The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2023-24 season by former NHL coaches and assistants who turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher. In this edition, Davis Payne, former coach of the St. Louis Blues and assistant with the Los Angeles Kings, Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators, writes about how coaches get their teams getting into "playoff mode" in the later stages of the regular season.
As teams approach their final 25-30 games of the regular season, you'll hear more coaches talk about being in "playoff mode." That's when teams start to ramp up their game to either get ready for the Stanley Cup Playoffs or make a push to qualify.
Some teams are getting into that mode already.
Most are in one of three groups at this point. There are teams that are solidly in a playoff position, and you want to maintain your spot, or you want to improve for home-ice advantage, or you want to extend some space away from the wild-card conversation. The second group would be the one battling in that wild-card range, from six points behind to maybe six points up.
Then, you've got the group below that, which will need to make a long run to get in, but you're still hanging onto that belief that if you can get a couple runs in your next sets of 10 games, then perhaps can put yourself back into the conversation and get in down the stretch.
The most important part for the top teams is really about style of performance. Are you doing all the right things on both sides of the puck? How hard are you defending? How hard are you attacking with the puck? What type of decision-making do you have with possession plays?
Teams will focus on specific elements of their game and special teams. And you probably are at a point in the season that if you're going to make any structural changes this is probably the time frame that you tweak things and then you stick with them and away you go.
Once you get into the playoffs, your style of play must be locked into the point where you play just as hard with and without the puck, but you also make decisions that give yourself a chance as the game goes on. You're sort of in outlast-your-opponent mode, and that's what playoff hockey gets to be.
Getting to that can be a process. As a coach, you're looking at your entire roster as far as style of play and commitment to the team game that you're going to need once the playoffs start. You feel if you focus on in that, you're going to win your share of games, and, at the same time, your game needs to be sharpened up and ready going into the playoffs.
Otherwise, you see what happened with the Boston Bruins last season. They had such a fantastic regular season but ended up in the first round against a team in the Florida Panthers that not only had to have their game sharp, but they were desperate and grasping for every point down to the final game to qualify for the playoffs. So, Florida was finished and ready for the playoffs and Boston had to ramp it up and shift gears into that and, unfortunately, it ran out of games to do so and lost in seven.
When I was with the Los Angeles Kings, we were always in sort in that wild-card conversation, somewhere in the fifth-eighth seed range, and our focus was so much on playing perfectly without the puck and how hard we could play without it, how difficult we could make it on our opponent and, at the same time, how comfortable could we be in those tight games.
We were built for playoff hockey. We just had to make sure we were playing air-tight playoff hockey down the stretch so that we would hit the first round running. That was always our focus. It didn't always work out. When we started in the first round against the San Jose Sharks in 2014, we lost the first three games, but we did get to playoff hockey after that, came back to win the series and went on to win the Stanley Cup.
For the teams that are in that bottom third and fighting for that wild-card spot, there are a lot of different strategies that coaches will employ. They will break the week down that, "This is our week, and we know we have to be positive on every three games we play." Or maybe it's a five-game segment or seven-game segments. They know they have to get themselves on the upper 60 percent of that in points to make sure they either climb in the standings or maintain a wild-card spot.
The hard part with that, I've found, is if you do break it down into segments and you lose a segment, what do you say? You can't count yourself out at that point, but I think what it allows you to do is narrow your focus in steps.
But at the same time, you want your style of play and your team performance to be dialed in as close to peak performance as you can, so that that over the course of those five games, if you play 4 1/2 really good ones, there's a chance you're going to get those three wins.
Also, if you're not getting wins, are you getting that one point from an overtime or shootout loss, just hanging in there long enough to get a point so you don't get zero?
When coaches say they're in "playoff mode", I think you're dialing your team in on one game. The amount of practice time at this time of the season goes way, way down. You're significantly focused on rest and recovery. How do you give your players as much time off to keep their energy up as high as it needs to be for peak performance on game day?
Your practices end up being very short and focused on the little parts of your game that you feel need tightening up and that's extent of it. The trick is how hyper-focused can you be on an individual performance and how can you repeat that over and over.
That's sort of what you try to do during a playoff run over the course of two months, improve little bit by little bit from Game 1 to Game 7 and improve from one round to the next. So, each team right now is looking at, "How do we make our improvements, and, at the same time, we need to be in playoff mode and how do we maximize game day?"
It becomes all about the game-day preparation, routine and performance and then it's reset, recover and load it back up again two days later for the next game.
