With only two pre-season games, neither with their full team, team building in the American Hockey League is akin to building a plane while flying it. There are always going to be new faces in an AHL locker room, but add in the fact that there’s a new head coach and there’s hardly enough time to look at the blueprint before taking off.
It creates a unique challenge for new Rocket head coach Pascal Vincent.
“Whether you focus on [building a team identity] or not, you’re creating something,” Vincent said. “Our purpose is to understand who we are individually and then when you put those pieces together, what does it look like as a team?”
That doesn’t mean that they won’t focus on certain things as a team.
“One thing I’m going to tell you is part of our identity will be that we’ll utilize a big amount of time on details with the stick. I was talking to former players Alex Burrows, Paul Byron, and Scott Pellerin and we all agreed on one thing: If you don’t have a good stick, you can’t play in the NHL,” Vincent said. “And they all want to play in the NHL, all of them.
“What’s a good stick? When do you have two hands, when do you have one hand,” Vincent continued. “How do you place your stick? How do you receive a pass? How you do all of those details, we’re going to pay a lot of attention on it so I think it’s going to become eventually part of our identity. We’ll have good sticks and it makes a huge difference.”
It can take time for everything to come together, and some of that is outside the control of the coach.
“It depends on how quick they understand what we’re trying to do,” Vincent said. “We have concepts and those concepts are supported by the systems, so it’s concepts within the systems that we’re trying to implement like offensive concepts and reading offensively and defensively what we think is going to happen, so playing the odds,” he said.
“Now everything that I just said, it’s all about hockey sense, right? That would be a part of a definition of a hockey sense offensively and defensively. So there’s no good answer to [how long it takes]. It really depends on how they understand. And some guys will understand, but when the game starts, they can’t execute it. They just need repetition and more teaching.”
Wotherspoon brings the experience
Heading into Laval’s season opener, Tyler Wotherspoon had 616 games of AHL experience. The other five defenders (Josh Jacobs, William Trudeau, Logan Mailloux, Chris Jandric, and Adam Engström) had 555 combined.
There’s a reason that Wotherspoon earned a letter on his jersey before the season started, even before he played a single game for the Rocket.
“It’s an honour first and foremost,” Wotherspoon said. “Coming into a new organization, new faces, getting to meet new people, it’s always a little bit of a challenge but everybody’s been here with open arms, been great to me and I hope that I can bring my leadership that I brought over the last couple of years and throughout my career to a younger group of guys.”
Wotherspoon played beside Trudeau to start the year and also gets a good view of Logan Mailloux and Adam Engström.
“Seeing them all through camp and I played against them last year, and even over the first couple of weeks they’ve progressed,” Wotherspoon said. “I think they’ve taken huge steps to mature as defencemen and I’m really excited to see what their future holds. They’ve got bright futures.”
He knows as much as everyone that in the AHL every point matters, and getting off to a good start can be a big help to a team’s playoff chances.
“Points early in the season are huge,” he said. “You really realize once you get down the stretch how important those are. I’ve been a part of teams that you can’t get off the ground early and you’re scratching and clawing to get back so we’re going to hope over the next month or two to really get off to a hot start and establish ourselves in this division.”
Fresh starts for Beck, Engström, a restart for Roy
Joshua Roy didn’t score a point through the team’s first two games, but he’s not worried about that.
“I created a lot of scoring chances,” Roy said. “They didn’t go in but it will come. I’m really focusing on the little details in my game. I want to have more pace in my game, be intense every shift, every game. I have to improve my consistency.”
Vincent noted an adjustment that players need to make when they return to the AHL.
“In the NHL, you’re open and you get the puck on the tape,” Vincent said. “Here it’s not always the case. That adjustment for him, not so much making those actions but receiving those actions. All I care about is do you work hard, do you pay attention, and are you coachable and the answer is yes for all them.”
Adam Engström scored in his first AHL game, and says the biggest adjustment he has to make is to make quicker decisions. With the smaller ice, everything comes quicker and you have less time with the puck.
“You need to make the decision a little bit faster because the checks are coming much faster,” he said. “You need to have your head up and have good shoulder checks to make a good pass.”
Owen Beck is entering his first professional season, but is part of a 2022 Draft Class that includes current linemate Filip Mešár and teammate Adam Engström as well as other players who have been in the organization that he spent time in development camp. Now he’s with those players in games that matter, as they grow together.
“Especially coming from the CHL as opposed to Europe, you come to your first camp and you get to know some of these guys before they’ve turned pro and then you don’t see them for a while,” Beck said. “There’s a year in between so you get to see their development every year and how your development stacks up. Then we come together and we’re always trying to push each other and it’s paying off and it’s cool to see how that translates into team success.”
The Rocket are now preparing for their home opener on Friday against former coach Joël Bouchard and the Syracuse Crunch. Former Crunch forward Alex Barré-Boulet and fellow veteran Gustav Lindström are expected to make their AHL season debuts.