Sutter starts planning for the road trip long before it starts.

"Everything is different when you go on the road so the key is to be prepared," he said. "When I'm preparing for an opponent, I definitely want to see their last few games, definitely their last game. I'm looking for a team's tendencies over their last three games. So, I have our video coordinator, Ike Rhodes, make sure videos of our opponents' last few games are available.

"I'm a coach that looks for tendencies in the other team, so I need to be able to use video at home or on the road. If I know something about our opponent, I can pass it on to our players in talks or in practice. I don't try to overwhelm them with information about our next opponent. I try to identify three of four things that they do that we can work on in practice to be prepared to play them. The game itself is the easy part. It's very much like when I was in school and I had to study for a test. I would study so hard and do so much preparation, along with the worrying, that taking the test was the easy part. After hours and hours of preparation, I'd find myself saying, 'That wasn't so bad.' I just feel better once it's done."

Sutter subscribes to the idea that being on the road and being home each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

"One of the advantages of being on the road is that you don't have the distractions of family and friends," he said. "I find it's a lot easier for players to concentrate on hockey when they are on the road. It's good for the team, too, to spend time together."

Sutter played for the St. Louis Blues during the 1970s when a succession of underfinanced owners kept the team narrowly afloat. He went through some harrowing travel experiences but, being the kind to make lemonade when life hands him lemons, Sutter used them as character builders, occasions to show inner strength.

"Of course, there are problems associated with being on the road and everything doesn't always go as planned," he said. "But what other people see as problems, I see as challenges and sometimes as things to just laugh about. Shortly after I started as coach with the St. Louis Blues we got caught in a snowstorm in Chicago and it looked like O'Hare Airport was going to be closed for a couple of days. (Longtime Blues team official) Susie Mathieu rented us a Greyhound bus to get back to St. Louis. We loaded the bus and pretty quickly discovered the highways were closing down, too. Someone suggested the train so we took that bus to the train station. Four hours later, we were home, safe and sound in St. Louis.

"During my time as a player with the Blues we had a half dozen changes of ownership and most of them struggled to operate the team and keep it in St. Louis. In the days before charters, that led to some interesting flights to get places. One time we had to travel from St. Louis to Montreal. We got on a plane in St. Louis at 9 a.m. that flew us to Chicago. The connecting flight took us to Syracuse where we caught a connecting flight to Newark from where we flew to Montreal, arriving at 8 p.m. We were stuck together on planes and in airports for 11 hours. Nobody told us beforehand."

Clearly, such a situation was no fun for anyone involved in the travel, from the head coach to the lowliest rookie but in that situation, Sutter felt he had to maintain a chipper, "no-problemo" type attitude, for the team's sake.

"I was the captain and I knew if something like that upset me and it showed, it would upset the whole team. My dissatisfaction would have spread to the whole team and affected our play. Our players were under a lot of pressure with the uncertainty regarding ownership and assorted things like the travel problems but we hung together as players. We knew our strength was in ourselves and as a result we became extremely close and our players from that era remain that way to this day."

Sutter has had long enough to identify the sources of trouble and dissension that can hurt a hockey team and travel is one. He takes the same approach to the travel schedule that he does other trouble sources.

Sutter: I can think of other travel horror stories and long, difficult road trips but, truthfully, I have more good stories and good memories.

"It's what you make of it," he said with a soft laugh. "The schedule is like a bad relative: You got it, it's yours, there's no getting away from it. Learn to live with it.

"The main thing about the schedule is that it's going to have some good things and some bad things in it every year and that goes for every team in the League," Sutter said. "You can't change it and all the whining and complaining in the world won't do you any good. Complaining just makes matters worse for you and the people around you.

"For instance, our schedule this year had us play four games in the first two weeks and then 11 games in 19 days," Sutter said. "The key is to be prepared, know what's coming and get your rest when you're going to need it. This League isn't about whether you think this part of the schedule is good or bad. It's about you're not getting paid to be half-assed, you're getting paid to play hard every night."

Sutter is a goal-oriented individual who has succeeded in two different aspects of hockey. He was a three-time All Star during his 12-year career with the Blues and he won the 1991 Jack Adams Award as the NHL's best coach. The travel is a small price to pay for a man still pursuing the Stanley Cup in his fourth decade in the NHL.

"I can think of other travel horror stories and long, difficult road trips but, truthfully, I have more good stories and good memories," Sutter said. "For instance, last night we played Tampa Bay and then we hustled out of there to catch a flight to South Florida to get ready to play the Panthers. When we arrived, after a flight in the middle of the night, a couple of the coaches joined me in my room for a couple of beers while we watched video of the Tampa Bay game that Ike had prepared.

"That's an example of a small group of guys, on the road, not distracted by family and friends, bonded by a love of hockey, a love of what they do, joining together, putting in the time, to help a younger group of players get better," Sutter said. "We have a team that didn't make the playoffs for five years and last year they did. We all have to put in the work to make sure we make the playoffs every year. Everyone connected with the team makes a great commitment but that time we spend together is a lot of fun. The memories of those nights together are everlasting."