Brylin's Warmup Routine: 'Some People Thought I Was Crazy' | STALL MATES

Sergei Brylin spent many years sitting in the Devils locker room.
As a player, Brylin, affectionately known as Sarge, spent 13 seasons, and all together, now as an assistant coach, he's approaching 30 years with the club.
He doesn't consider himself superstitious, mostly just a routined guy when it came to getting ready for games and practice, but around him he certainly saw a few oddities.
"Jeff Friesen sat right next to me, and he used to cover his legs, like from the hip all the way down to his ankles with some sort of, some kind of oil type thing. It was yellow. That was a little too extreme for me."
Brylin would also be privy to watching Friesen change his skates, a new pair for each game, which was completely different than anything he had ever done himself.
"I had two skates a year, plus the playoffs."
Brylin did have his own routine, where if you asked others 'some people thought I was crazy,' he quipped.

"I used to go really hard, that was my thing," he shared of his pre-game routine. "I wanted to be ready right from the first drop of the puck. Maybe now looking back at it, you know, maybe it was a little too much."
A little too much? Maybe in retrospect, but it certainly didn't hold him back in any capacity, one of the few players to win all three Cups in franchise history, he played 765 games, scored 308 points, and in the final four years of his playing career in the NHL, he played in all 82 games.
But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.
"Looking back at it, you know, maybe (it was) a little too much. But obviously, when you get older and you look at some of those things, you probably say 'Hey, this is, if I do it over again, maybe I'll do it differently. I mean, at least I was trying to be ready."
Now, Brylin spends little time in the Devils locker room, he passes through but firmly believes that 'it's their locker room, it belongs to them,' he said of the current crop of Devils players, but he does suspect the dynamics are similar to that of when he was a player.
"We try to give players their space, it's their room, it belongs to them. But I hope it's still the same, the leaders should be talking before the game, between the periods changer periods."
One thing he doesn't need to be in the room to notice and is certainly different than his playing days…
"Music. Definitely, music," he said, "Some of the stuff that I listen to, we as coaches keep the doors closed sometimes because it's impossible!"