Presented with a hypothetical situation of the same activity occuring in an NHL locker room, the veteran defenseman insisted he could not predict how he would react, Ference said Friday on Dennis and Callahan.
“What exactly would happen if you went into the locker room for some repairs in the middle of a period and found some teammates in there drinking beer and eating fried chicken and playing video games?” John Dennis asked Ference, who was selected to share captain’s duties with Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron this season.
“It’s a completely different culture,” Ference said. “Having the same trainers work for us and work for baseball, you hear about the differences in the sports’ cultures.”
“It’s just a different sport,” he added. “It’s a completely different mind-set.”
Dennis wondered if the Bruins would enforce their leadership physically.
“Is it safe to say there’d be some rolling around on the carpet if you saw teammates doing that?” Dennis asked.
“Well, no,” Ference responded. “They just wouldn’t be there. … After the game, maybe. It just wouldn’t happen [during the game].”
He maintained that he could not guess what he would do, because the Bruins have strict guidelines for players who are not playing.
“We have a pretty firm rule,” Ference said. “If you’re not playing, if you’re … a healthy scratch, you spend the first period working out with our strength coach, ride the bike, do our weight program. If you’re injured, you’re doing that on top of getting treatment from the trainers. For the second and third period, you’re expected to be up on the press level and you watch the game from the ninth floor. That’s just what you do. … That’s just the way it is.”
Listen to the full interview below (the conversation about the Red Sox begins shortly after the 10-minute mark).
