It is a ritual unlike anything else is sports. Fifteen minutes of a 20-man army unified in its movements and initiative. A synchronized orchestration on skates that announces the evening’s novelty of grace, timing, ferocity, and breathtaking skill. It’s sports’ most poignant prelude.
Does hockey have the most alluring and impressive pre-game warm-up in all of sports? Yes — and by a wide margin.
It is an event that ensnares the young especially, but quite often the parent as well, and with a comparable sense of awe and devotion.
We are moths to this flame.
To arrive at the rink in time to see warm-ups is to feel treated to bonus exposure to the planet’s greatest athletes, but also something more: it is to be witness to a highly stylized symphony of sights and sounds, the collective of which is a compelling commercial for hockey’s culture.
Unlike the pre-game routines of others sports, which commonly involve coaches organizing and orchestrating them, unsupervised hockey players appear to know instinctively when, where, and what to do on the ice 30 minutes before each game. They execute their exercises silently, sure of every movement. It is a display of the artist in the athlete, the armored warrior also the theater stage star: movements well-rehearsed, very well synchronized, poignant and powerful, the actors showcasers of sublime skills. There are long-established, well-regimented drills within the warm-up for the team to carry out, but there are as well, detected by the keen eye, isolated, individual exhibitions of other-worldly virtuosity.
Its purpose is to work up a sweat, but in the process it also inspires.
No matter the time of year that hockey is being played at Verizon Center hundreds of fans flock down as close to the rink plexiglass as they can for the 6:30 warm-up by the evening’s teams. Verizon Center, to its credit, has a policy allowing any ticketholder to scurry down low to the venue’s up-close seats to watch the entirety of the pre-game skate. The result is an every-night swarm of admirers hard by the glass, the young in rapture, their elders viewing with young hearts — both united in an appreciation for their dream access.
The players themselves seem to recognize how special a cultural moment in the sport this skate is. For Bobby Hull it was often an opportunity to sign programs clutched and extended out over the glass by boyhood Chicago. (The Golden Age of Hockey, with its lower side glass, allowed for a wonderful accessibility of fan to player.) At around 6:28 each game evening Alexander Ovechkin bolts out of the open gate of the Capitals’ bench like a rodeo bull too long lodged in its pen, seizes a puck before any teammate, and races with it for the warmup’s first wicked wrist shot rifled into the cage. He is, technically, 22 years old in this moment, but in his zeal and glee for the feat he may as well be 13 and in the throes of first-love with hockey.
Football players stretch and in dull assemblies conduct walk-throughs with their position coaches. Basketballers have layup lines (yawn). Baseball players meander through BP, leisurely ground balls, and fungo bat fly balls. But pre-game hockey, any night of the week, offers a Saturday night symphony of spectacular sights and sounds.
There is drama even to the procession of players rifling wrist shots into the unguarded cage in the skate’s opening moments. Which player can with the most precision pick the cage’s top corners? Whose shot carries so much sting that its riccochet returns the puck well out back into the skating slot? In my own warmups as a player I much never minded the misses on the pre-game net so long as they delivered that piercing crack against the plexi-glass; I figured it produced something for the netminder at the other end to think about.
The two teams take pains (most of the time) to respect the half-sheet territoriality of the skate, and this, too, adds an aura to the moment. Montreal’s Claude Lemieux precipitated perhaps the NHL’s most infamous pre-game brawl in the 1987 Eastern Conference finals versus Philadelphia. Lemieux liked to shoot a puck into the opposing net at the end of the warmup skate. The 1980s Flyers (Dave Brown, Rick Tocchet, Craig Berube, Scott Mellanby), as you might imagine, took none too kindly to this habit. On the night in question the Flyers even turned their cage around at the end of the skate to impede Lemieux. He outwaited them and fired away. Before it was all over, there were players brawling out on the ice in their socks and shower sandals.
Always there is a blood-warming soundtrack, too, to the prelude skate — carefully selected, generally hard rockin’ tracks that seem in synch with the high-octane mission ahead. From bantam to beer league to big league, loud rock music is a staple of player warmups. I’ve long meant to solicit from the beer league-ing among our readers their pre-game playlists and see what songs most commonly get cued up. Marilyn Manson a few years back seemed to offer up an anthem for eternity for hockey warm-ups in rinks across the globe:
I don’t want you and I don’t need you/ don’t bother to resist, I’ll beat you/ It’s not your fault that you’re always wrong/ the weak ones are there to justify the strong/ the beautiful people, the beautiful people
Whether I was 7 or 37 I never ceased to appreciate how thoroughly two NHL teams could chew up a 200-by-85 sheet of fresh ice with a mere 15 minutes of fluid labor. At 6:45 their snow-crusted sheet looks identical to the one inhabited for an hour by 200 Saturday public sessions skaters at the community rink.
I suppose my exposure to warm-up skates at old Capital Center was formative: it wasn’t just that I was young then but that the Pringle Chip’s seats were enveloped in such pervasive darkness, and so the shimmering white ice below that greeted the warm-up arrival, with so many players rushing about it helmetless, their era-appropriate long hair fluttering gallantly as their skate blades crunched and smacked pucks hissed, was hero-forming.
Warm-ups have changed a bit since then. They’re shorter now, it seems — 15 minutes instead of about 20. Also, slapshots have all but disappeared from them. I remember well the firing squad along the blueline pelting Al Jensen and Ron Low and Pete Peeters and Don Beaupre. I must have watched a thousand of these slapshots at the old barn before I turned 15, ever awestruck at their velocity and the nano-second of interlude between launches. Perhaps it’s because today’s sticks are so expensive, and the velocity they generate so significant, that slapshots have been removed from the routine. But it may also be the case that slapshots have dissipated greatly in games in general, as the time and space they require have vanquished — so players simply are warming up with the shots they most commonly use in games.
NHLers, all, were themselves at one time the wide-eyed, nose-pressed-against-the-plexi-glassers, and it isn’t uncommon to see players today toss a puck up over the glass or even bestow an underperforming (nonetheless still expensive) stick to a lucky youth at the end of these warm-up minutes. More common are the winks and smiles players perched next to the glass will direct at their young admirers on the other side. Eras change in hockey, but the sport’s elite continue to connect with their core constituents in this special slice of time.
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