Players like to keep their options open
The night before, John Tavares had put in more than 26 minutes of work all told — 26:23 by the game sheet.
According to Hockey-Reference.com, in 792 NHL games he’d been given more ice time just once — back when he logged 26:46 as a 19year-old Islanders rookie. The distance between the two highest workload games of his career amounted to a lifetime for the 29-year-old captain of the Maple Leafs, now a married father of a four-month-old son. So the reasonable question on Friday afternoon, when the Maple Leafs held an optional skills session at their Etobicoke practice facility, went something like this. Why on earth didn’t Tavares take the option and take the day off?
“I just felt like I had some good energy today,” Tavares was saying. “I didn’t feel like sitting around not doing a whole lot was for my benefit.”
These are the calculations being
made daily in the Sheldon Keefe era in Leafland, where practices are shorter (and more often optional) and gameday skates are going the way of the wooden stick. Players, both veterans and youngsters, are often being given an existential choice: to skate or not to skate?
And even though we’re living in the load-management era, where it’s become a go-to assumption that rest is a weapon and high-priced pro athletes ought to be bubble-wrapped between gaps in the schedule, there are those who often opt to skate.
“It was only optional for a very select group of guys. Most of our guys, we wanted to have out there,” Keefe, the head coach, clarified. “For a segment of our team, we wanted to make sure we’re giving them the proper rest to be prepared for tomorrow. For others, we wanted to make sure to continue to work with them to get them touches and get them reps so we can work to get better.”
Still, the idea of making the optional practice commonplace, as Keefe has done, is a relatively new NHL innovation. Frederik Andersen, the 30-yearold goaltender, glanced across the room at the locker stall of 36-year-old teammate Jason Spezza and laughed at the memory of an NHL ruled by a wholly different philosophy.
“Not to age (Spezza) too much, but he’s of the old school where you skated every day with very few options,” Andersen said. “Now you’ve got guys coming in playing one or two games and taking options. You’d never see that before. Even when I came into the league, that was unheard of. Maybe if you had the Patty Marleau over-37 card you could play it once in a while. But those were the only guys.”
Speaking of Andersen, given how no NHL goaltender started more games since he arrived in Toronto in 2016 — and seeing how he’s on pace for another 65 outings this season — you might have assumed he’d sit out Friday’s skate in favour of a day of rest, preferably in a hyperbaric chamber while sipping from the best legal fountain of youth science can concoct.
The more rest the better, right? The answer, Andersen was saying, is that he’s still trying to figure out the answer. As much as the Leafs believe in the merits of sport science, Andersen said there’s not yet a science that guarantees a stellar performance in the next game. And given that the Leafs still have a game to play on Saturday — a home date against the Blackhawks, after which they’ll embark on a bye-week, all-star-break vacation that will see them freed from the NHL schedule for nine consecutive days — Andersen felt a day off Friday would be to his detriment.
“I get the point that you need some rest. But you also need to do the work to feel confident in your game,” he said. “There’s a reason we got to where we got as players. That’s by working and by honing our skills. Now it’s almost like we’re a circus act — Saturday nights and Tuesday nights, that’s when you can see us. Like that’s all we do now.”
Andersen laughed when he got to the part about “circus act,” but he thinks long and hard about the details of his daily routine. Manning a goal crease, he said, isn’t like running a marathon. Sometimes it’s about endurance, sure, but mostly it’s about skill.
And in the interest of keeping his skills sharp, Andersen opted for 40 minutes on the ice on Friday. He said playing under Keefe, who has scaled back practice time and occasionally ditched game-day skates, has meant an adjustment to his routine.
“It’s a fine line between staying sharp enough and staying fresh,” Andersen said. “You’ve got to be able to feel, you’ve got to be able to think and read and react to plays. And that’s probably been the biggest challenge for me — to have less time in game-like situations in practice. And that’s something I have to adapt to as well.”
Spezza, for his part, is going through the same adjustment. While the team’s sports science staff has encouraged him to take more days off, getting on the ice is a big part of his daily lifeblood. So while various Leafs remained in street clothes Friday — among them
Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and Tyson Barrie — Spezza was among those who skated. “I just want to stay sharp,” he said. There was a time, not long ago, when the choice wasn’t the player’s. Spezza, Ottawa’s second overall pick in the 2001 draft, said when he broke into the league it wasn’t uncommon for practices to run 80 or 90 minutes. And only the most esteemed of veterans ever contemplated skipping a day.
“Daniel Alfredsson was the first teammate I had who started taking practices off. It seemed bizarre — like, how are you going to stay sharp?” Spezza said. “But now, everybody takes practices off.”
Everybody does, but not every time it’s green-lighted. Tavares, for his part, said that after conferring with the team’s medical and sports science staff about the best plan for Friday’s work day, he opted to don his skates — albeit only for a10-minute on-ice session concentrating on “a little bit of acceleration,” as he accurately described it.
“It’s always about the quality,” Tavares said. “If you’re going to do something that’s going to take you an hour, but there’s not a whole lot of purpose or intent or detail, the effect is very minimal. Where if I’m going to put in 10 good minutes on whatever I’m trying to focus on or accomplish, I give it my full attention and full ability, I feel like the benefit is much greater.”
NHL alumni who grinded through 90-minute bag skates might scoff at the notion of a 10-minute skills session, but that’s where science has brought us. Whether or not it’s for the best — well, everyone has the option of disagreeing.
“Now there’s lots of people thinking about this stuff. Whereas before it was the head coach figuring it out himself,” Spezza said. “And if he came to the rink pissed off at you, you were going to practice for an hour and 20 minutes … It’s evolved quite a bit. And probably for the better, truthfully.”