The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2023-24 season by former NHL coaches and assistants who turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher. In this edition, Davis Payne, former coach of the St. Louis Blues and assistant with the Los Angeles Kings, Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators, writes about how teams that have been eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention utilize the final games of the regular season to set themselves up to improve the following season.
The final week of the regular season can have different purposes for different kinds of teams. For teams that have clinched a berth in the Stanley Cup Playoffs or are still fighting to get in, their focus does not change. They’re forging ahead business as usual.
For the teams eliminated from playoff contention, it’s a real important time of either growth, development or preparation for the following season. As a coaching staff, you’re going to start putting players into situations and minutes that they might not normally get just to see how they fare against top-level competition.
Are you a middle-six forward? Can we put you in a scoring role in the top six that puts you against the other team’s top-four defensemen? And how do you fare?
You’re probably going to play against teams that have clinched and trying to prepare their game for the postseason or teams fighting to get in. So, the competition is fierce and it’s a real good proving ground to see how a young player can survive in that, thrive in that or how they deal with the stumbles.
You want to know the reaction that your player is going to have as sort of a blueprint that you can use working toward next year.
From a team standpoint, you want to see competitive pride. You want to see acceptance of playing a solid team game with good fundamentals, good details, good habits. You want to see guys really understand that every time you put on the jersey that’s the most important game your team is playing.
Being eliminated from playoff contention can be like a breakup. There are a couple days where the harsh reality is that you’re not making it, you’re not getting in. You put in a full season, and a full summer of training and thought process of preparation into it, and there’s a disappointment that should register deep in your guts.
At the same time, that should fuel you toward next season. After 1-2 games, 2-3 days, whatever it is, you’ve got to get over the mourning process because the League is going to come at you and your competitive instincts should come back out of you. So, that needs to show up real fast regardless of how tight of a race you were in, how early you are out or how late you were eliminated.
There are several different growth phases each team is going through. I’ve been on teams when getting into the playoffs and winning the Stanley Cup was the only growth we were concerned about. Then, you have the teams that have pulled back, started over from scratch and built it from the ground up with draft picks and young players.
Those teams that are in the long-term phase of, ‘Yeah, it’s Game 78, but this is just as important in a two-, three- or four-to-six-year plan. It’s tough for players, coaches and fans to go through, but those games are really important building blocks in terms of how you’re going to continue to grow as an organization.
As a coaching staff, you can’t accept anything less than full effort, full competitive play. That detail needs to be driven home from Game 1 to Game 82. There’s no letup in that. It’s not just, “Get these games off the schedule.” They’re important games.
You may have a young player who had a very successful season in the American Hockey League or he’s a college player who graduated or a junior player who turned pro. These are opportunities for them to see how their skills translate to a stronger, bigger and faster level of competition.
A lot of times it’s a real eye-opener to a young player to see…
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