It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Chicago, crisp but not cold. Practice officially ended more than a half hour ago, and surely Matt Duchene has more exciting places to be.
The Dallas Stars got into town a day early, and free afternoons in the best cities are few and far between in the perpetual motion of the NHL — get to the rink, practice, cool down, drive to the airport, fly to another city, land in the evening, grab a quick dinner, go to bed early, wake up, warm up, morning skate, treatment, lunch, nap, play a game, more treatment, straight to the airport, land in the next city at some ungodly hour, do it all over again.
Duchene could go to any of Chicago’s world-class museums. He could stroll the lakefront. He could catch a movie or veg out in his hotel room, binging some brainless reality show.
But here he is, more than 1,000 NHL games and lord-Stanley-knows-how-many practices into his career, still on the United Center ice, playing games and working on skills and hammering pucks into the net and generally goofing off with the Stars’ contingent of younger players, well after much of the team had already showered, dressed and hopped on the first bus back to the hotel.
Yes, it turns out, playing hockey for a living can be pretty fun.
“I love that stuff,” Duchene said. “For me, the word ‘play’ has always been a really big key for me. If I’m ‘playing,’ I’m playing well. Of course, you always have to work hard at everything, but if you’re ‘working’ hockey, you’re not going to play as well. If you’re ‘playing’ hockey, the work’s built in, and the fun’s there, too. That’s just always how I’ve been wired.”
But even the coolest jobs have their downsides, and everyone’s entitled to feel burned out from time to time, to have a bad day at work, to even dread coming into the office. And the truth is, life as an NHL player can be an excruciating grind — physically, mentally, emotionally.
There’s monotony in an 82-game season, a sameness when all the morning skates and games and hotels start blurring together. There are days when you park at the rink, exhale deeply and think, here we go again. Days when you step out of the elevator and can’t remember your hotel room number because it’s the fourth one this week. Days when your whole body hurts, when a cold tub sounds better than a cold beer. Days when you can’t believe you have to tie these damn skates again and rip off all this damn tape again, and days when your back seizes up just trying to tie those damn skates and rip off all that damn tape.
Hockey’s hard, man.
“Getting on your gear and walking into the rink, I don’t feel that,” said 15-year veteran Taylor Hall. “It’s the other stuff. It’s getting in a cold car at 2 in the morning and driving, or going to stay at a s—-y hotel in an unnamed city that I’m not going to say. We’re here again. We’re doing this again. Fighting that feeling off is a big part of being a professional athlete.”
For most laypeople, having one of those all-too-human woe-is-me days means being a little less productive. Maybe a project isn’t completed on time, maybe a TPS report lacks a cover sheet, maybe a term paper isn’t spell-checked. For an NHL player, a case of the Mondays can be anywhere from merely humiliating on an international stage to outright catastrophic, as anything short of full engagement on the ice can lead to injury.
So, how do athletes stave off the monotony and the pain and the endless grind of an NHL season?
It’s not easy. But it’s their ability to do so — almost as much as their ability to skate and stickhandle at more than 20 mph and slap a puck more than 90 mph — that allows them to do this job in the first place.
And those who handle the grind best tend to keep grinding into May and June.
“I think that’s what we’ve learned the last couple of years here,” Florida forward Sam Reinhart said after a snowy bus ride to a nonconference game against an overmatched Chicago squad on a Thursday night some five months after winning a Game 7 in the Stanley Cup Final. “It’s games like this that you build off for something bigger. It’s a night like this that you might learn something, that you might find your game (and) something that’s going to benefit you later on. It’s little moments like this.”
It was perhaps an odd way to start a conversation, but Nick Foligno laughed all the same. Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.
So, are you just sore, like, all the time?
“Yeah!” Foligno said. “The best quote I ever heard is, ‘The last time I felt good was my first NHL game.’”
Hockey hurts, man.
And it’s not just the hits or the smears along the boards. It’s all the pucks you eat throwing yourself in front of opposing slap shots, the welts on your shins and your shoulders. It’s all the times your neck gets strained reaching for an opponent, or your knee gets hyperextended trying to maintain a gap on a shifty forward, or your thumb gets bent backward in a puck battle in the corner. It’s damn near every stride you take.
Who ever thought running around on knife blades was a good idea, anyway?
“It’s 30 years of having your hips be in the wrong position,” Duchene said. “Human beings weren’t meant to skate. So your body has to adapt, and over time, it breaks down a little bit. The last year and a half, I’ve really noticed a difference (in everyday soreness). It’s nothing too bad, but if you do the same thing over and over and over again from when you’re 4 years old till you’re 34, you’re going to feel it.”
While a player’s timing and sharpness tend to improve the more he plays, the body is a different story. A player’s 100 percent in February is probably quite a bit less than his 100 percent in October. And it’s certainly less at 35 years old than it is at 25.
That’s where self-care and preparation come into play. It simply takes an average older player more time to get his body ready for a game than it does a younger player. More stretching, more time on the massage table, more sleep, more attention paid to nutrition, more supplements, more of “those crappy, disgusting protein bars with the gold wrapper,” as Foligno put it.
Foligno likes cold plunges. Duchene has a morning routine. Duncan Keith had a series of calisthenics he molded over the years that he did first thing in the morning, right out of bed. Seattle’s Brandon Montour swears by Pilates.
But during the season, it’s difficult for players to keep weight on. So the groundwork for feeling good during the season has to be laid during the offseason.
“I’ve been trying different things throughout my career, just to see how my body reacts,” Montour said. “I’ve been around enough to know how my body handles everything now, but it’s important to keep doing different things to keep you on your toes.”
That’s often a hard-learned lesson for younger players. In fact, Foligno has a theory as to why breakout rookies so often have a sophomore slump, which happened to Connor Bedard earlier this season. The way Foligno sees it, adrenaline and excitement carry a rookie through his first season.
Then things go awry.
“You’ve finally played a full season as a rookie and you don’t necessarily realize the impact it has on you,” he said. “So in the summer, you’re still doing the same training you’ve always done, and you don’t think about the recovery aspect that goes with it. Then you go into the season and you’re tired, or you don’t have the same excitement, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is a little harder now.’ So then you have to learn to grizzle yourself and get back at it.”
That said, today’s young players are so far ahead of where previous generations were in terms of taking care of their bodies. Foligno said he “wasn’t even allowed on the table the first five years in my career” unless he waited for every veteran to be done and out of the room, lest he get ripped a new one by the older guys.
“I’m old-school, but not to that degree,” Foligno said. “A lot of the therapy was ice from the inside out with beer when I came into the league. Not trying to be funny, it’s just the reality. But young guys are playing a lot of big minutes and they’re not used to it, so they’re really conscious of everything and they understand that if I take care of myself, I’m going to have a better season and a longer career.”
Seattle’s Brandon Montour knows the toll hockey can take on his body. (Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
For mere mortals, it can be hard to fathom just how physically demanding a game at the NHL pace can be. But all you have to do is see guys sucking wind on the bench after a 40-second shift or watch an intermission interview with a player spitting out words between desperate gasps for breath, even though that interview is taking place several minutes after the final horn.
Even Olympic 100-meter sprinters are completely gassed after a race, and that’s just 10 seconds, one time. This is 45 or 60 seconds, 20-some times, 82 nights a year.
“It takes a toll,” Montour said. “Especially because we play a lot. You play 82 games, it’s a long, long time and it’s grueling. Plus, you’re traveling a lot, you’re on planes, in different time zones, sleeping in different hotels. As great as playing the game obviously is, there’s a lot that goes into it. It’s time-consuming, you’re away from family, it’s a busy, busy schedule. Then you play the games and they’re so hectic. Anyone who goes 45 seconds hard — it might seem short watching it, but it’s a long time. It takes a lot out of you.”
Paul Maurice has coached 1,908 games in his NHL career. Which means he’s rewatched 1,908 games. Plenty of times, he wasn’t terribly excited about pulling out that laptop or that iPad.
Hockey’s relentless, man.
So while Maurice never played in the NHL, he understands as well as anyone the grind of the NHL. That’s why he’s shortened Panthers practices, focusing on intensity and efficiency rather than duration. He’s worked with the team to make travel a little less difficult, staying in a city overnight when possible rather than bolting for the airport right after the game, as most teams do after most road games. He’s cut back on morning skates when it makes sense.
“You try to stay as fresh as possible,” Maurice said. “And that’s true for the coaches, too. You need to be mentally sharp, so you’re not getting off the plane at 3 a.m. but still have to get your video started at 5. We work hard at it.”
Panthers coach Paul Maurice has been around long enough to know he has to allow players the time to recover and the space to let their guards down. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
Maurice also does his best to stay out of the Panthers’ locker room, “because they have more fun when I’m not there.” Fun is fundamental to surviving an NHL season because it allows players to embrace the grind rather than simply endure it. Finding fun in the mundane is critical to a team’s chemistry off the ice and success on it.
It’s turning the end of a practice into a competition, with a game like two-puck or seeing who can hit both posts and the crossbar first from a designated spot on the ice. It’s rotating the locker-room DJ throughout the season, allowing players to show their personalities and mercilessly mock each other’s taste in music. It’s just shooting the breeze while lacing up those skates for the umpteenth time.
The kids are always having fun, the sheer excitement of being in the NHL superseding all mental and physical strain. The old guys are clinging to the fun, knowing all too well that it won’t be there much longer.
So, oddly enough, it’s those guys in their primes that often have the toughest time getting up for the 37th game of the season against some nondescript opponent in some godforsaken rink. The beginning is a distant memory, and the end is a far-flung afterthought. That’s when you’re really in it, really aware of how long you’ve been doing this and how long you’ll be doing this.
“In my career, the hardest point was when I was about 26, 27,” Duchene said. “That’s when things can get monotonous because you still have so much runway left.”
That goes for coaches, too. Tampa Bay Lightning coach Jon Cooper is the NHL’s longest-tenured coach, standing behind the same bench coaching the same team for 13 seasons now. He’s been to four Stanley Cup finals and has won it all twice. He’s also just 57, so he could be doing this for another decade or more.
Cooper said “there’s a lot to” staving off the monotony of the season and admitted there definitely have been days when he got up in the morning and didn’t want to sit through yet another replay of a game he already saw live. But this is also a guy who’s worked in the real world as a lawyer, and, well, this grind beats that grind any day.
“It’s never the same,” Cooper said of life in hockey. “There’s a different challenge, you have different players, there’s different scenarios. … You get up every day and you’re like, ‘All right, what can we do to make ourselves better?’ And I’ve never gotten up a day where I’ve been in the NHL and been like, ‘I don’t want to go to work.’ It’s the complete opposite. I just love doing it.”
That’s a perspective that comes only with time, age and experience. Pat Maroon is the 20th-oldest player in the league. He’s won the Stanley Cup three times. And he’s currently playing out the string as a fourth-liner on the 31st-place Blackhawks, playing utterly meaningless games in front of largely indifferent crowds.
And he’s loving every second of it, no matter how sore he is, no matter how pointless it might seem from the outside.
“We get to do what every child wants to do growing up,” Maroon said. “That’s the whole point. You never know when it’s going to be your last shift, your last TV timeout, your last year, your last goal, the last time you get your ass to the last morning skate. You take every shift with pride. You’re not going to be perfect through 82, there are going to be off games. But there’s still another shift where you can get better. That’s always been my mentality. You never know (when it’ll end), so you might as well take advantage of it and just enjoy and embrace it.”
Early last season, Hall had some of the usual gripes about how long and trying a season can be. Then he missed 72 games with a knee injury and caught a glimpse of what life without hockey looks like.
Give him the grind any day.
“One day, I’m going to be sitting there after my career is done and I’m going to wish that I was about to lace them up for a s—-y practice after we just got beat 6-2,” Hall said. “I’ll want to come back to that moment. I try to be cognizant of that when those thoughts do creep in your head. I love the monotony, I love the routine, I miss it in the summer and there’s not much going on. That’s when I’d love to just be in the middle of seven games in 13 days and just figuring out how to get better every day. I enjoy that.”
So get to the rink an hour earlier to stretch and get that balky shoulder worked on. Wake up a half hour earlier and do some Pilates in your hotel room. Linger in the locker room a little longer, sitting back and listening to the ridiculous banter. Think of that great hidden gem of a restaurant you found last time in that city you always dread going to.
And stay on the ice — after a practice, at the end of your career — as long as you possibly can. Because the grind is grueling and gutting, exacting and exhausting. It’s a toll that only professional athletes can comprehend. It demands the full attention of your heart, your mind and your body nearly every hour of every day for the entire prime of your life.
It’s so damn hard, so painful, so relentless. And you’ll miss it terribly when it’s gone.
“The best way to combat all that is just to enjoy playing hockey and have fun and look at it through a kid’s lens,” Duchene said. “It sounds cheesy, but that’s how I’ve looked at it the last few handful of years. As I’ve gotten older, those regular-season games, yeah, it’s not Game 6 of the Western Conference final. It’s just not. But at the same time, there’s no reason you can’t go out there and for 60 minutes be your absolute best and have a hell of a time doing it.
“Don’t think of it as, ‘I have to play a freaking hockey game tonight.’ Always think of it as, ‘I get to play a freaking hockey game tonight.’”
(Top photo of Adam Larsson: Brett Holmes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
