NHL
In the three months since Jeff Blashill was hired as the next Chicago Blackhawks head coach, he’s tried to prepare for the upcoming season and become accustomed to his new city.
He’s met with his staff, discussed roles and developed ideas to efficiently utilize training camp. He’s talked with players over the phone or in person. He’s gotten to know the Blackhawks’ analytics department. He’s watched video of the Blackhawks and plenty of other teams.
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He’s also made his way around the Chicago area. He threw out a first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game, tossing “probably the type of slider that would cause somebody to swing,” he said.
He also talked with first-year Chicago Bears coach Ben Johnson at their training camp: “I had a couple of curious questions that I’ll keep to myself, that I asked him, that he was honest with me on. … We’re both coming into new teams and taking over, and there’s a certain mentality that goes with that.”
With Blashill’s own training camp set to begin in less than two weeks, he took the time recently to discuss all those things and more with The Athletic.
(Note: Some questions and answers are edited lightly for clarity and length.)
Is there anything you know now that you feel prepares you more for a first training camp with a team than you maybe did going to that first season as a head coach in Detroit?
Since that first time, I’ve been through, I think, 14 training camps. Just to say there’s one thing, I wouldn’t say that. A lot of our working manual that we’ll use for training camp dates back to some of the things we did in Detroit and how we had it structured there. I got to learn how to run a camp from Mike Babcock. I would say if you ask people that were around when Mike coached, he ran a great training camp. It was very efficient. It was timed out to the second. So I, early in my career, got a chance to see that type of camp. And then I moved and had the opportunity to run my own and also then see how Jon Cooper runs his.
I would just say, I’m very at peace with knowing that the way that we’re going to run camp is an efficient and productive way, and we just need to go out and now execute each day of camp as coaches and make sure that we’re getting the most out of the time that we have.
Training camp is a real valuable time because once you start playing, you don’t get to practice much. So we want to walk out of camp and, No. 1, make sure that we’ve instilled the type of culture we want, including instilling the type of winning fundamentals we want our guys to play with. No. 2, we have to make sure that we have our systems instilled and that our guys are comfortable playing them. No. 3 is kind of figuring out which guys are going to play in what roles, and between training camp and the exhibition season, that will start to dictate what we do at the beginning of the year.
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I’ve heard you talk about a winning culture and winning ways. Oliver Moore brought it up recently too when I talked to him for a story. What does that actually look like?
Well, the things that I’ve observed over time that each winning culture has is, No. 1, the leaders of the team and the best players play winning hockey. So that’s going to be an expectation for our leaders and best players is that they play winning hockey, they handle the risk/reward of the game. Our game probably has to grow from a maturity level, so certainly there will be a lot on their shoulders to make sure that we’re doing it right. No. 2, as a coaching staff, we have to set a high standard and demand that our players reach that standard and hold them accountable when they don’t. And that’s something that is a day-to-day thing, and something that’s a thing that we’ll carry on throughout the season.
I think the other real important piece of it is installing those types of winning fundamentals. Making sure that before you can be great in your systems, you have to be great in the fundamentals that you utilize within those systems. And so, making sure we’re great in all the types of winning fundamentals we want to be great in — stopping on pucks, how we angle, defend and take away good ice when we don’t have the puck, winning puck battles, boxing out in front. All those type of things will be real important, and it will be something that I emphasize every day in camp.
How much say will you have in roster decisions in camp? I’m sure some of it has to fall on being cap compliant, so you can’t have a team full of young players. But how many of those decisions will be made by you or Kyle Davidson or together?
My experience has been that there’s always a dialogue between the head coach and the coaching staff and the general manager and the management team. I think that’s dialogue that started this summer, that will continue through the beginning of training camp, all the way through the end of exhibition season.
Ultimately, we all have the same goal in mind and that’s to get the Chicago Blackhawks to a championship-level team. And so, that’ll be our continued goal. We’ll make decisions based on that.
There was a recent Athletic article about developing young NFL quarterbacks and the impact coaches and organizations can have on their development. Whether the Blackhawks become a Stanley Cup contender likely depends on the development of the 25 draft picks in the three first rounds, including 11 first-round picks, over the last four years.
What do you think is important for you to try to balance winning and ensuring those players reach their development potential?
For me, development and winning go hand in hand. I’ve always felt that. I feel that in the short term, in the long term. Once we kind of have our team set this year, the best way to raise our ceiling is for our individual players to get better. That’s not just our young players. That is every player on our roster. Focus on them, continue to rise their game to get better. That’s how you continue to push your ceiling further and further north.
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Certainly, when we’re talking about a number of young players, you have to look at putting them in the position that is going to help give them the best road for development. I am a believer that in the long haul, the best players always rise to the top. Part of being a best player is perseverance, is getting up when you get knocked down, is handling losses of confidence that happen when you do have struggles. That’s part of becoming a great, great player, and the strongest do certainly survive.
We’re gonna make the decisions we think are in the players’ best interest. We won’t sacrifice trying to win a game tomorrow if that puts a timeline on a player and it hurts their timeline towards their greatest success. That’s something that we’ll be certainly cognizant of.
I think I actually probably read the article you’re referring to, and there’s certainly times where maybe young players get thrown to the wolves so early, and it can hurt their confidence. You just have to be careful of monitoring that, and some guys are better equipped to handle it than others.
We’re not going to put anybody in a position to fail on purpose. We’re going to try to put them in positions where they can grow, and part of growing is facing adversity, part of growing is having success, and so we’re gonna have to balance those two things.
I’m sure you’ve watched a lot of video of Connor Bedard since taking the job, or even before. How do you think you can help him get to the next level of his game?
First off, I think when I watch Connor, I think he had two great years as an 18- and 19-year-old. I think he was the second- or third-youngest player in the league for most of the last year, maybe the second-youngest until Arty (Levshunov) came up. So, he’s had, I think, two good years to start his career. Does he want to continue to grow? Yes. Do we want him to continue to grow? Yes.
I think, one, he’s continued to put the training in during the summer. That’s going to help his body, maturation process, as any young man, that’s 18, 19 into 20. You can start to hit your physical kind of peak at that point as you keep getting a little bit older at those ages. I know he’s trained hard and put himself in position to have success.
Ultimately for Connor, I think when he has the puck on his stick, he can do some really, really special things, and when he’s got the puck in offensive situations he can both from a shooting and passing perspective do things at an elite level, so then the process for us is to try to help him, one, get the puck on his stick as much as possible, whether that’s through winning puck battles himself, whether that’s through other players helping in winning puck battle, and then not just getting it on his stick, but getting it in the offensive zone on his stick. So Connor doing a real good job of transporting the puck up the ice as well as his linemates. Those are things that are going to be important that are gonna help lead him to success.
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The only thing that we’ll ask him, that we’ll ask all our young players, is that they play winning hockey. It’s not just about producing points. It’s about doing all the little things it takes to win.
So what is that? Ultimately, I judge players on how much they create versus how much they give up, and you want to create more than you give up. And it shouldn’t be 50-50. If it’s 50-50, your team will win 50 percent of the time, and that’s not going to be good enough for any of us. So, we need it to be much higher than that, where he’s creating a lot more than he’s giving up, just like every other young player or every other player on our team.
We’ll ask him to manage his game, to know when it’s time to make a play and when it is time to live another day. If you watch the Stanley Cup playoffs, if you watch the 4 Nations tournament, you saw great, great players deciding, “You know what, I just need to get this puck behind this player because the risk isn’t worth the reward and I’m going to live another day.” That’s all part of the maturation process.
I think, ultimately, Connor’s game will continue to grow as he naturally matures, both as a player and as a person. I just think that’s what happens to people when they’re 18, 19, into 20 years old. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve really enjoyed him as a person. I think he wants to be great. He wants the Chicago Blackhawks to be great. I look forward to continuing to work with him.
Do you see Bedard and Frank Nazar as centers?
Interestingly, Nazar was late in becoming a center. But I think they both can excel at center. I think they both have the attributes to be really good centers. We have some other centers in the pipeline, including (Anton) Frondell, a guy who has a chance to be a top-couple-line NHL center. We’d love to have more centers than not enough.
I was just watching the 2009 Stanley Cup Final game on the plane the other day on the way home, Game 7, and, you know, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg, who I coached as well, both were centers and at times played together. So, there’s a lot of things you can do when you have great players.
Obviously, Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid do that. I’m not suggesting that I’m going to do that necessarily, but those are options that you have when you have really good players who can certainly play the center-ice position, but can also play together with another center if that’s the best way to maximize your team.
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Both of them have the attributes to be great centers. We’ll continue to help work with them. Part of being a great center is that you have to be a great two-way player, so we’ll continue to work with them on that.
The Blackhawks have put a lot of resources into analytics in recent years. Have you found, as a head coach, that analytics are useful, or do you have any philosophies on how those numbers or patterns might assist you as a coach?
I’ve actually had a chance over the course of the summer to have numerous meetings with our analytics group. I think the No. 1 thing that you want to make sure when you’re dealing with analytics is that the statistics are measuring what they say they’re measuring and that they’re accurate, directionally accurate, at least in a sense that you might not ever get to 100 percent accuracy when you deal with an algorithm that’s automating the stats, but getting them as directionally close as possible. You’ve got to feel comfortable that those two things are happening, and that’s not always the case. Once you can trust it, I think they can be very, very, very important tools in helping decision-making.
What analytics does is it takes the emotion out of the decisions in a sense that sometimes your head can be clouded by emotions, and you don’t necessarily see things exactly as they are, where analytics is obviously very black and white.
I think it can help in judging players. Who’s actually playing good? Takes away the human bias of it. Who plays good together? What’s the best combinations? Where do we stack relative to the rest of the league? All those things are really important. And again, they can help you in your decision-making. You don’t simply use those as the only tool, but they’re a tool.
I think my mind is an analytical mind. It’s something I’ve utilized throughout my time in coaching. So the long-winded answer to that is analytics is something that’s important to me, something that we work very hard to make sure that it’s accurate in what it measures, and then we utilize it as a tool in helping decision-making.
(Top photo: David Banks / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
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Scott Powers is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the Chicago Blackhawks. Previously, he covered the Blackhawks and the White Sox for ESPN Chicago. He has also written for the Daily Herald and the Chicago Sun-Times and has been a sportswriter in the Chicagoland area for the past 15 years. Follow Scott on Twitter @byscottpowers
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