When Pascal Vincent was the head coach of Winnipeg’s AHL team in Manitoba, whenever a player was called up, he’d give the usual congratulations and exhortations to his player.
The phrase “play your game” likely came up a time or two, but Vincent also had a little extra instruction to bestow as he saw his young charges move up the ranks.
“The years I was coaching in the American League, I would talk to the player when he’s being called up,” Vincent said recently. “I said, ‘Hey, you might play eight minutes (per night in the NHL). You’re used to playing 20 minutes. Make your eight minutes count. If the coach doesn’t see you on the ice, you’re doing something wrong. He needs to see you. You have to do something, whether it’s a hit, it’s a shot, it’s a track, it’s a stick battle, it’s running your routes. You have to make it count.’”
Now Vincent has the shoe on the other foot a little bit, serving as the head coach of the Blue Jackets, and he’s the one the players are hoping to impress when they come up from the AHL level.
As you may have noticed, that’s become a trend lately for the Blue Jackets, who have been forced by injury of late to call up five of Cleveland’s top six point scorers this season in captain Brendan Gaunce, all-time franchise leading scorer Trey Fix-Wolansky, dependable two-way player Carson Meyer, solid rookie Mikael Pyyhtia and top defenseman Jake Christiansen. (Fix-Wolansky was returned to Cleveland on Sunday.)
Those players all have been hoping to get the call and show what they can do at the NHL level, but when they arrive, things are a bit of a paradox. While their immediate reaction is to try to play the same style of game that led them to success at the AHL level, they’re also being used in much different ways in the NHL.
Such players as Fix-Wolansky and Meyer might have been 20-minute-per-night, all-situation players in Cleveland, but their ice-time averages are 11:27 and 11:12 with the Blue Jackets, respectively. Boone Jenner and Johnny Gaudreau already are Columbus’ versions of Fix-Wolansky and Meyer, taking up big minutes and jumping over the boards to play at even strength, on the power play and on the penalty kill.
It's just another one of the adjustments the young players have to make as they try to show they belong at the NHL level.
“I think it’s just finding a way to impact the game in different ways,” Fix-Wolansky said when asked about the transition. “Obviously being kind of the main guy in Cleveland, I get a lot of power-play time, 5-on-3, 4-on-4, that kind of stuff – every situation up there. That’s not how it is up here right now.
“I’m just trying to find different ways to impact the game, whether that be on the forecheck or playing a sound defensive game. I think just playing a full, rounded-out game for 60 minutes or however many minutes I play in that game, that’s most important to me.”
If there’s one advantage to the situation, though, it’s that those recent call-ups should have a little extra energy to attack games. When your ice time goes from 20 minutes per night to 12, for example, the legs don’t have to be monitored quite as much during the course of a game.
“I have to pick my spots to (attack the game) when I’m in Cleveland because it’s not sustainable (to go all-out) for the amount of ice time that the staff gives me there,” Meyer said. “Here, I can just fully focus on that. That part of it is nice. Just try to keep the pedal to the metal all game.”
So far, those young Jackets are still adjusting to the game and are yet to make too big of an impact on the score sheet, though Meyer did score his first goal of the season late in the Jackets’ loss Saturday to Vegas.
For Vincent, though, seeing the young players go through the ups and downs of moving up a level is all part of the deal.
“Most young men at that age, they have to go through the AHL, and it's the right thing to do and earn their call-up,” he said. “Once they're being called up, most likely won't play in the same role, and the guys that have a chance that establish themselves are the ones that are adjusting, and we want to see that, too.
“We want to see, ‘Is he playing the same style, or is he adjusting? Is he trying to manage the game?’ I'm thinking about a guy like Ben Chiarot, the defenseman for Detroit. He's a veteran now. I had him in Winnipeg. I worked with Benny for quite some years, and this guy started in the East Coast, played in the East Coast, played in the American League for our team in St. John’s, now plays in the NHL.
“When he came to the NHL he never looked back, but every step of the way he was able (to adjust). He was more of an offensive guy or creating offence, and then he had to become a two-way kind of defenseman, focus on his defense, and now he's a top-pairing defenseman in the NHL.”
That’s a path someone like Christiansen would like to follow, especially as someone who has spent most of the last four seasons at the AHL level. He’s put in the work to round out his game, and now he’s in his third season of receiving NHL minutes.
He knows at the NHL level that he’s not going to play quite as much yet as he did in the minors, and Christiansen said that can’t impact the way he approaches each game.
“It shouldn’t,” Christiansen said. “You maybe have to be just more dialed in on the bench and try to stay in it when there’s power plays and penalty kills and try as best you can to keep laying your game. Those are things you can’t control. You just have to stay focused and stay in it and try to do as much as you can to keep playing the same.”
