Very superstitious? Not them
Anything but routine for some players as they prepare for games
The local hockey club ranks highly in a few familiar categories, including goals per game and shots into an empty net. There is another the NHL doesn’t track.
Unofficially, the Penguins might again be the league leaders in superstitions.
Eating a pregame PB&J. Taping sticks at the exact same time. Avoiding the team soccer ball like it’s a grenade. Wearing the same jockstrap for years. Stick-handling on corporate logos. Top-secret handshakes with longtime teammates.
And that’s just Sidney Crosby.
“Trust me,” Chad Ruhwedel said. “There are plenty of guys. It’s not just him.”
But a few stalls down from Sid in the dressing room, apparently by coincidence, sit a few teammates who all received multiple votes in a recent Post-Gazette poll that asked the Penguins to name the team’s least, we’ll say, routined player.
They are Ryan Poehling, Jeff Carter, Brock McGinn and Kasperi Kapanen. And if there is something any of them absolutely has to do before the puck drops on game day, none of their teammates, including Crosby, have seemingly noticed.
“You cross paths with guys who have similar
[routines] to yours,” Crosby said. “You see them all the time so it sticks out to you. I see [Bryan Rust] and [Jake] Guentzel and [Brian Dumoulin] a lot before the game, just based on what we do.”
So in a sport in which players are known for being a tad bit superstitious and many stick to a routine like clockwork, why do the aforementioned four buck the trend? We stopped by that stretch of real estate in the dressing room to find out.
Poehling, a Penguins newcomer, previously played with his older twin brothers in high school and then at St. Cloud State, where he enrolled a year early so he could skate with them again. He said his bros took their routine fairly seriously.
“They were more dialed in than me,” he said with a smile. “They would hang out in the trainer’s room for the majority of the time and then they would do their own little warmup. But I would just kind of walk around and see what was going on.”
Years later, Poehling still approaches game days pretty much the same way.
Sure, he knocks out a pregamenap, asthe vast majority of players do. Whenever he strolls into the arena on any given day, he only needs to do two things.
One is his specific warmup routine, with “a lot of work” with exercise bands, two sets of squats and jump squats then some abdomen and shoulder activation. After the team meetings, Poehling will join the boys for a game of sewerball.
“Then I just wait for the clock to go down,” he said. “I’ve never been superstitious, because sometimes things happen. Maybe you show up late. I’m almost scared to have a routine. Because if I can’t do it, then I’ll be screwed in the head.”
Why doesn’t Kapanen have much of a routine? The winger simply shrugged.
“My superstition is to kind of not have a superstition or a routine. Obviously, there are certain things that I do at a certain time. But that’s just everyday life,” he said. “Some guys are very superstitious and I just really haven’t caught on.”
Giving it a little more thought, he expressed a sentiment similar to Poehling’s.
Some players may see routines as a way to “control the controllables,” as coach Mike Sullivan likes to say. Meanwhile, psychologists believe they can help athletes feel more confident and in control heading into uncertain future events.
Kapanen sees that the other way.He fears that if he were superstitious, he would worry about how he might play if he didn’t drive a particular route to the arena or tied his skates in the wrong order. Instead, he lets his body be his guide.
“I just warm up what I need to warm up and stretch what I need to stretch,” he said. “If I feel good, then I won’t overpush myself and get too amped up or anything. Or some days I’ll feel sluggish, then I really need to get a good warmup in.”
Pregame warmups out on the ice can be a whole different animal. Even if a player doesn’t have a strict pattern to follow, he must be aware of those who do. The last thing a player wants to do is disrupt the decades-long routines of Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang. Last year, NHL players voted Crosby the league’s most superstitious player. But all three stars have their own signature quirks, such as Malkin always shooting one puck at the lead athletic trainer’s foot.
“I feel like even if you have no routine, being in this locker room long enough, you develop them,” Ruhwedel said. “Or you just abide to everybody else’s routines, so then it basically becomes your own, just by trying to stay out of the way.”
McGinn signed with the Penguins in 2021. He laughed as he recalled how nervous he was his first few games here.
“I didn’t skate too fast in warmups, just so I didn’t disrupt anything,” he joked.
McGinn said he doesn’t stick to a strict routine in order to keep his mind “light.”
McGinn has the same meal — chicken noodle soup and pasta with chicken and broccoli — before every pregame nap. He likes to tape his sticks before the team meetings and is a regular in the sewerball games, too. But that’s about it.
“When I start overthinking things, I think too much on the ice,” he explained.
Next to McGinn in the dressing room is Danton Heinen, who lands somewhere in the middle of the superstition spectrum. He has become more of a creature of habit after spending the last two years following Crosby’s lead. But it doesn’t bother him that Poehling, Carter, McGinn and Kapanen are relatively willy-nilly.
“I don’t mind sitting here. Maybe it’s good for me,” he said with a big grin. “They’re laidback guys. Good guys to hang out with. I’m in a good wing down here.”
McGinn understands why Heinen and others are a bit more obsessive, even if that approach isn’t for him. Do what you need to do, he said.
“Superstitions sometimes help guys get in the right mindset,” McGinn said. “I think everybody gets ready a different way and it’s just about what suits you best.”