With big weekend looming Silvertips hold light workout
Published 4:14 pm Tuesday, February 16, 2016
We’ve reached that point of the season where on-ice practice sessions are shorter and not as frequent – particularly for guys who are banged up.
Most of the skaters will be off Wednesday while the team will reconvene Thursday for a full practice prior to heading to Tri-City Friday night.
“It’s a very, very intense game,” head coach Kevin Constantine said. “That’s why we’re such a big proponent of rest – every ounce of energy that we can get. It’s very important that our compete level is very high. Sometimes you can get away with an average compete level if you have a high skill level to score goals when you need to. But we need to compete.”
I counted 14 full participants in Tuesday’s practice, plus the injured Brandon Ralph, who skated on his own, and Constantine’s 10-year-old son, Nick, who took part in several drills and skated sprints with the team at the end of practice.
“He’s been a rink rat his whole life,” Constantine said of his son. “He loves being around the rink. He loves the game and it’s really cool. That’s his deal. I don’t really discourage or overly encourage it. It’s his passion and he likes being around the game.”
As I wrote last weekend, the Tips immediately left for Spokane after Saturday night’s home game and got to the hotel around 3 a.m. It’s at least the second time they’ve done so that I know of, and Constantine said they like to capitalize on the two-to-three hour window that most players need to wind down following a game.
“The challenge of going to Spokane is that you screw up your sleep pattern if you go the night before,” he said. “But if you go the day of and get your normal sleep then you’re trying to skate after five hours on a bus. In that case you have to decide the lesser of two evils. Most players when they play a game it’s hard to relax for two or three hours. There is so much emotion and adrenaline and so forth that we just said, ‘Let’s take that three hours of emotion and get the bus trip out of the way during that time.’”
As far as official injuries go, Lucas Skrumeda is the only addition to this week’s WHL report as he is out TBD with an undisclosed upper body injury. He did not play at Spokane on Sunday, a fact that the Tips with just 19 healthy players.
Finally, goaltender Carter Hart won the CHL fans choice play of the week for his save against Kamloops. Take a gander below:
