Last year, Jeff Gorton warned that he would “think differently” (” think outside the box ”) in the search for its managing director. Which he did by poaching a players’ agent to lead his team, then a head coach who had only managed teenagers until then.
Posted yesterday at 8:31 p.m.
It seems that the philosophy will also apply to player development. We’ve seen it since the beginning of the camp, with the many sessions led by the director of hockey development, Adam Nicholas. By the energy he deploys, by the exercises he organizes between the lines he draws with a pencil on the ice rink, his approach seems to be different from what we are used to.
The same can be said of his speech. On Thursday, Nicholas and the entire Player and Skills Development team met with the media. Of the six people in hockey, it was Nicholas who stole the show, with remarks that we could have heard from the mouth of Charles Tisseyre on a Sunday evening in Discovery.
“The meaning of hockey is built through the environment, he launched, from the outset. If you want to know this environment, you have to practice in the jungle, not just at the zoo. When we see players on social networks posting exercise videos, they are at the zoo. It’s good for some things.
But we have to combine that with a knowledge of the environment. The brain works with signals, readings. The only way to do this is to build environments that allow these readings to be reproduced. The brain then remembers things, and when the brain understands the environment, the body moves better. You have to match the environment to the movement.
Adam Nicholas, director of hockey development for the Canadiens
Nicholas’ 25-minute press briefing was filled with fascinating explanations of the genre. The fans of coaching can watch the full story here.
A message to pass on
Nicholas’s remarks clashed with what we usually hear from hockey coaches. That said, a locker room is full of players with different personalities, different backgrounds, who have learned from coaches of different styles.
How can Nicholas reach the players with his methods, without sounding like a mad scientist?
“I don’t use such jargon with the players. It’s just what I learned, but then I have to phrase it differently to make sense to them,” he warned.
However, we guess that with colorful examples, the message gets across better. “I love golf. When I go to the practice green, I’m a superstar, I play like a zero handicap golfer. But once in the field, it’s different. It must be executed and remembered. That’s what I tell the players: the idea is not to make 20 one-timers in a row. But are you ready, cognitively, to do it when the opportunity arises? »
More resources
When Marc Bergevin took over in 2012, he hired Patrice Brisebois and Martin Lapointe in player development. Two former NHLers, relatively young retirees. Francis Bouillon and Rob Ramage would later replace them, but this mandate remained the business of two men, again two former NHLers.
Thursday’s press briefing clashed with the former administration. The exercise had to be done in two stages because there were six of them sharing the podium: Nicholas, Scott Pellerin (new hockey development consultant), as well as Nick Carrière, Marie-Philip Poulin and the aforementioned Ramage and Bouillon . Of the four new resources, only Pellerin is an NHL veteran. Poulin arrives with the baggage of women’s hockey and her playing career is not over.
These additional resources are welcome for St-Louis, especially when Nicholas leads training. “As a coach, when you’re always the one with the whistle, it’s harder to teach and give feedback to the players,” he explained to the media present in Brossard on Thursday morning.
“Adam is very smart about building drills into our concepts. For the coach, it’s fun to look at it from a more distant perspective, because you can reach more players, you can give them more feedback. It’s a big plus. »
Player development was a blind spot of the Bergevin administration. With 38 players selected in the last four drafts, the Habs are entering a crucial phase for the future, and this department must necessarily perform better.
We do not yet know if the approach of Kent Hughes and Jeff Gorton will be the right one. But we cannot accuse them of having been sparing on resources. Or for not having tried innovative methods.