FEATURE: Carrick Reconnects to Game During NHL Pause

Connor Carrick has made two new friends during the current NHL pause.

11-year-old Drew and 13-year-old Joe.

They're neighbors who live in Carrick's Chicago-area home, where Connor and his wife Lexi are spending their time during the NHL pause.

Like many NHL players, Carrick invested in a pair of rollerblades to help recreate the feeling of skating. While it will never entirely duplicate it, it's an effort to help keep the body's tissues stretched, using them in the same general motion as skating. Carrick says the only way he will know if it really does help is when he is once again able to touch blades to ice. But until then, it's brought a little something extra to his time away from the game.

Regularly he straps on the rollerblades and heads down his street. On one occasion, he was stopped by a woman who opened up a conversation.

"It's a cul-de-sac area, so it's a turnaround," he said. "I would go rollerblade in this area. And one day there was this mom walking a dog and from a very good distance she yelled over to me and asked, 'what's your name, who are you, what do you do,'… There's not a lot of people coming down our block rollerblading every day, so there's clearly a reason that you're engaging in this. And I said I am a professional athlete, I play ice hockey, I play for the Devils. And she goes, 'Yeah, I thought so' and mentioned she had a young son that played. And she's like, you know, do you mind if he comes out and passes with you at some point."

"I see no harm in that," Carrick continued telling the story. "So, the kid came out from 20 yards away know passed a puck around and his friend that lives two doors down was there."

Those boys are Drew and Joe who have had at least four sessions since their first encounter and Carrick said that the boys are 'improving' their skills. The young men are probably over the moon, spending part of their social isolation working alongside an NHL hockey player, but it has also become a valuable experience for Carrick himself.

It's giving the 25-year-old an opportunity to reconnect with the game, and himself on a different level.

"The techniques that I would use as a kid, just going outside and pretending 5-4-3-2-1, shoot the winning shot," he recalled, "that's what my career was really built off of. It wasn't built off three sets of 10 in the gym or, super structured practices, as worthwhile as they are at the pro level."

"It's put me back in touch with the 12-year-old [in me]," Carrick reflected, "that had this big dream to play in the NHL and it has brought some beauty to it that otherwise, mid-season, you're just [mad you're] off the off powerplay last night, or you're happy… You're just more stuck in the moment. But for me a lot of it's been really rewarding to have this distanced view from the game, and really to miss it, like for an extended period of time. It has rekindled some of that fire, because I've had a tough couple of years career wise."

Carrick had played in 29 game for New Jersey prior to the pause but had become more of a regular since the calendar his January 2020. He's felt good about his game, and like the rest of his teammates, is anxious to get back out on to the ice, but knows it has to be at the right time. =

"Gosh, it feels so far away, you know, trying to even put that hat on and remember what it was like, where we're at," Carrick said when asked to comment on how the Devils were playing heading into the pause. All he can control is how to best be ready, ready for the moment when the league may pick up again, a slice of normalcy returning to everyday life. A slice, because there is so much that will be different, but the game will feel so very familiar.

"I know what I felt like before there's a frustration just knowing that I felt better on the ice before and now my games on at the same level this is a person you always think you want to be growing as a player. But just with everything that's gone out there in the world I think I would simply. I really would hope, I would feel nervous for a moment, be really excited to play from every second thereafter."

The importance for Carrick is to make sure that he's using this time the most effective way possible. Preparing for a potential return to play, but also understanding that what is currently being experienced by the world, life continues to move forward, although manifested differently.

"I guess what I've tried to maintain is what's been the most sobering for me anyway," he reflected, "It's trying to remember what was true. Yesterday, pre-COVID, what did I know to be a fact about how I wanted to operate? What do I know to be true today? And what do I know be true tomorrow? There's more similarity of that than there's a difference. So, for me, thrilled to get back. I'd be excited, I'd be nervous. I feel as prepared the best with the resources I have in hand, I've been really proud of my effort. But at the same time, I'm not going to make it feel like an 'if then' deal with my well-being, I'm not going to say 'if we come back, then my life will resume,' because, you know, we all know right now it's a sense that we don't know what the future holds."

So, until then, when there is a better sense of what the future will hold, Carrick will continue to zip around on his rollerblades, and Drew and Joe will probably look for him out their windows. They've got plenty of questions to ask the NHL player, and Carrick is happy to answer.

"It's funny because the conversation will go from like the mechanics of a backhand, to the kid watching my YouTube video last night and saying he loved it, to they still can't believe I play with Jack Hughes," he laughed. "I don't know why they can't believe it, we play on the same team! They don't, I don't know how that's interesting. You know, it's what we talked about it every time."