Anton Lander scores the hat trick
Anton Lander looks like Exhibit A for new approach heading into season
After he won a gold medal in parallel giant slalom at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, snowboarder Jasey Jay Anderson found himself in an awkward hillside discussion with a TV reporter who was fishing for some Olympic poetry.
Or at least a florid sentence or two about realizing his dream, the grandness of the occasion. Something emotional, if not soaked in joyous tears. Anderson wasn’t playing along, “I don’t know what you want me to say,” the gold medallist said, after a while. “I was just trying to make good turns.”
Anderson was thrilled, all right. He was also focused on the most basic component part of his sport — making technically sound turns. Over and over again. The interviewer was frustrated, but focusing so narrowly on the process is why Anderson succeeded.
This comes to mind as the Oilers’ training camp winds down. Just a brace of games, home and away, against the Vancouver Canucks remain on the pre-season schedule. Following their 4-0 victory over the Arizona Coyotes on Tuesday night, the Oilers are 6-0, with 21 goals for, just eight against.
And yet, the first training camp for Oilers general manager Peter Chiarelli and head coach Todd McLellan — and their boss, Bob Nicholson — has been refreshingly free of pronouncements about how the team will play, happily light on promises to live up to, expectations about meaning- ful games in the spring, or what have you. Nobody’s talking about being in the fight, or chopping wood and carrying water, about no individual being more important than the team, on and on.
Like Anderson, the Oilers are focusing on the component parts of their game: competing for jobs at key positions, like goaltender and defence; demonstrating mental toughness; being hard on the puck up and down the ice; being defensively sound.
There are a lot more moving parts for a hockey team than for a snowboarder, but McLellan has his players paying attention to detail in all aspects of their play.
Young veteran forward Anton Lander, who scored three of Edmonton’s four goals — two of them on the power play, could well be Exhibit A of this approach. Lander is just 24, but the 2009 second-round draft pick has been up and down between the Oilers and their AHL club several times. The Oilers, their patience with the Swedish centre wearing thin, waived him at the start of training camp last season.
Lander dialed up his game playing under Todd Nelson in Oklahoma City last season and he is continuing to work on improving his game under McLellan.
“I’m one year older,” said Lander, who produced 20 points, including six goals in 38 games with the Oilers last season. “Maybe I’m learning and getting better.
“I’ve been lucky to have great coaches and great teammates around me that have been helping me to get better. And I’ve been pushing myself to get to the next level. There is still a lot of work to do, but it feels better, definitely, than last year.”
Lander said the players all are learning McLellan’s system, yet still finding ways to win games, albeit against often the watereddown lineups teams often ice during the pre-season.
“We’re playing the system all right, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” Lander said. “At the end of the day, the most important thing is to win the hockey game.
“And it’s a lot more fun to be in training camp and winning, I promise you that.”
The winning, pleasant as it is, is the byproduct of implementing McLellan’s detail-oriented system, not necessarily the objective. It is pre-season, after all.
“I’m trying to get better on everything,” Lander said. “When the chances are there, you’ve got to take care of it.”
Even young Oilers veterans like Lander have had to grasp, absorb and execute new systems every training camp as the team has changed coaches, year over year. McLellan is the fifth head man Lander has played under in his time with Edmonton.
Is it tough to absorb new material each training camp? “Basically, every team has the same kind of idea,” Lander said. “But Todd is really (stressing) those kind of small things that you’ve actually been working on in practice.
“That’s in the system, where the defenceman has his stick, what way you’re going, how you read the defencemen. Those kind of things are in his system.
“Otherwise, where I’ve (played) it’s more (among) the players that we would talk about (positioning) and help each other out.
“With Todd, it’s in the system. It helps a lot out there. Everything makes a lot of sense. He’s a smart coach.”
The consensus among the Oilers players on McLellan is trending that way. That he’s a smart coach who focuses on insisting that his players make good turns, as it were.
The rest is liable to take care of itself. It certainly has so far, even if it is just pre-season.