Coaches must learn quickly how to help new players adjust after Trade Deadline

The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2024-25 season by former NHL coaches and assistants who turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher.

In this edition, Craig Johnson, a former assistant with the Anaheim Ducks and Ontario of the American Hockey League and development coach with Los Angeles Kings, writes about how coaches help players integrate into their new team after being acquired at the NHL Trade Deadline.

When a team acquires a player before the NHL Trade Deadline, the main objective for the coaching staff is to help the player get comfortable as quickly as possible.

At this point in the season, there are maybe 20 games left, and some teams are battling to qualify for the Stanely Cup Playoffs or improve their positioning. So the quicker the player can get acclimated, the better.

Some teams that decided to rebuild and traded away players might have left their former teammates in shock. It may be the team's top player. It may be someone's best friend.

These teams will be left with around 20 games in a season where there isn't much hope to make the playoffs, but there can be some excitement for the young players or a new player that comes into an organization.

You want to finish the season strong to build confidence going into the next season. For some players, they have to think about it as there are jobs to be won for the following season.

Whether in games or practices, this is a time to show an organization that you can be a full-time NHL player. These games become very important as the last games of the season become a tryout of sorts.

A lot of the initial transition is talking the player through what you do with your systems, such as your forecheck and tracking. He might go into a new power play, so the power-play coach will take him through what the team does on the power play. If the player kills penalties, you'll have to go through that system with him.

You want to avoid system overload though. The player might have so much new to think about, so as a coach you need to just briefly touch on little things. Then you need to figure out what the most important thing is with that particular player.

If it's the way you play defense, if it's the power play, whatever it is, you need to find where that player is going to help you the most and emphasize that area to him. So at first you just let him play, and then you can make little adjustments day by day as you watch his games and you look at his video.

Some players are leaving places where they have homes and they have their family there. For example, Brad Marchand, who was traded from the Boston Bruins to the Florida Panthers, had been in Boston forever. Now you're putting him into a situation with Florida where I'm sure he's going to be really excited about having a chance to win the Stanley Cup.

Marchand's situation is a little different because he's doing rehab from an upper-body injury and won't be playing right away. That gives the coaches some time to sit down with him and go into more details of the team's systems.

But other players are traded and jump into the lineup almost right away with their new teams. Defenseman Carson Soucy was acquired by the New York Rangers in a trade with the Vancouver Canucks on Thursday and made his debut with the Rangers against the Ottawa Senators on Saturday.

Soucy had to travel from Vancouver to join the Rangers and then their coaches had to go through their systems with him. It's important to let the players play, though.

You keep the information brief and then it's, "Go out and play and we're going to help you through this as you go." I don't know what the Rangers did with Soucy, but it worked. He scored a goal in his first game.

As a player, when you come into a new organization you want to impress them in any way you can, whether it's scoring a goal, blocking shots, being physical. You're trying to bring something that you do well and then you take that thing you do well and try to incorporate it into playing the way the team plays.

Whatever it is, you want to show you're engaged and show the guys you care and want to be there.

When the Dallas Stars acquired Mikko Rantanen from the Carolina Hurricanes, they added a player they feel can help them win the Stanley Cup. I'm using Rantanen as an example, but they're going to try to put him in situations where he can be successful. They'll give him the offensive-zone starts and things like that.

If the player can score a goal early, which Rantanen did in his first game with the Stars on Saturday, that's going to give him confidence right away. If he doesn't score right away, the pressure can build and then all of the sudden he's in a situation where he might start squeezing the stick a little bit.

As a player, you need to be yourself. You need to play to your strengths.

When I was traded by the St. Louis Blues to the Los Angeles Kings as part of the deal for Wayne Gretzky in 1996, I remember we had a press conference and I said something like, "If you put us all together, we wouldn't fit into Wayne Gretzky's skates." He's such a great name and an icon and somebody I always looked up to. He was my favorite player as a kid.

But when you go into it, you're not thinking you're replacing Wayne Gretzky because he's just too big to replace. I just went into it as, "I want to play fast. I want to be physical. I want to see if I can contribute right away on the scoreboard."

You're also going from a team in St. Louis that was one of the best teams at the time to a team in Los Angeles that was in a rebuild. But for me, it was an opportunity to play. It was an opportunity to kind of establish myself as an NHL player too.

So for a player like Logan Stankoven, who went to the Hurricanes in the trade for Rantanen, he just needs to continue to play his game. He's not going to be Rantanen, and he can't try to be him. He needs to do what made him successful in Dallas.

He's a young player and Carolina plays an exciting brand of hockey and it's going to fit what he does too.

Whenever a player is traded during the season, it's different because he's going into a situation where he probably doesn't know many people on his new team. You know the names, you played against them, but you don't know them well unless you played with them in the past.

So you're meeting new people, you're meeting the coaches. You're trying to find the way the locker room runs. You're trying to figure out how they play. There's a lot of things that go into it.

Then you're also trying to get comfortable with where you're living. You probably had a house or an apartment that you'd been in for a while and now you're living out of a hotel and you're trying to find accommodations. The player might have a wife. They might have a baby.

So there's a lot of uncertainty that comes with a trade. One thing that helps is the guys already on the team do a good job of welcoming a new player. They'll take him out to eat or invite him to dinner at their house. They're going to go out of their way to help him feel comfortable.

That's just what hockey players do. They've done it from when I was a rookie all the way through.

Hockey is a great community, so when you do come into a new organization, there are going to be people that will help you feel comfortable, the coaches and the players as well.