We scanned the Ristuccia Arena locker room again to see if we missed him, and the chance to interview him, but his equipment was not in his stall. In rescanning the room, we found that gear was also missing from the stalls of Zdeno Chara, Johnny Boychuk and Derek Morris. It meant they were still on the ice after everyone else was done with practice.
I gave it another minute and then stepped back out to the rink.
There they were, still shooting pucks. Morris and Boychuk were simulating the pass-to-the-point for a quick shot on the near side.
On the far side, Hunwick and Chara worked together with assistant coach Doug Houda and 20 perfectly lined pucks, each evenly spaced out about a foot apart and parallel to the blue line. As though picking apart the drill in the most mathematical way, the three stood talking, pointing and gesturing. Then, Chara stepped up and started shooting the pucks in succession, hitting net, top corner, left side, right side, bottom side, as the rhythmical booming sound of his slappers numbed us into a trance.
“You put in a lot of extra time today,” I said to Chara, mesmerized by the sheer amount of their work, as he was leaving the rink about an hour after this shooting session.
“Have to get better,” he responded in passing.
Better can be little mental tricks, and Morris came up with one. Houda held his stick out on the backside of the players as they shot the pucks in succession. Upon inquiring to Morris, he explained, “It’s to shorten the backswing.” Houda’s stick was making them aware of just how high they were going with their backswing.
Think about it. There’s a split-second difference between a full backswing and a half backswing on a slap shot. But hockey is a game of speed, where split seconds can mean the difference between a goal and a blocked shot. A split second can give the opposing team time to position a stick, position their bodies, just enough to prevent that point shot from getting through.
“We were asking why a lot of our shots weren’t getting through,” Morris continued. “It could be a combination of things. This could help, who knows, could be just mental, but I think it helps.”
But don’t you lose power when you take away that upper half of the backswing?
“Well, if you think about it, this is where your power comes from,” he said as he brought his arms down in a shot motion, stopping when the elbow approached the rib cage. “Here, right?”
Morris then explained that if that’s where the power comes from, why not get to it quicker than risk losing the split second time by winding all the way up.
Fittingly, it was Morris’ two shots from the point (one a shot, one a fake shot) that led to the two late goals to tie the game in Ottawa on Saturday. His ability to aim his shots from the point has been heralded since his arrival, which apparently comes from an instinct to look up and survey the objects between the point and the net (bodies or sticks) before releasing. But ask Morris about it and he doesn’t take much credit.
“Well, Bergie gave me a great pass. It was flat,” he said in talking about the Bruins’ game-tying goal, in which Patrice Bergeron picked up the assist. “When the puck is bouncing, you look down and try to settle it, and then you might not have time to look up. But when it’s flat, you can just look up and see what’s there.”
Then he went on to exuberantly describe how he fake shot the puck to David Krejci, before Krejci finished off the play by skillfully angling his stick to put the puck in the net — a display of pure talent. Morris put his hands up again, simulating the shot and angle Krejci took, motioning how difficult of a shot that was.
It’s natural for many players to have photographic (or rather, “videographic”) memories of what occurred on the ice, but Morris seems to be particularly tuned in to the details — a vision that is certainly welcomed on the team, and this day in practice.
“It’s probably just mental,” he added with a smile while talking about that short backswing and if it’s actually effective. “But I think it works.”
