CrusaderPi wrote on Sun, 21 May 2023 10:10

100%. I remember when Mark Cuban took over the Mavs he wanted to know what amenities the good clubs had for their players and how much it would cost to get Dallas to that level. Just getting things like nicer chairs in the dressing room and PlayStations on the plane ended up costing ~200k and made the franchise feel less cheap (this is from memory, details are fuzzy). In the current year there’s no reason why the Oilers shouldn’t be sending out nutritionists, skills and condition advisors, and sports therapists out to their players. Hire cooks to feed them (and inspect their pantries). Hire a concierge in kelowna and Muskoka to book ice, tee times, and make sure their phone bills are paid. Just make it easy for the payers to stay out of trouble and in preparation for October.

From what I've read it seems that the Oilers have a lot of nutrition education and consultation covered, What I was thinking was specifically from a mechanics (analytics, evaluation) point of view. There is no reason I player's skating and agility shouldn't be able to improve. Some of it could be by more strength (Crosby does 500# squats for example), but most of it would be via improved stride mechanics.

Pittsburgh actually has a Department of Sports Science and Development (so I'm on the right track), the Director of that department trains McKinnon, Crosby, and Marchand in teh offseason, and has been training McKinnon before juniors. Here's an interesting article.. its McKinnon focused, but you can glean from it that the concept of the analytics of skating mechanics is valuable, and effective.
Article Link: https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/nathan-mackinnon-colorad o-avalanche-profile/

Here's some excerpts..

Quote:

.. It’s spotless, though it’s now seeing its first off-season of sweat. And it’s outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, built to specs detailed by the guest MacKinnon has just buzzed in: Andy O’Brien, trainer to NHL stars. A native of Charlottetown, P.E.I., O’Brien serves as the director of sport science and performance for the Penguins during the regular season and spends his summers working with clients who rank in the NHL’s elite, including MacKinnon and his next-door neighbour on Grand Lake, Sidney Crosby. O’Brien makes regular trips out east in the off-season and MacKinnon has made trips west to work out at O’Brien’s gym in Etobicoke. When they can’t schedule face-to-face time, MacKinnon works out on his own from programs written by O’Brien. He also works with Alex Pianosi, O’Brien’s long-time business partner. Plus, MacKinnon can always get in a skate, some track work and a hill run with his neighbour. “Mike Sullivan told me after we played against the Avs that Nathan was the best player we faced all season.” O’Brien is in MacKinnon’s ear as they get work through a warmup and some stretching, but it’s not what you might expect. This isn’t the dynamic of a drill sergeant to a recruit. This isn’t the scene at the NHL combine, where you have staff shouting in the ear of a prospect trying to push through pain on a stationary bike. No, it’s a discussion of restaurants in town, plans for the rest of the summer, changes in downtown Halifax — strictly water-cooler stuff. Only occasionally does something drop that reminds you this isn’t the Y or a Goodlife. “I was talking to Sid the other day,” O’Brien says. “I said, ‘Look at the three guys from here that I work with’ — y’know, you, Sid and Marshy…” The latter being Brad Marchand, of the Boston Bruins. “…you’re all animals in the gym.” Yeah, all animals and all All-Stars.

This is where he talks about how important it is for a young player to improve skating technique FIRST before Strength.. as he says.. you can always build strength later, but your ability to improve technique diminishes quickly as the player gets older (which supports my previous hypothesis)..

Quote:

.. Yet another parallel to Crosby: In the summer after his first year at Shattuck, MacKinnon started working with O’Brien. He’d had a small taste of life under the trainer back when he was peewee-aged. “I did one workout with him, mostly lunges and that sort of thing. Andy asked what I did for workouts and my dad told him I used to run telephone poles on the way home from school with my backpack on. That was my sprint work. That was all I did.” Though he never came off as even a bit full of himself, MacKinnon was pretty puffed up when he first went to O’Brien that summer. “I had this video of me at Shattuck and thought Andy would watch me skate and be impressed,” he says. “When I was 14 or 15, I thought I was a sick skater. Andy looked and said, ‘Look how bent over you are when you’re skating.’ Mechanically I had a lot to work on. I got humbled quick.” The regimen that followed was not what the teenager expected. O’Brien reprised the role of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, you know, the learning-to-walk-before-you-run proposition. That’s exactly what he had MacKinnon do: walk. All summer long. For hours. On a treadmill. Yeah, he had skipped too far ahead when he was running from telephone pole to telephone pole. It was as boring as it sounds, but a little more intense than you might imagine. It wasn’t a stroll, but rather a steep incline. “We focused on flexing his ankle and positive shin angle,” O’Brien says. “My experience is that it’s hard to train technique later. If you’re three, four, five years in, it’s hard to retrain and correct technique. You can wait for the power. Other than Sid, Nate was the only teenager I worked with where I had the benefit of taking that approach and being able to be patient with the process. If you’re in the NHL, you don’t have the luxury of time.” “I was so raw that’s really where we had to start, the basics,” MacKinnon says. “I tried to understand what it was that we were trying to do but at a certain level it came down to trust and I just had to trust Andy.” MacKinnon stuck with the summer sessions — not surprising, given that he was committed enough to go to Shattuck for two years. And not surprising, given O’Brien’s track record, which is basically a drop-out rate of zero. “It takes a certain type of person to sign on,” O’Brien says. “Any of my clients have to be self-motivated. They come to me looking for a way to get better. Looking for any way, whatever it’s going to take.” Effectively, they need a bit of Crosby about them. FUNDAMENTALIST The first time they worked together, O'Brien had MacKinnon relearn how to walk. “I was so raw that’s really where we had to start, the basics,” MacKinnon says. O’Brien says that MacKinnon didn’t put on muscle like Crosby had and that continues to this day — I was a little skeptical when I first heard that. I saw Crosby for the first time back in August ’03, when he was the same age MacKinnon was at the Mooseheads’ camp. MacKinnon looked much more filled-out, but put it down to either the limitations of the eye test or a trick of memory, or both. MacKinnon’s first game with the Mooseheads was an exhibition against Cape Breton at the Halifax Forum. From his first shift, he had the opposing defencemen struggling to get their legs under them; they couldn’t even begin to deal with his speed. On that shift, he set up Martin Frk for a goal and though he was limited to that assist on the score sheet, he was clearly the most impressive prospect on the ice. MacKinnon, though, was hardly impressed with himself. Today, he admits that he had doubts about making the jump from Shattuck the Q. “I [wondered] what was I getting myself into,” he says. “I didn’t think it would be easy and it wasn’t. Everyone was much bigger and stronger. Everyone was trying to get as big as possible, on the bench [press], whatever. I was 15. I spent the summer walking on a treadmill. I didn’t lift a weight all summer. I’m gonna get f—in’ crushed.”

That's what the Oilers require, a top end, hi-tech, leading edge, Department of Sports Science.. they can have sub-departments.. (by order of importance) Skating Technique and Performance, Goaltending Performance (with a spiritual component to channel the flow of Goalie Voo-Doo!).. Shot Mechanics.. Strength and Conditioning.. and Nutrition and Diet.

As an example of how high a level of skating technique and analysis can take, here is a study for speed skating stride analysis, the same could be done for hockey.. except it'd be more complex, you'd also have to include other parameters such as agility and edge work into the analysis.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002192901 7304608

[Updated on: Sun, 21 May 2023 21:48]

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P. Chiarelli math.. T. Hall = A. Larsson, Yak= bag o'pucks (OK he got one right...) K. Russell = $4.1 M+NMC, G. Reinhart= M. Barzal + A. Beauvillier, J. Eberle = R. Spooner,