Sleep or skate? Game-day ritual and science face off in NHL

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This article was published 07/11/2016 (3559 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — Major league baseball teams don’t do it. Neither do NFL or CFL football teams.

And, increasingly, NBA basketball teams have stopped doing it.

But for reasons that seem to have as much do with habit and tradition as anything else, NHL hockey teams continue to drag their players out of bed early in the morning of a game day and haul them down to the rink for what is referred to as “the morning skate.”

The players suit up, skate around in circles for as little as 15 or 20 minutes — these things are so casual a lot of teams don’t even have their head coach on the ice — and then the players get undressed, talk to the media and either head back to their homes or back to the hotel.

The effort involved in getting to the rink is often the most taxing part of the exercise. Take the Winnipeg Jets’ schedule here on Sunday morning:

After playing two games in the previous three nights, the Jets were rousted from the beds of their Lower Manhattan hotel, packed on a bus and then sat in traffic brought on by the New York City Marathon on their way to New Jersey in order to skate for less than a half-hour in a building they weren’t playing in later that night.

And then the players were packed back on that bus and driven back through that same traffic to Lower Manhattan, where most of them ate lunch and then promptly got back into bed for the NHL’s other game-day ritual — the afternoon nap.

A couple of hours later, it’s rinse and repeat; they’re back on the bus, this time headed for midtown’s Madison Square Garden for the game against the New York Rangers.

If none of that makes any sense to you, well… you’re not the only one. Former Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins once pointed out the skewed logic involved in getting players to the rink just once on off-days, but “on game days, when everything is on the line and you need to be fresh, we bring them twice, for some reason.”

Baseball players have always taken batting practice on game days, but they do it late in the afternoon just prior to the game itself as an extended warmup session.

Football players not only don’t practise at all on game days, most don’t even practise the day before a game. Teams used to do a light “walk-through” the day before games, but most visiting teams have done away with that in recent years.

And the “morning shootaround” that used to be a staple in the NBA — just like the morning skate in the NHL — is on the verge of extinction. Teams all over the league are abandoning the ritual, believing the best thing for fine-tuned athletes early on game days is rest.

Former Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers was among the first to scrap the shootaround back in 2009. He told the New York Times at the time that after studying the science underlying the issue, he concluded waking players on game days in the midst of a gruelling NBA schedule was doing more harm than good.

“You’re talking about our players functioning on five or six hours of sleep a day,” Rivers said, “and that’s just not good enough…

“If you go three, four, five days in a row with less than six hours of sleep, your reaction time is comparable to that of someone legally drunk…You’re trying to play a basketball game where just a 10th of a second, a degree off, throws your whole game off.”

Those are the same reaction times and margins of error required in hockey, of course. And yet, unless a team has played a game the night before, NHL teams continue to haul their players to the rink for game-day morning skates.

And that includes the Jets, who are otherwise big believers in the science of rest and recovery.

Head coach Paul Maurice says he understands the logic and thinking of doing away with the morning skate and he has cancelled more and more of them in recent seasons.

But Maurice says an outright ban of the morning skate is probably not realistic in a league such as the NHL, where the full contact often means many players are too sore to practise the day after a game, leaving the game-day ritual as sometimes the only opportunity teams can skate together as a unit.

“When we’ve tried to do it in the past — get rid of the morning skates — in this schedule your team would almost never be together because there’s always going to be eight or nine guys you can’t put on the ice the night after a game,” he says. “The trainer doesn’t want them on.”

The Jets’ current schedule is a case in point: when the team practises Wednesday, it will be the club’s first full off-day session in exactly 14 days, because of a gruelling November schedule that has them playing 16 games in 29 days, including 10 on the road. The bigger picture is even more daunting — 28 games in 49 days, including six back-to-backs.

“This is unique,” Maurice says. “We’ve never been through this.”

Take away the morning skates, in other words, and one of the youngest teams in the NHL won’t practise at all. How are the kids supposed to learn?

And so the challenge becomes how to find a delicate balance between getting your players just enough practice so they can get better and denying them so much sleep that they get worse.

That’s where Dr. Craig Slaunwhite comes in. The Jets’ director of fitness is the team’s sleep guru and the man Maurice relies on to tell him when the best thing he can do for his charges is to leave them alone.

“So many things in hockey get done because they’ve always been done that way before,” Slaunwhite says. “And now there seems to be a bit of a turning of the corner and people are starting to question why certain things are being done…

“For us, the morning skate is assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

While Slaunwhite says he’s always reluctant to deny athletes sleep, he says there remain tangible benefits to getting players together on a game day. “It’s skill maintenance — guys like to continually feel the puck. And I think there’s also a bit of tactical chemistry that comes with that — guys like to feel comfortable with their linemates,” he says.

“But I’m always pushing for more rest and recovery.”

Slaunwhite also plays a big role in making sure the sleep the Jets players do get is of the highest quality. Players’ sleep patterns have been recorded via wristband trackers. The guys who suffer through fitful nights are identified so that help can be provided.

All of which brings us to the subject of caffeine — basically the last performance-enhancing drug still legal in the NHL.

The coffee urn has long been a fixture in NHL dressing rooms and a big part of many players’ game-day routines has always included slamming down multiple cups of coffee as game time approaches. These days, the coffee pot has also been joined by so-called energy drinks, which create the same caffeinated effects.

The challenge, says Slaunwhite, is figuring out for some players what is the right amount of caffeine to get up on that razor’s edge, but not so much that the player cannot get to sleep after the game.

“If stimulants in their body are making them still stimulated after the game,” he says, “we’ll work backwards from there and try to figure out their dosing leading up to the game and then try to find the smallest effective dose that they can use.”

In the old days, of course, players could rely on a stiff belt after the game — and sometimes many stiff belts — to take the edge off and get to sleep. But those days are mostly long gone in a league in which every player is a well-oiled machine and their bodies are multimillion dollar investments.

Mark Scheifele is perhaps the best example on the Jets of a player who is dedicated to nutrition, fitness and body science on the path to being a better player. He says his program is more than enough to get him up for a game — and then right back down afterward.

“I have a natural energy in my body, so I don’t need any of that artificial stuff,” he says.

And the morning skate? Scheifele says he wouldn’t know any other way. “I think it’s nice to get out of bed and touch the puck in the morning. I like getting some reps in the morning and then shutting it down for a nap. I feel like if you just lie in bed all day, you’re pretty blah by the end of the day.

“So I’m a big advocate of the morning skate.”

For what it’s worth, Rivers also encountered a lot of resistance from his players when he did away with the shootaround. And then the Celtics won 20 of their first 25 games in 2009. “All of them, to a man, said: ‘Wow, it took some getting used to, but I’m fresher. I love it,’” Rivers told the Times.

To sleep, perchance to dream of championships? Aye, there’s the rub.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek