Pushing the snooze button
Sticking to sleep routine key to Andersen’s plan to handle challenges of long season
If we’ve learned anything about Frederik Andersen in his four mostly formidable seasons with the Maple Leafs, it’s that he’s a serious man of meticulous habits.
He’s not alone in this; goaltenders often come to be known as obsessives, and certainly there are levels to the trait. When it comes to detail-driven quirkiness, Andersen is probably never going to match, say, hall of fame netminder Eddie Belfour, who was known for legendarily sharpening his own skates into the dead of night because … hey, if you want a job done right you’ve got to do it yourself.
But ever since it was explained to Andersen during his early days as an Anaheim Ducks prospect that the path to athletic excellence required more than showing up to games with his considerable talent, he has been a faithful adherent to the school of state-ofthe-art training. He spends thousands of dollars every off-season hiring a performance coach. He partakes in weight training and vision training on top of a steady diet of on-ice drills with medicine balls and rebound boards and screen-mimicking dummies and the like.
And this past off-season, Toronto’s No. 1 goaltender was won over to the idea that optimizing his sleep could be a game-changing addition to his arsenal.
“The greatest performance enhancing drug that most people are probably neglecting,” is how Dr. Matt Walker, the popular sleep expert, has characterized a nightly eight-plus hours.
Andersen, citing Walker as an influence, has hit on a bedtime routine that makes sense for him. He limits late-day caffeine.
“Even if you drink it in the early afternoon you still have a lot in your system at the end of an evening,” he said. He eschews late-night alcohol. “Instead of focusing on (recovery), your body’s just trying to get rid of all the poison in your system,” he said.
His ideal temperature for a long winter’s nap — seven to nine hours is the goal — runs about 18 Celsius, and maybe chillier. “I like it really cold,” he said. And his environment must be pitch black, which is generally not a problem at home or on the road, when the Leafs
stay at high-end hotels like the Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton.
“Most rooms have nice blackout curtains,” Andersen said.
Which is not to say he always sleeps as well on the road as he does at home.
“When you’re in a new room, something about your brain stays on a little bit. The fightor-flight response,” he said. “It’s some kind of instinct. When you’re in a new environment, you’ve got to be aware if there’s any sabretooth tigers coming.”
If Andersen occasionally sleeps with one eye open, maybe it’s less about the particulars or his nighttime routine and more an occupational hazard. Since he arrived in Toronto, after all, no NHL goaltender has been pelted with more cumulative pucks.
And if you’re among those wondering why Andersen’s recent run of poor play has seemed to coincide with the arrival of Sheldon Keefe as Toronto coach — well, consider that between Mike Babcock’s firing and Toronto’s 6-2 loss on Saturday, a 26-game stretch, Andersen had faced more high-danger shots at 5-on-5 than any goaltender in the league. In other words, the puck-possession style Keefe is pushing clearly suits the skill set of Toronto’s best players. But it’s not necessarily going to be a goaltender’s best friend.
“It’s still a learning process,” Andersen said in a recent chat before the Leafs parted ways for the bye week, wherein he and teammates Jake Muzzin, William Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen had planned an outing to famed Augusta National Golf Club. “It’s not going to be perfect right away. We’ve had sort of a new system for, what is it, a month or two now? We’re slowly knowing when we get in trouble and when we don’t.”
Trouble or not — and the Leafs, at their worst under Keefe, have been a defenceshirking turnover machine — nobody’s making the case Andersen has been good enough of late, and certainly not Andersen. Prone to allowing too many soft goals, his .881 save percentage in January marks his worst month of the season by a considerable margin.
But the question is this: Is his recent run of poor form simply a run-of-the-mill slump, the kind even the best goaltenders inevitably weather? Or is it the accumulated effect of too many years stopping too many high-quality shots for a team that often treats defence like some inconvenient truth?
“It’s tough to say what the perfect recipe (for load management) is. It comes with experience. I haven’t had my best period, I know. And that’s something I’ve got to figure out,” Andersen said.
“I don’t really say no to playing. I think you know that about me by now. But I don’t think there’s anyone who’d like to prove everyone wrong that I can play 60 or more (games) and have success in the playoffs … I thought last year in the playoffs I played well (after starting 60 regular-season games).”
It could be possible, too, that Andersen’s rough January is the unpleasant byproduct of a team adapting a new system in the midst of a season, and the unintended consequences that come with such a midstream change.
“(Playing under Keefe is) a little bit different. I’d been playing every game that wasn’t a back-to-back. And now it’s adjusting to practising a little bit less and taking a game here and there off. That’s also been a challenge,” Andersen said. “Guys do it really well on the players’ side, they slide up and down the lineup and they’re good at playing 15 minutes but they can also go out and play 20 minutes. So that’s something I’m learning as well.”
Adjusting to playing under a new coach, honing the details of a pre-bedtime routine, playing Augusta, heading to his first all-star game in St. Louis at week’s end. You can see why the man seeks optimal sleep. Even the bye week doesn’t promise much in the way of rest.
“They tell you the best thing for sleep is to have a regular schedule, which is not something that’s always possible for us,” he said. “But the more good sleep I can bank, the more I can avoid being over par, to use the golf analogy. You’ve got to get it when you can, is the simplest way to say it.”