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Um Haven para o Hockey Malnourished

Os dias os mais frios aquecem melhor meu coração do hockey

As we watched Head Coach Bruce Boudreau put the mostly anonymous Bears through a rigorous skate I had the thought that while there is perhaps less glamour at camp in Hershey there is every bit the drive and passion among the camp invitees and the coaches possessed by their NHL counterparts. Boudreau today looked and sounded like his charges were in the midst of a mid-January losing streak, and he was going to work them out of it. After the morning’s first session Leone asked Boudreau about his bark out on the ice.

“Look, I tell the guys, ’shame on you if you’re not ready to come.’ There’s a lot of money [to be made] in hockey, in the AHL and NHL,” he said.

I wanted to know of the coach who and what he saw in his nearly week on the ice at Kettler Capitals that might have made him excited about the prospects this season for both the Bears and the Caps. He sounded a strong note of pride in his players.

“All my players can help the Capitals,” he claimed. “There’s a reason we’ve gone to the Calder Cup Finals two years in a row. We’ve got good players.”

He then ran off the list of all of last season’s Bears still at Capitals’ camp. “They’re all going to help the Capitals at some point this season,” he said.

There are some similarities between the two training camps, beyond the players who participate in both. Like the Caps, the Bears will have an exceptionally compressed period of practice — just today and tomorrow – before dressing for their first exhibition game Saturday night, at Wilkes Barre/Scranton. And all of the talk from the players strikes the highest possible note of optimism. Leone pointed out to me that at this stage of camp there are a lot of guys present who won’t dress for Hershey on opening night, October 3, and with less than four or five hours of time together on the ice today and tomorrow, Saturday’s game will be tantamount to “a grab bag” of shinny and maybe some mischief. Boudreau will just “throw the guys out there and see what the talent does,” Leone told me.

The media who attended this morning all seemed to want to know how the returning Bears were responding to the dynamic of a Calder Cup Finals failure versus the victory of 2006. Failure, though, is a relative term. Quintin Laing, released by the Caps earlier this week, told the media after today’s 10:00 session, “We wanna keep the bar really high, we want to set [our goals] high. I think we set them higher than other teams.” In Washington this year, he added, “they’re focused to make the playoffs . . . we come down here and our goal is to win the Cup and nothing but.”

Leone and I chatted a bit about pro hockey’s new look in its uniforms. The Bears have yet to reveal their altered threads, but Leone made an observation about the Reebok scheme that I hadn’t considered before. So much attention has been focused on the tightness of the new sweaters, but what really bothers Leone, and I seconded his disgust, was the bizarre piping running vertically on virtually all of them. “The Denver Broncos I think got this started years back,” he observed. I think he’s right, and the look is awful. Seriously faddish.

Louis Robitaille, perhaps the most popular Bear, is back this season, and he’ll have leadership duties that will be new to him as an AHLer: he’s designated a veteran, one of only five allowed per AHL club, by virtue of his amassing more than 260 regular season games among the ‘A,’ the NHL, the IHL, or in Europe. With the media today he talked about mistakes — lapses in judgment — he’d made on the ice in the past, and how with his new status they can’t and won’t be tolerated by the coaching staff. Still, tigers don’t change their stripes. Robitaille’s role is to antagonize, and no altered status is going to change that.

Saturday will be the first of four exhibition games for Hershey this month. The team’s lone home exhibition comes September 30, and seating for fans that night is general admission and just $7. The Bears then have a weird schedule getting out of the gate in the regular season: they open at Wilkes Barre on October 3 but then are off for 10 days until they face Binghamton, also on the road.