The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2023-24 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, Paul MacLean, former coach of the Ottawa Senators and assistant with the Anaheim Ducks, Detroit Red Wings, Columbus Blue Jackets and Toronto Maple Leafs, looks at how coaches deal with extended winning streaks such as the one put together by the Edmonton Oilers, winning 16 in a row before losing at the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday.
It all starts in training camp and trying to establish how your team is going to play and the identity of the team.
From there, you try to monitor the things you are doing when you are playing well and the things that you’re doing when you’re playing bad. You always want to see what things in your game you’re doing well, and you want to continue to keep doing those things well.
You look at that stuff every day and when you get into a streak, good or bad, it’s always a ton of work to make sure you get out of it when it’s going bad and keep it going when things are good.
Of course, everyone wants to go on a winning streak of 15 or 16 games in April and May, that’s what everyone is shooting for, that’s the target date for everything to come together.
Keeping things going on a daily basis is difficult when you’re losing in the National Hockey League. Losing puts so much pressure on your team, but you would be amazed how much pressure gets on a team when they get to that 10th win, 11th win, 12th win in a row.
We had some teams in Detroit that got to those bigger numbers, and it becomes just as pressure-packed to maintain that excellence of play, pace of play and continue that streak.
It takes a ton of preparation and attention to detail. The coaches have to make sure the players are paying attention to what’s going on and how they have to do things, and at the same time, putting responsibilities on the players; they’re the ones that have to decide the way they have to do things to keep it going.
You have to be able to evaluate your team and be very good at self-evaluation with your group and see what’s going well and what’s going poorly. Are the coaches doing enough? Is the power-play coach doing enough? Is the penalty-kill coach doing enough?
You monitor everything on a daily basis; you try to keep bailing the water out so it doesn’t go under and you’re trying to keep it afloat. Sometimes you have back pumps and sometimes you just have a tin bucket.
You’re trying to make sure things are going in the right direction and it’s hard to do, you have 23 players, 15 staff, medical staff, equipment staff, coaching staff, a lot of things have to be looked after and attended to and it’s a big responsibility of the head coach. You can’t pass it off to someone else, because eventually, at the end of the day, when they hire and fire guys it’s the head coach that’s the guy that goes.
The responsibility is yours, so you really want to make sure you’re on top of things, make sure you’re not allowing yourself to fall into the trap where you think you have to wear the same shirt and same tie and the same suit to try and keep things going.
You might have superstitions and your staff and players might have superstitions to try and keep things going. The old saying is that “You’re never as bad as your team seems coming out of a losing streak and at the end of a winning streak, you never were as good as you were during it.”
When you’re winning it does wear on you, it takes a lot of work, preparation and attention to detail to stay on top of these things and make sure you keep on winning. Monitoring that situation is difficult and the schedule really has a lot to do with it.
The schedule gets pretty packed after January and it can be a really heavy mental workload for everyone.
Practice is a really important part of maintaining a winning streak and being able to get out of losing streak. Having the ability to practice as a group and have conversations away from the stress of games.
You don’t want to get away from those practice days, but at the same time, when you’re on a steak, you have to make sure you monitor the health of your team and make sure you’re playing more games when you’re in the green-light area than you are in the yellow-light area and you really don’t want to be playing games when you’re in the red-light areas as far as conditioning is concerned.
You are monitoring things and when it’s going good it’s easy to say, “We don’t have to work on that today,” but practice is a really important part of keeping things going.
