Teaser: Muzzin, Gaborik, Brown talk team routines

A very happy Morn O’ Frozen Fury to you, Insiders, and here’s to a safe and free-of-incident drive or flight to Las Vegas.

I’ve been working on a pair of feature articles for the Kings’ yearbook, which will be coming out in the not-too-distant future. You may remember last year’s yearbook, Sweet 16, which delved into the club’s 16 postseason wins from the spring of 2014. There’s some great new content this year in this year’s book, which will feature a behind-closed-doors look at a typical day inside the Kings’ El Segundo practice facility. Andrew D. Bernstein will provide the wonderful, glossy photographs. I’ll send out an alert when that book is available.

As a teaser, here are several interesting quotes from the three players I spoke with in putting my two features together. I wanted a younger (or young-ish) player, an experienced player who joined the club during Darryl Sutter’s tenure, and an weathered veteran who has logged significant miles with the club, and I turned to Jake Muzzin, Marian Gaborik and Dustin Brown. One of the stories will feature the establishment of quality practice habits and routines, and the other story will be a day-long look into the behind-closed-doors life of an NHL player.

Some quotes that I found interesting:

Jake Muzzin, on how much chicken and pasta he eats over the course of a season:
I’m Italian, so I could eat chicken and pasta every day, and I would not get sick of it. We have it lots, 82 games and then playoffs, so over 100 times. That’s fine with me. I grew up on chicken and pasta.

Muzzin, on the challenges of eating healthy:
I think it takes a maturity. I guess it all depends on who the guy is and what their eating habits are. When you go pro, you’re on your own. You may not eat the way a pro should eat. It’s not because you don’t want to, it’s just that some guys don’t even know how or how to cook because their billets and moms have cooked for them their whole life and that’s just the way it is. I was the exact same way. It takes some time to take responsibility and learn that eating healthy is very important and not just going to McDonald’s. The odd time, you can let loose and have a meal or whatever you want but it does help when you’re putting the right food in the body because you are using the body to its max. So you have to treat it right.

Marian Gaborik, on general principles he has in speaking with the media:
You want to obviously answer the questions. You want to be accurate, you want to answer the questions as honest as you know, but obviously there’s some wiggle room that you play with that you don’t share everything, obviously. We’re a team, and most of the guys are guys who have been around for a long time, and obviously every organization – and we do as well – has a team that deals with the media in terms of Krusher (Director, Communications and Media Services Mike Kalinowski) or whomever. They know how to handle it so the guys don’t get too much or too little. They’re good about that.

Gaborik, on what Darryl Sutter is like in the facility, but away from the ice:
He’s cool. He talks to us. Obviously game day, he’s game-on, and he wants us to be game-on and focused on things and when you step onto the rink, it’s all about business on a game day. Practice day, before practice, he can have some fun as well, and then practice, it’s all about business. You have a long year, so it can’t be all serious because you’ll kill each other here. It’s loose at times. Obviously game days, it’s game on.

Dustin Brown, on the utilization of video:
We do a lot of video here. I think as the year goes along, we probably do a little bit less of it. I think a lot of coaches are video-oriented nowadays. I came in with Andy Murray, he was the king of video. It’s one of those things where you try to take what you can get from it. You can learn a lot from it. As players, I think there’s a fine line between enough video to help you, then it gets to a point where you’re sitting in the video room for a long time. It can get you out of a rhythm. It’s just finding that balance.

Brown, on younger players learning from mistakes in video sessions:
I think the one thing that has changed is, since I came in, was a lot of team video. Now it’s readily available and you can go look at your own shifts and diagnose your own game. The other half of that is you have to be willing to look at yourself and critique yourself and be hard on yourself and figure out ways to get better each and every day. That’s where I find, for me personally, team video is generally systems and stuff like that. It’s important, but I think biggest tool for a player nowadays is being able to watch themselves and see their tendencies. Then, once you start collecting lots of data, it becomes very interesting where your chances come from, how you generate chances, why there are games that you don’t generate chances, and then you figure out pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t.