition and teamwork, a boring stretch unimaginable to athletes whose lives have followed a schedule that has rarely changed for years.
As kids, they played pee-wee hockey at all hours of the day. When the rink wasn’t available, the pond was. The long rides to tournaments, the steady drumbeat of practices and workouts. Most of all, games.
The games finally return for everyone with a compressed 56-game season that begins this week. It will be a fresh start for the 24 teams that made the postseason when play resumed Aug. 11. It will be something more than that to the other seven whose players had weeks on end without hockey.
Hughes spent time in Michigan to work out out with his brothers, Quinn of the Vancouver Canucks and Luke, one of the top prospects in junior competition. He spent five days a week in the gym and focused on eating healthy to add 14 pounds to his 165-pound frame.
Jack Eichel of the Sabres spent a lot time reflecting on how fast his first five years in the NHL went. Kyle Palmieri of the
Devils, a former Norfolk Admiral, returned to his family’s farming roots and grew a garden (he said the carrots needed more patience).
Other players took up hobbies or pumped iron, skated when they could and simply let their bodies heal at a leisurely rate. Devils center Travis Zajac, 35, said he felt great a week into camp.
What’s uncertain is how the teams coming back from the hiatus will perform. Will they be fresher? A step slow?
“I think that’s the million-dollar question that everybody’s searching for,” said Sharks defenseman Erik Karlsson, who joined the league in 2009. “But at the end of the day, we don’t have much of a choice.”
Kings coach Dallas Eakins felt humbled to be back at work, and at the same time lucky.
“There are so many people out there who have suffered and who are still suffering,’ Eakins said. “We’ve been allowed to come back and follow our passion. Our guys are very sensitive to it, and we feel a great privilege to be able to come back.”