Tradition continues to trump science

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This article was published 16/03/2017 (3162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — The high-flying Columbus Blue Jackets no longer use them. The defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins have mostly done away with them.

And at least eight other NHL teams have now either completely eliminated or rendered optional that uniquely anachronistic hockey institution: the game-day “morning skate.”

So why, if so many teams — including some of the league’s most successful — have decided to stop dragging players out of their warm beds on game days are the Winnipeg Jets still holding morning skates on most of the days they play?

It’s a question I couldn’t help but wonder about — yet again — Thursday morning as I watched the Jets skate around in circles in an empty Barclays Center for reasons that seem to have at least as much to do with superstition and tradition as anything performance-related.

Tell me if this makes sense to you:

On a day the Jets were to play the New York Islanders at 7 p.m. local time, they dragged their players out of their beds in Manhattan, put them on a bus to Brooklyn, skated them for a half-hour or so beginning at 10:30 a.m. and then put them back on the bus and took them back to Manhattan — only to then repeat the whole journey again five hours later for the game.

If that makes no sense to you, you’re not the only one. There’s all kinds of sleep scientists who agree, too.

I’ve written on this issue several times in the past, so there’s no point in detailing once again the overwhelming scientific evidence that strongly suggests whatever perceived benefits NHL teams and players think they’re getting from such gameday skates is nothing compared to the benefits of simply sleeping in.

Just know this: a landmark study of U.S. college basketball players by researchers at Stanford University in 2011 found players who slept in on game days had quicker reaction times, faster sprint times and shot 10 per cent more accurately than players who took part in the morning “shootaround,” basketball’s equivalent of the morning skate.

Little wonder most NBA teams have done away with the game-day shootaround or why the morning skate seems to be going just as extinct in NHL hockey.

So I ask again: why in a season in which the Winnipeg Jets have had an unusually gruelling schedule (at one point last fall they even had the most gruelling schedule in hockey history) does this underperforming hockey team continue to drag its players out of bed on game days?

Jets head coach Paul Maurice gave me the same answer this week he gave me last fall when I first broached this question: that it is precisely because the Jets have had such a difficult schedule that they need the morning skate, as counterintuitive as that sounds.

“I’m not a huge fan of the morning skate, personally,” Maurice said this week, “but so much of it is driven by your schedule and are you skating on off days.

“So when you look at Columbus, they had a really, really light schedule earlier in the year, so they were practising every day, which means the morning skate has very little value.

“When you look at our schedule, we’re still in these continuing blocks of four (games) in six (days) and five (games) in eight (days). That’s almost the way our season has gone… Now if we had a more even schedule, we would much rather practise (on off-days) and not have a morning skate. But our schedule hasn’t really looked like that at any point this year.”

All of that is, of course, true.

But it’s also true a team playing a gruelling schedule such as that is also exactly the kind of team with players who would most benefit from some extra sleep.

Here’s the rub: it’s the players themselves who are some of the biggest believers in the morning skate.

While pro hockey players like sleeping in as much as the rest of us, they are also a famously superstitious bunch who are loathe to change anything in their routine, lest they risk offending the hockey gods.

One of the most superstitious of them all is Jets centre Mark Scheifele.

(Have you seen the routine he does where he attempts to wait out every player on the ice during the pre-game warm-up?)

When I asked Scheifele this week about the league trending away from morning skates, he made it clear it will be over his dead (tired) body.

“I like the morning skate and it’s something I definitely build into my routine,” said Scheifele, suggesting he’d make his own personal morning skate if the Jets suddenly did away with the event.

“I’d probably still skate,” he said. “I’d definitely get on the ice for sure. It’s something I like on a game day and something I’d continue.”

If present trends continue, Scheifele might soon have to start booking his own ice time in every NHL city he visits.

But for the moment, he’s part of a team that continues to believe a tradition born in the hard-drinking 1970s as a way for coaches to keep players accountable the morning after still has a place today when overwhelming research suggests sometimes the best thing you can do for your team is absolutely nothing at all.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek