A few thoughts as the NHL crosses the halfway mark.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the young, improving Oilers are about to learn on a nightly basis.
Todd McLellan, the Oilers head coach, has likened the team’s locker room to a classroom, one with attentive pupils.
It’s a good thing, too, because things are about to take a turn for the intense as the NHL season swings into the second half.
First up were the Tampa Bay Lightning, a Stanley Cup finalist last spring, but just another .500 hockey club scuffling for points and a place in the playoff fold this go-round.
“We’ve got to get back in the picture here,” said Lightning associate coach Rick Bowness. “We can’t fall any further behind than we are right now.”
As the puck dropped Friday night, Tampa was under the playoff cut line in the Eastern Conference, a team in search of its game.
“There’s half a season to go and we’re on the outside, looking in,” said heart-and-soul forward Ryan Callahan. “It’s desperation time now and we have to realize that.”
Callahan said the remedy to the Lightning’s woes was not terribly mysterious: application of hard work in the video room and on the ice, rebuilding the team’s collective confidence by stringing some victories together, that sort of thing.
Easy to say; not so simple to do, especially halfway into a mediocre season.
“The biggest thing is that we have the team to do it,” Callahan said. “We have the time to correct it and it has to be done.”
Corrections of that sort will happen, if they do, against teams like the Oilers, who will get a double dose of the Florida teams over the next 10 days.
The Florida Panthers, who hit the weekend on an 11-game winning streak, are the hottest team in hockey and looking to pad their lead atop the Atlantic Division.
But as the NHL season turns for home, every team the Oilers face will have dialled up the intensity. Sounds like a dandy teaching environment for McLellan and the Oilers, if you ask me. We are about to find out.
One lesson not lost on anyone who spends much time around the NHL is that the cavalry charge to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs is fuelled by a recognition that winning the prize is so hard to do.
Bowness, Tampa Bay head coach Jon Cooper’s second-in-command, is a hockey lifer from Moncton, N.B., who has been in and around the NHL or its minor league affiliates since he was drafted 26th overall by the then Atlanta Flames in the 1975 entry draft.
He was strictly a marginal player, so Bowness segued toward coaching while still playing in the Winnipeg Jets organization.
He began his NHL coaching career in 1985-85 with the Jets and has worked for Boston, Ottawa, the New York Islanders, the Arizona Coyotes and Vancouver, and now is in his third season with the Lightning.
He never got close to the Stanley Cup finals as a player. As a coach, he has made it to the finals twice: with the Vancouver Canucks in 2011, when they lost in Game 7 to Boston; and last season, when the Chicago Blackhawks won the Cup in six games.
Bowness, who turns 61 on Jan. 25, was asked how he has managed that disappointment.
“Oh, it’s devastating,” Bowness said. “Hey, I’m still upset over our loss to the Bruins in 2011.
“It stays with you forever, because when you’re that close, it’s unreal. You pay such a price to get there . . . and then you walk away.”
In Bowness’s case, he has twice walked away disappointed, albeit laden with rich memories. Just not lugging the Cup nearly 41 years into a distinguished hockey career.
“Anyways, we’ll get there,” Bowness said, ever the optimist.
Given the hockey journey he has travelled, it will be quite a story when Bowness does get there.
Speaking of great stories, Journal freelancer Jason Hills delivered one Friday that touched a lot of hearts. His story about Alex McFarlane, a 16-year-old honours student at Ross Sheppard High School, described how McFarlane, whose family could not afford to enrol him in minor hockey, saved the money he earned working at McDonald’s, got some help from an uncle, who gave him some old hockey equipment, so he could get started in his teens.
The story resonated with hockey people all over the place. An Oilers season ticket holder who now lives in Florida, called the Journal sports department, offering his tickets to young McFarlane could attend his first Oilers game.
That was just the first of many such generous gestures of support for the young man.
It was a lovely story about an exceptional young man, a reminder of what the game of hockey, and sport, can be about. Beautiful.
