Hockey N Heels recap
Beth and I got to the arena last Monday and ended up waiting in line for an hour, which brought back many memories/flashbacks. We did get to watch two girls in a Poulin Hawks jersey and an old Lemieux Pens jersey get majorly side-eyed, though. Once we got in everyone was divided up via colored wristbands, and we headed straight to the bar. The fact that the drinks line was before the food line, plus the heavy hand of the bartender, meant that we were perhaps not fully sober at the start of the first event. I think this worked out though, because it meant we did not mind looking like fools.
On-Ice Activities:
Our first event was the stuff on ice level - learning to shoot a puck, playing ball hockey, taking pictures with cardboard cutouts etc. We ignored the ball hockey and the zambonis in order to run up to Sarah Baicker, one of the Flyers beat writers, and make her teach us things. She showed us how to shoot a puck on the ice, which we did with varying degrees of success. In addition to being a beat writer, she's a member of a ladies charity tournament team, the Philly Honor, who were there to demonstrate and instruct on the ice.
Then we wandered off and started goofing around with the cutouts they had sitting on the bench, that you could take pictures with.
Originally they had Claude and Danny at opposite ends of the bench. We of course rectified this.
We climbed into the between-the-benches spot where Pierre McGuire and Steve Coates hang out. It was full of peanut shells and old crab fries. Coatesy is affectionately regarded as being the drunk old uncle of the Flyers organization, so we posed appropriately.
They sounded the goal horn every thirty minutes, to signal that it was time to move on to the next station, and that horn, at ice level in an empty arena might be the loudest sound I've ever heard. I jumped every time.
Virtua Health:
The next event we did was split into 2 parts: half doing a zumba routine and half Q&A with Flyers trainer Jimmy McCrossin. The zumba thing was... over quickly at least, though it did have the one actual use for the ice girls who were wandering around all night, in that they could lead the routine from the group. The Q&A part was super fascinating though. Jimmy McCrossin just seems like a guy who has a so many feelings about fitness and training, and loves talking about them all. Here is a list of things he told us during the 10 minutes or so we got to talk to him.
- They make all the Flyers wear these Zeo sleep headgear that monitor how much sleep they're getting, and how deep of sleep and stuff, and they make each player record their "zeo score". Then they use that to help the team plan better for jet lag and long roadtrips etc. I read an article I think last year that the Canucks do this too, and probably other teams do too.
- They weigh the players before and after every practice, and they can drop 8-10lbs in between just from sweating. Brian Boucher was famous for losing a ton of weight, sometimes 13 or 15lbs. That is so crazy, guys! This is where those crazy slushie machines come in.
- Oh! We asked him where he got that crazy tiger alcohol from 24/7, right? And he said he had a patient he was treating who he wouldn't accept payment from, for whatever reason, so the guy gave it to him as a gift. He described it as a combination of Vicks Vaporub and alcohol, that you're supposed to take medicinally. So now we know!
- The trainers also measure the specific gravity of the players' urine quite often, to check if they're getting dehydrated. Like if a guy comes up to Jimmy and says, "Man, my legs feel heavy and I'm tired," he'll tell him, "Next time you pee, save me a cup."
- They also work with players to help them skate more efficiently, wasting less energy and conserving their joints. Jimmy was super into the biomechanics of skating, and how sports science can be used to help players improve without radically changing their games.
- The Flyers cater dinner after every game, to get food into the players as quickly as possible, to help get their energy back and replenish all their nutrients and stuff. They also have a bunch of extra salt sitting out at every meal, since sodium is the electrolyte players lose the most when they're sweating.
- Beth asked if other teams do pretty much the same kinds of things as the Flyers and McCrossin shook his head emphatically. He said that guys come in from other teams sometimes and look at him like he's crazy when he explains all the stuff they do. Now McCrossin is very much a company man, but he said the Flyers are very focussed on players having a life after hockey, as opposed to some organizations (he didn't name names) who are only concerned with getting the most out of their players now, regardless of how their bodies hold up when they're done.
- Teams are apparently not required to provide much stuff to the visiting team in terms of training equipment etc. Like I think he said it was one stationary bike and not much else. The team doctor will only visit away team players between periods, so if a guy gets injured, McCrossin will do everything he can to fix him up on the bench, so they don't lose him for the whole period. He said he'll only send a guy to the locker room if he's gone through three tubes of Dermabond and a bunch of steristrips, and the referee is like, "Jim, he's bleeding everywhere, he can't come on the ice, bud."
- Someone asked who was in the best shape on the team, and he said other than Jagr, who is in crazy shape for a 40-year-old, it's probably Couturier. He benefits a lot from living with Briere, just as Giroux did last year. He didn't say what methods Briere used on these young things, but they clearly are effective. >:)
-McCrossin also trains the guys who stick around the area in the offseason, and he's really into getting them into stuff like pilates and yoga and various martial arts. So those are some amusing mental images for you to think about.
Women in Sports:
This event was just Lisa Hillary, a CSNPhilly Flyers anchor/reporter, doing a Q&A about anything related to her job, and being a woman reporter etc. A lot of it was dumb "How do I get into this industry" type questions, but we did learn some interesting things.
- Bryz apparently hates her. Last November, when the Coyotes came to town, Derek Morris and Adrien Aucoin said some things about how Bryz was a bad teammate and not a good person to the Phoenix media. Hillary, being a reporter and having a relationship with Derek Morris from covering him on the Flames, took the opportunity to ask Derek if he wanted to elaborate or anything. He said not really, so she asked what specifically about Bryz was so bad and apparently he just responded, "You'll see." So anyway, Bryz apparently saw the news segment that came out of that and the next day when she saw him in the hall and said, "Hey Bryz, how's it going?" he replied with, "I don't know, ask Derek Morris." And he's hated her ever since. So now even though she usually gets to ask first question in every media scrum, she lets other reporters go first with Bryz so his grudge against her doesn't salt the scrum.
- So here's a thing. The NHL Network is moving to Stamford, CT next season and they're going to start collecting video pieces from local stations and air them in longer form. The example she gave was if she does a sit down interview with Jagr, and they talk for a half hour, CSNPhilly may only use 3 minutes of that for a segment, but they can send the whole interview to NHLN, and then they air a much larger part of it. And if every market is doing this, hopefully the NHL Network will get some interesting stuff, and not just 4000 replays of Oil Change.
- Bob's English is apparently totally fine now. His wife teaches Russians to speak English as a profession, so he really has no excuse, and yet he still won't talk to reporters without his interpreter. Lisa is dying (as are we) to get a long sit-down interview with him in English. Tell us your secrets, Bob. She also said that if he was playing more games and still refusing to speak, they would probably ask the NHL to intervene.
- Giroux and JVR are both super nervous in front of the cameras, and will ask for do-overs on questions. Giroux in particular is really self-conscious about his accent and will ask for re-dos, even when she tells him she can understand him just fine.
Hockey 101:
So then we moved on to Hockey 101, which was Ian Laperriere and Steve Coates answering questions about how hockey works. Some of the questions were dumb, like a lady who wanted to complain about her son's hockey coach, but I was actually surprised at how good Coatesy and Lappy were at explaining things. For a guy known for his drunken, incoherent rants on broadcast and an esl guy with very few of his own teeth, they managed to answer most questions to everyone's satisfaction. They clearly know a ton about the game, and are excited to share their knowledge. There were a couple of times where they perhaps knew too much about the game, like when a lady asked them to explain pinching and they stumbled around "it's when the defensemen... pinch in..." a little bit. They had a tv that was playing highlights and there was clearly a guy somewhere controlling it, but they had a real hard time coordinating it to show what they were talking about.
Someone asked them to demonstrate the difference between boarding and crosschecking, so Coatesy had Lappy stand up against the wall and proceeded to check him with an old stick a bunch of times. Then someone wanted to know what a one-timer was and Coatesy got super excited about demonstrating, but they wouldn't let him shoot a puck in the atrium. He was bummed about not getting to try and break things. One lady asked Lappy who he hated the most in the league, from being a fighter and a grinder, and he said Sean Avery, no question. He said when they were teammates and after, he just thought he was a bad teammate and not a good person, and he doesn't care who knows it. lol Sean Avery. Lappy also talked about learning which guys are going to go after your knees every time they're on the ice and then learning to notice when they do take a shift, so you aren't caught unawares. He's been mentoring Zac Rinaldo and teaching him how to "manage" the refs, aka suck up to them so they give you the benefit of the doubt.
Locker Room Tour/ Flyers Wives Q & A:
After that, we went and sat in front of the area where Laviolette gives all his post-game pressers and listened to the wives do a Q&A. It was the wives of all the coaches, the GM and the assistant GM, plus Mrs. Coburn. This was the least interesting Q&A of the evening, at least for me, just because I don't care that much about how the wives have to schedule their lives around the NHL season. Nadine Coburn did talk about how on game days gets about half an hour with Braydon before he goes to the rink and another half an hour after he gets up from his nap, and other than that she doesn't see him. But then she was talking to one of the other wives who was like, "blah blah blah, hubby's playing with the kids" and Nadine was like, "he's not asleep???" so I guess Coburn naps more than most guys. I also laughed when she was talking about Braydon telling her that Zac Rinaldo always eats the exact same thing every game day and she said, "So... now I know more about Zac's pregame routine that I would have thought." They also have a tiny 5-month-old baby and she is very unimpressed when he takes care of her for a couple of hours and then says he's exhausted. Also when he tells her they're out of eggs and she just went shopping the day before. She said, "It's me, Braydon and a five-month-old, and I have to buy the 18-pack of eggs."
Mrs. Holmgren and Mrs. Hanrahan, aka Mrs. GM and AGM, told a story about how the trainer Jimmy McCrossin called Homer while he was in the car to say that one of the guys wasn't going to be able to play in the next game, so Homer called Hanrahan, who was at his son's hockey tournament, who was immediately on the phone with like six guys in Glens Falls trying to find a call up in time.
After that it was time for the locker room tour, where we basically walked down the hall and looked through the doors into every room. The lady in charge of the tour did tell us that the reason the Flyers have those slushie machines is that Chris Pronger really likes slushies, and made the team go out and buy them. Captain Elbows, more like Captain Slushie, amirite?
I drew you an extremely detailed diagram of the layout, for those of you who might find it useful.
The "Captain's Room" where they take off their suits and put on their underarmor. Back in the old Spectrum, they didn't have a separate changing room, so players were always complaining that their suits smelled like lockerroom, aka ball sweat.
The locker room, which was smaller than I had thought. Notice these stalls are set up Briere, Couturier, Jody Shelley, Giroux. Clearly they need the team heavyweight to keep Claude away from his old flame with his new squeeze.
vir tu' Mini Spa:
We skipped this one. Instead, we snuck back down onto the rink and just shot the shit with Sarah Baicker for the last rotation. She was kind of over teaching shooting for the past three hours, so we just hung out on the blue line and chatted. Have some more bullet points:
- She had "appropriated" Matt Read's stick for the evening and let us fool around with it a little. It was so light! And probably cost $300.
- She said that Hartnell is much nicer this year, now that there's no Richards and Carter. I also wonder if it has anything to do with his having a career year and his divorce being another year behind him. But she did say that the locker room was legit much looser this year, whatever the reason.
- She was just about to go to Long Island to cover a game, and was saying that there's only one hotel by the Coliseum, so the media and the team both stay there, which she finds super weird when she goes down to breakfast and finds them all there. She tries very hard to avoid meeting the team in social situations.
- One of her Philly Honor teammates asked her who was the nicest guy on the team and she said that Voracek is surprise really funny, and so is Jagr. Jagr likes to show up for his postgame interviews wearing his weighted vest and ankle weights and then be like, "Guess I should stop wearing these during games, huh?" What a weirdo. But she said there were no jerks on the team this year.
- We were talking about the Wives Q&A and that led to talking about hockey players' dating habits, Sarah's assessment of which was, "Canadians are weird."
- Oh, for people who have curly hair and are jealous of Scott Hartnell's hair, she did ask him one time how he got his hair like that and he just laughed, but she was like, "No, I really want to know!" (She also has curly hair, though she straightens it most days) but he just said, "idk, gel and stuff?". She also told us that his hair even looks that good as soon as he gets out of the shower, then immediately heard what she said and had to clarify that she only knew that in a professional capacity. But she told us she would try and get a better answer out of him, since we all really wanted to know. And sure enough, she tweeted after the Islanders game that Scott Hartnell refused to divulge his hair care regimen, because it's a secret. What we've chosen to take away from this is that he secretly uses some $300 designer product and is embarrassed to admit it.
So that was the evening! Here are two different recap videos, one from CSNPhilly and one from the Flyers website. We definitely show up in the background of a couple of shots.
On-Ice Activities:
Our first event was the stuff on ice level - learning to shoot a puck, playing ball hockey, taking pictures with cardboard cutouts etc. We ignored the ball hockey and the zambonis in order to run up to Sarah Baicker, one of the Flyers beat writers, and make her teach us things. She showed us how to shoot a puck on the ice, which we did with varying degrees of success. In addition to being a beat writer, she's a member of a ladies charity tournament team, the Philly Honor, who were there to demonstrate and instruct on the ice.
Then we wandered off and started goofing around with the cutouts they had sitting on the bench, that you could take pictures with.
Originally they had Claude and Danny at opposite ends of the bench. We of course rectified this.
We climbed into the between-the-benches spot where Pierre McGuire and Steve Coates hang out. It was full of peanut shells and old crab fries. Coatesy is affectionately regarded as being the drunk old uncle of the Flyers organization, so we posed appropriately.
They sounded the goal horn every thirty minutes, to signal that it was time to move on to the next station, and that horn, at ice level in an empty arena might be the loudest sound I've ever heard. I jumped every time.
Virtua Health:
The next event we did was split into 2 parts: half doing a zumba routine and half Q&A with Flyers trainer Jimmy McCrossin. The zumba thing was... over quickly at least, though it did have the one actual use for the ice girls who were wandering around all night, in that they could lead the routine from the group. The Q&A part was super fascinating though. Jimmy McCrossin just seems like a guy who has a so many feelings about fitness and training, and loves talking about them all. Here is a list of things he told us during the 10 minutes or so we got to talk to him.
- They make all the Flyers wear these Zeo sleep headgear that monitor how much sleep they're getting, and how deep of sleep and stuff, and they make each player record their "zeo score". Then they use that to help the team plan better for jet lag and long roadtrips etc. I read an article I think last year that the Canucks do this too, and probably other teams do too.
- They weigh the players before and after every practice, and they can drop 8-10lbs in between just from sweating. Brian Boucher was famous for losing a ton of weight, sometimes 13 or 15lbs. That is so crazy, guys! This is where those crazy slushie machines come in.
- Oh! We asked him where he got that crazy tiger alcohol from 24/7, right? And he said he had a patient he was treating who he wouldn't accept payment from, for whatever reason, so the guy gave it to him as a gift. He described it as a combination of Vicks Vaporub and alcohol, that you're supposed to take medicinally. So now we know!
- The trainers also measure the specific gravity of the players' urine quite often, to check if they're getting dehydrated. Like if a guy comes up to Jimmy and says, "Man, my legs feel heavy and I'm tired," he'll tell him, "Next time you pee, save me a cup."
- They also work with players to help them skate more efficiently, wasting less energy and conserving their joints. Jimmy was super into the biomechanics of skating, and how sports science can be used to help players improve without radically changing their games.
- The Flyers cater dinner after every game, to get food into the players as quickly as possible, to help get their energy back and replenish all their nutrients and stuff. They also have a bunch of extra salt sitting out at every meal, since sodium is the electrolyte players lose the most when they're sweating.
- Beth asked if other teams do pretty much the same kinds of things as the Flyers and McCrossin shook his head emphatically. He said that guys come in from other teams sometimes and look at him like he's crazy when he explains all the stuff they do. Now McCrossin is very much a company man, but he said the Flyers are very focussed on players having a life after hockey, as opposed to some organizations (he didn't name names) who are only concerned with getting the most out of their players now, regardless of how their bodies hold up when they're done.
- Teams are apparently not required to provide much stuff to the visiting team in terms of training equipment etc. Like I think he said it was one stationary bike and not much else. The team doctor will only visit away team players between periods, so if a guy gets injured, McCrossin will do everything he can to fix him up on the bench, so they don't lose him for the whole period. He said he'll only send a guy to the locker room if he's gone through three tubes of Dermabond and a bunch of steristrips, and the referee is like, "Jim, he's bleeding everywhere, he can't come on the ice, bud."
- Someone asked who was in the best shape on the team, and he said other than Jagr, who is in crazy shape for a 40-year-old, it's probably Couturier. He benefits a lot from living with Briere, just as Giroux did last year. He didn't say what methods Briere used on these young things, but they clearly are effective. >:)
-McCrossin also trains the guys who stick around the area in the offseason, and he's really into getting them into stuff like pilates and yoga and various martial arts. So those are some amusing mental images for you to think about.
Women in Sports:
This event was just Lisa Hillary, a CSNPhilly Flyers anchor/reporter, doing a Q&A about anything related to her job, and being a woman reporter etc. A lot of it was dumb "How do I get into this industry" type questions, but we did learn some interesting things.
- Bryz apparently hates her. Last November, when the Coyotes came to town, Derek Morris and Adrien Aucoin said some things about how Bryz was a bad teammate and not a good person to the Phoenix media. Hillary, being a reporter and having a relationship with Derek Morris from covering him on the Flames, took the opportunity to ask Derek if he wanted to elaborate or anything. He said not really, so she asked what specifically about Bryz was so bad and apparently he just responded, "You'll see." So anyway, Bryz apparently saw the news segment that came out of that and the next day when she saw him in the hall and said, "Hey Bryz, how's it going?" he replied with, "I don't know, ask Derek Morris." And he's hated her ever since. So now even though she usually gets to ask first question in every media scrum, she lets other reporters go first with Bryz so his grudge against her doesn't salt the scrum.
- So here's a thing. The NHL Network is moving to Stamford, CT next season and they're going to start collecting video pieces from local stations and air them in longer form. The example she gave was if she does a sit down interview with Jagr, and they talk for a half hour, CSNPhilly may only use 3 minutes of that for a segment, but they can send the whole interview to NHLN, and then they air a much larger part of it. And if every market is doing this, hopefully the NHL Network will get some interesting stuff, and not just 4000 replays of Oil Change.
- Bob's English is apparently totally fine now. His wife teaches Russians to speak English as a profession, so he really has no excuse, and yet he still won't talk to reporters without his interpreter. Lisa is dying (as are we) to get a long sit-down interview with him in English. Tell us your secrets, Bob. She also said that if he was playing more games and still refusing to speak, they would probably ask the NHL to intervene.
- Giroux and JVR are both super nervous in front of the cameras, and will ask for do-overs on questions. Giroux in particular is really self-conscious about his accent and will ask for re-dos, even when she tells him she can understand him just fine.
Hockey 101:
So then we moved on to Hockey 101, which was Ian Laperriere and Steve Coates answering questions about how hockey works. Some of the questions were dumb, like a lady who wanted to complain about her son's hockey coach, but I was actually surprised at how good Coatesy and Lappy were at explaining things. For a guy known for his drunken, incoherent rants on broadcast and an esl guy with very few of his own teeth, they managed to answer most questions to everyone's satisfaction. They clearly know a ton about the game, and are excited to share their knowledge. There were a couple of times where they perhaps knew too much about the game, like when a lady asked them to explain pinching and they stumbled around "it's when the defensemen... pinch in..." a little bit. They had a tv that was playing highlights and there was clearly a guy somewhere controlling it, but they had a real hard time coordinating it to show what they were talking about.
Someone asked them to demonstrate the difference between boarding and crosschecking, so Coatesy had Lappy stand up against the wall and proceeded to check him with an old stick a bunch of times. Then someone wanted to know what a one-timer was and Coatesy got super excited about demonstrating, but they wouldn't let him shoot a puck in the atrium. He was bummed about not getting to try and break things. One lady asked Lappy who he hated the most in the league, from being a fighter and a grinder, and he said Sean Avery, no question. He said when they were teammates and after, he just thought he was a bad teammate and not a good person, and he doesn't care who knows it. lol Sean Avery. Lappy also talked about learning which guys are going to go after your knees every time they're on the ice and then learning to notice when they do take a shift, so you aren't caught unawares. He's been mentoring Zac Rinaldo and teaching him how to "manage" the refs, aka suck up to them so they give you the benefit of the doubt.
Locker Room Tour/ Flyers Wives Q & A:
After that, we went and sat in front of the area where Laviolette gives all his post-game pressers and listened to the wives do a Q&A. It was the wives of all the coaches, the GM and the assistant GM, plus Mrs. Coburn. This was the least interesting Q&A of the evening, at least for me, just because I don't care that much about how the wives have to schedule their lives around the NHL season. Nadine Coburn did talk about how on game days gets about half an hour with Braydon before he goes to the rink and another half an hour after he gets up from his nap, and other than that she doesn't see him. But then she was talking to one of the other wives who was like, "blah blah blah, hubby's playing with the kids" and Nadine was like, "he's not asleep???" so I guess Coburn naps more than most guys. I also laughed when she was talking about Braydon telling her that Zac Rinaldo always eats the exact same thing every game day and she said, "So... now I know more about Zac's pregame routine that I would have thought." They also have a tiny 5-month-old baby and she is very unimpressed when he takes care of her for a couple of hours and then says he's exhausted. Also when he tells her they're out of eggs and she just went shopping the day before. She said, "It's me, Braydon and a five-month-old, and I have to buy the 18-pack of eggs."
Mrs. Holmgren and Mrs. Hanrahan, aka Mrs. GM and AGM, told a story about how the trainer Jimmy McCrossin called Homer while he was in the car to say that one of the guys wasn't going to be able to play in the next game, so Homer called Hanrahan, who was at his son's hockey tournament, who was immediately on the phone with like six guys in Glens Falls trying to find a call up in time.
After that it was time for the locker room tour, where we basically walked down the hall and looked through the doors into every room. The lady in charge of the tour did tell us that the reason the Flyers have those slushie machines is that Chris Pronger really likes slushies, and made the team go out and buy them. Captain Elbows, more like Captain Slushie, amirite?
I drew you an extremely detailed diagram of the layout, for those of you who might find it useful.
The "Captain's Room" where they take off their suits and put on their underarmor. Back in the old Spectrum, they didn't have a separate changing room, so players were always complaining that their suits smelled like lockerroom, aka ball sweat.
The locker room, which was smaller than I had thought. Notice these stalls are set up Briere, Couturier, Jody Shelley, Giroux. Clearly they need the team heavyweight to keep Claude away from his old flame with his new squeeze.
vir tu' Mini Spa:
We skipped this one. Instead, we snuck back down onto the rink and just shot the shit with Sarah Baicker for the last rotation. She was kind of over teaching shooting for the past three hours, so we just hung out on the blue line and chatted. Have some more bullet points:
- She had "appropriated" Matt Read's stick for the evening and let us fool around with it a little. It was so light! And probably cost $300.
- She said that Hartnell is much nicer this year, now that there's no Richards and Carter. I also wonder if it has anything to do with his having a career year and his divorce being another year behind him. But she did say that the locker room was legit much looser this year, whatever the reason.
- She was just about to go to Long Island to cover a game, and was saying that there's only one hotel by the Coliseum, so the media and the team both stay there, which she finds super weird when she goes down to breakfast and finds them all there. She tries very hard to avoid meeting the team in social situations.
- One of her Philly Honor teammates asked her who was the nicest guy on the team and she said that Voracek is surprise really funny, and so is Jagr. Jagr likes to show up for his postgame interviews wearing his weighted vest and ankle weights and then be like, "Guess I should stop wearing these during games, huh?" What a weirdo. But she said there were no jerks on the team this year.
- We were talking about the Wives Q&A and that led to talking about hockey players' dating habits, Sarah's assessment of which was, "Canadians are weird."
- Oh, for people who have curly hair and are jealous of Scott Hartnell's hair, she did ask him one time how he got his hair like that and he just laughed, but she was like, "No, I really want to know!" (She also has curly hair, though she straightens it most days) but he just said, "idk, gel and stuff?". She also told us that his hair even looks that good as soon as he gets out of the shower, then immediately heard what she said and had to clarify that she only knew that in a professional capacity. But she told us she would try and get a better answer out of him, since we all really wanted to know. And sure enough, she tweeted after the Islanders game that Scott Hartnell refused to divulge his hair care regimen, because it's a secret. What we've chosen to take away from this is that he secretly uses some $300 designer product and is embarrassed to admit it.
So that was the evening! Here are two different recap videos, one from CSNPhilly and one from the Flyers website. We definitely show up in the background of a couple of shots.