The bag skate began about five minutes before practice was even supposed to start at Kettler Iceplex on Wednesday morning. Up to the red line and back. First one trio and then another. Now do it again. That lasted for seven minutes. After some one-on-one work in the corners for about 20 minutes, Washington coach Bruce Boudreau made his players skate again.
By the end of those suicide sprints several of them were on all fours trying to catch some air. After some serious work in the defensive zone there were even more sprints. Then more defensive zone work in front of goalies Tomas Vokoun and Michal Neuvirth.
Then things turned bizarre. Assistant coach Dean Evason pushed both goals into the far corner of the rink. Each was manned by one of the goalies about 20 feet apart. A puck was passed in between and a pair of defensemen and a pair of forwards did battle. To be honest, the players seemed to enjoy that one. The skating they could have done without. All told, the Caps were on the ice for about 90 minutes. None of them were particularly pleasant.
“If it’s a comfort thing the comfort will change tomorrow [at practice],” Boudreau said ominously after Tuesday’s ugly 5-2 loss to the Dallas Stars. That and Saturday’s 5-3 loss at the New York Islanders precipitated the season’s hardest practice so far.
Boudreau wasn’t kidding. But that’s what happens when a coaching staff senses the effort wasn’t there. Let’s not go crazy. The Caps are 9-4 now. Dallas is a really good team – the best in the Western Conference right now. But Washington has lost four of its last six games and Boudreau is trying to nip some bad habits in the bud now. This is one way to do it.
“I think any bag skate with no pucks is worse than that,” forward Jason Chimera said. “At least we did a lot of functional things out there that we could use in a game. Not just needless skating. We did a lot of skating, but we did a lot of things that we can work on, too.”
The last time Boudreau did this? Nov. 2, 2008. It was his second season in Washington and the Caps had lost at Buffalo 5-0 the day before. Instead of a scheduled day off before the road trip continued in Ottawa, that Caps team had a bag skate. These things can go either way. Former NHL player Ray Ferraro notes in this column from two years ago that the Toronto Maple Leafs reacted to a bag skate with a two-shot first-period performance in their next game. Stick tap to the web site Japers’ Rink for digging up that gem. That Washington team lost to the Senators 2-1 in overtime on Nov. 4. But it then won six of its next seven games after that.
“There’s a whole bunch of different facets to the game of hockey,” Boudreau said. “But one of the main facets is winning the one-on-one battles…The team that usually wins the most battles is the team that usually gets the most chances to win. And I didn’t think we won enough battles the last two games to be successful.”
Boudreau did say that he didn’t do this “off the cuff”. A coach has to balance his anger at the way a team played and what’s best for the group overall. But he believed a hard skate was the right approach for today. Boudreau asked Evason after Tuesday night’s game if he had any “battle” drills in mind. In fact, Evason did. He described the one with the two goals set in a corner of the rink. Boudreau, who worked in the Los Angeles Kings organization early last decade, instantly remembered it as the Andy Murray drill. Murray was the Kings’ coach from 1999 to 2006. Evason laughed and said, no, it’s the Bill LaForge drill. LaForge was a longtime junior hockey coach in Canada and coached Evason with the Kamloops Oilers in 1982-83 and 1983-84. That’s when Boudreau remembered the drills were called “the Bill Drill” when he was still playing. It brought a little levity and a lot of competition to a team that needed both on Wednesday.
“The one thing that it shows no matter how tired you are you can have fun if you’re working hard,” Boudreau said. “They were smiling and laughing and yet they were kicking the crap out of each other. Hard work doesn’t necessarily have to mean punishment. If you want to compete it can be fun.”
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