NHL
BRAINTREE, Mass. — The afternoon’s first drill was simple. Charlie Coyle, Ryan Donato and James van Riemsdyk were told to turn their torsos toward the neutral-zone boards, pick pucks off the wall, look to the middle and backhand them to center ice.
By the end of the hour at Thayer Sports Center, the three NHLers had progressed to something more complex.
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One by one, each stood in the corner, back turned to the ice. As Oates Sports Group coach Jon Lounsbury and Militia Hockey Club director of hockey operations Anthony Chighisola sent in rims at varying speeds and angles, each player pulled pucks off the boards, swiveled toward the slot and passed to one of their two fellow participants for shots on goal.
Throughout the session, each drill incorporated counterrotation, the movement Lounsbury emphasized for the day. Whenever Coyle, Donato or van Riemsdyk reached for a puck, he had to look down once while gaining possession, raise his head, turn his body and immediately gain awareness of his surroundings.
It aligned with the Oates Sports Group’s foundational principle: A player must know where everybody else is on the ice. Enemies as well as friends are always nearby.
“Our joke is, ‘Tom Wilson’s out there somewhere.’ So we’ve got to be able to play around him,” Lounsbury said. “We’ve got to understand, ‘Contact’s coming. How do I take it?’ So the core principle is if you handle the puck the right way, you’ve got all the time in the world.”
Being aware of the nine other skaters serves a singular purpose: expanding time and space to make plays with the puck. Every player wants to do it. Not everyone can.
For skills coaches like Lounsbury, livelihood depends on teaching clients this craft.
By June 11, the day of their session, nearly two months had gone by since Donato played his final game of 2023-24 for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Conversely, only 25 days had passed since Coyle, van Riemsdyk and the Boston Bruins fell short against the Florida Panthers. Coyle averaged 18:49 of ice time per game in the playoffs, second-most on the team after David Pastrnak. Yet the center was on the ice at this prep school rink south of Boston, early by his standards, to practice skills that often gather cobwebs during the season.
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“Yeah, September’s a long ways away,” Coyle said. “But just doing this little stuff, getting the hands going, putting some new things in your mind to try to work on it and gain that repetition, you can’t really hurt yourself.”
Between games, practices, travel, training, recovery and off-ice commitments, there is little time to focus on the individual details that, in Lounsbury’s view, can initiate a winning sequence or more zeroes in a pending contract. Those two variables are often connected.
“In our league,” Lounsbury said, “10 more points is another million bucks.”
It’s why some players are grinding while others are reaching for their golf clubs.
Coyle, 32, is looking to improve on a career-best 60 points to lock himself in as the Bruins’ first- or second-line center. Donato, 28, is entering the last season of his two-year, $4 million contract and is eager to stick next to Connor Bedard. Van Riemsdyk, 35 and unrestricted, is desperate to stay in a league overrun with younger and faster players who want his job.
For Coyle, the session was part of a long day behind the wheel. That morning, he had driven from his offseason home in Cape Cod to Logan International Airport to drop off his sister-in-law. Then he stopped at Warrior Ice Arena, the Bruins practice facility, and swung by his in-season home. A half hour before the session, Coyle arrived at the rink.
Shortly after, Lounsbury walked into the lobby. He had come from another rink in nearby Walpole, where he had been working that morning with Ryan Shea (Pittsburgh Penguins), Jack St. Ivany (Penguins) and Henry Thrun (San Jose Sharks). Later in the week, Lounsbury would skate with Matty Beniers (Seattle Kraken) and Kevin Rooney (Calgary Flames).
Adam Oates, the founder of Oates Sports Group, is a Hall of Famer. Oates scored 1,420 points, 20th-most in NHL history, with a degree of intellect that amplified every part of his game.
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Oates does the same now as a skills specialist. His client list includes Nikita Kucherov and Connor McDavid.
“It’s the ability to handle the puck,” Lounsbury said of how the elite process their surroundings. “They handle the puck better than everybody else. For them to look around is easy. They can cruise around with the puck on their stick, no problem. They can turn. They don’t lose anybody.”
Kucherov and McDavid are on pace to join Oates in the Hall of Fame. Lounsbury once scored 48 points for the Huntsville Havoc of the Southern Professional Hockey League. One of Lounsbury’s first tasks, then, is to convince the world’s best players that the counsel of a 42-year-old ex-defenseman who never played in the NHL is worth their time and money.
“Adam’s a Hall of Famer,” said Lounsbury. “I played in the minors. I didn’t have a touted career. But at 42, I can do all these things. My joke is, ‘I played in a four-letter league.’ And I can make a little play. We all joke on the ice. But they see me doing it at my age and how I move. They’re like, ‘I can do that. If he can do that, I can. But how?’”
As Lounsbury showed Coyle, Donato and van Riemsdyk, it was through comprehension. Attention to detail. And lots of practice.
There is nothing sexy about picking pucks off the wall and getting them out of the defensive zone. But it is a maneuver, when failed, that ignites the warning lights on every coach’s dashboard. Players lose ice time. Conversely, a player’s name gets called when he proves to his coach he can get pucks out.
“Pat Maroon, turning on a puck on the boards and breaking it out, there wasn’t a better guy in the playoffs doing that,” Lounsbury said of the three-time Stanley Cup champion and Oates Sports Group client. “That’s the stuff we work on. He knows he can’t skate up and down with the guys. But he can make every play in the corner and every play on the boards. That’s what keeps him going at (36) off back surgery.”
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Coyle, Donato and van Riemsdyk never approached their thresholds during the session. Donato was the only one of the three who placed a 16.9-ounce bottle of Poland Spring on the boards in front of the bench.
The calories the players were burning were mental. They took at least 10 reps at every drill. They focused on good, repeatable habits: playing pucks cleanly, lifting their heads after gaining possession, shifting their hands on their sticks, scanning the ice to Lounsbury’s liking.
What looked like a simple shooting drill was far more than that. As Coyle, Donato and van Riemsdyk plucked pucks out of a pile, Lounsbury was monitoring subtleties: how cleanly they picked the pucks, how quickly they looked up at the net, how loosely they held their sticks.
“I don’t care about the shot,” Lounsbury said. “I’m looking at how they picked the puck up. Can they pick it up in a way where their eyes come up fast? Can they pick it up in a way where they can move (it) in a second to find the next guy? Can they move the right way? The shot to me, in a lot of this stuff, keeps them entertained.”
You may consider skill development as expressing eye-catching techniques such as dangles through traffic, deceptive releases and bar-down accuracy. Lounsbury does not agree.
His sessions emphasize building-block maneuvers. The speed and reliability with which players initiate these actions translate to more time for playmaking. Cale Makar would not be a game breaker if he could not fetch pucks effortlessly at one end and keep them in at the other. Neither skill is ever featured in the Colorado Avalanche defenseman’s highlight reel.
“If you’re a right-shot D, I’m going to have you in that corner three-quarters of the summer,” said Lounsbury, pointing to the right quadrant of the defensive end. “Picking pucks off the boards. Seeing how they bounce. Turning. Finding guys. All that stuff. Because that’s where you live.”
“You live there and here,” Lounsbury added, emphasizing his placement at the right point inside the blue line. “So let’s work on the areas where you’re going to be the most. Because they have to be your strengths. They can’t be your weaknesses.”
The Oates Sports Group requires a one-year commitment from players. Aside from on-ice work, the company sends its clients video clips during the season for study and feedback.
Lounsbury declined to disclose the company’s rates, which vary depending on a player’s experience. Word of mouth drives business.
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“If I came to you and I said, ‘If you gave me $30,000 right now and I could make you $1.5 million in the stock market,’ would you give it to me?” Lounsbury said.
He recalled posing the question to one player, who responded, “Wouldn’t think twice about it.”
“That’s what we do,” Lounsbury added. “Our hope is to grow your game at X amount of dollars so you get to that contract. Then at that contract, we hope you don’t stop. We want you to get to the next one. And the next one.”
Coyle is signed through 2026 at $5.25 million annually. He earns his salary by being strong on pucks, being dependable in all three zones and having the trust of his coach.
To play his game, Coyle requires a mastery of sound habits: being first on pucks, using his body to fend off opponents, buying himself time to find his teammates. By mastering the basics, Coyle could have the time to slip a puck under a defenseman’s stick to a waiting linemate instead of having his opponent tip it away.
“A hundred percent. A hundred percent,” Coyle said with conviction when asked if hiring a skills coach was worth his money. “It’s an investment. But it’s an investment in yourself.”
(Top photo of Ryan Donato and coach Jon Lounsbury watching James van Riemsdyk: Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)
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Fluto Shinzawa is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the Boston Bruins. He has covered the team since 2006, formerly as a staff writer for The Boston Globe. Follow Fluto on Twitter @flutoshinzawa
