The Game

by Ken Dryden

What practice is not is a time to teach. In Europe, and in U.S. colleges and high schools, teams play fewer games and practice more often. With more days between games, they can vary the tempo of a season to create the right environment for practice. They can use practice for preparation and instruction, to develop team and individual skills. The Canadian tradition is different. We have never learned how to practice. We are told at an early age, and we believe, that only with game competition can we improve. So we play games, three games a week for much of our lives, and, preoccupied with the last game until preoccupied with the next, we have little energy and less attention span for anything else. Only when things go wrong do we interrupt ourselves and focus on specific parts of our game—on power plays, faceoffs, forechecking, breakout patterns. The rest of the time, our conditioning and skills building gradually from seasonal causes, we move through practice less to improve than to sustain what we already have.