Sean Kuraly does not consider himself a morning person. At the same time, the Bruins’ fourth-liner encounters an issue that’s common around the league: It is not easy to settle down after the high of a game and go to sleep.
By Kuraly’s estimation, it is usually 1 or 2 a.m. after a 7 p.m. home game that his eyes close for the night. Then, if the Bruins are scheduled to practice the next day at their usual 11:30 a.m. start time, Kuraly wakes up at 8:30 a.m.
Kuraly, 25, is single. He does not have children to get to school. Still, his alarm is not a welcome intrusion.
The 8:30 wakeup leaves Kuraly enough time to get a coffee, commute from his downtown home to Warrior Ice Arena, and arrive at the practice rink in Brighton to eat breakfast, stretch, work out, attend meetings, and do whatever else is scheduled before he hits the ice at 11:30 a.m. To counter the quick turnaround, Kuraly usually takes a nap after practice.
There is a possible solution: practicing at night on non-game days. No team currently does.
“If you’re able to do that and have player buy-in, I would definitely support that,” said Benjamin Jensen, key account manager for professional sports sales in the USA for Firstbeat, the Finnish company that collects and interprets heartbeat data for teams.
The problem lies within Jensen’s statement: player buy-in. Today’s NHL players are used to their routines. It would be a massive disruption to bust career-long habits and have players approve a 7 p.m. session.
The first NHL coach who proposes such a shift would face a mutiny. But the first coach who does so may enjoy a competitive advantage.
“It is an interesting concept to see if anybody did it,” Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said. “I’d like to see how it would work out.”
Recovery is critical
Synchronizing training and performance times is nothing new. It is common practice for individual athletes in the Olympics, for example, to train around the same time as their events. The circadian rhythm falls into place. The body figures out when to peak for performance and fade for recovery.
In theory, there are no barriers to limit such a setup in the NHL. Nothing in the collective bargaining agreement dictates when teams must practice. Article 16.6 reads as follows: “Practice sessions shall be scheduled at reasonable times in accordance with the general practice of Clubs in the League.”
Currently, practice is late morning or early afternoon, regardless of what has taken place the night before. Exceptions are practices on the road, especially on the West Coast. Eastern teams sometimes practice in the late afternoon Pacific time to acclimate.
If there is a trend, it is toward later practices following night games.
“We go at 11:30,” Cassidy said. “Years ago, it was always, ‘Let’s just stick to 10:30.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if teams went at 12 or 12:30. We may do that down the road.”
The reason is to extend postgame sleep for the players. Data has proven that proper sleep is critical for recovery. Depending on the player, the process of repair sometimes does not begin until several hours into his shuteye. It makes little sense, then, to disrupt recovery during a critical stage.
A player coming off proper rest is in better shape, so to speak, than one who is fatigued. The likelihood of injury decreases. The chances of better performance increase. A team that has more good, healthy players is more likely to win than one that does not.
Part of the hesitation at aligning game and practice times is the break with tradition. Everybody in the league is used to practicing in the late morning after a night game.
But tradition sometimes cedes to practicality.
The morning skate used to be standard operating procedure. Regardless of fatigue, venue, or circumstance, players would always report to the rink the morning of a game — specifically for an on-ice flush of toxins imbibed the previous night.
Bruins captain Zdeno Chara entered the league in 1997.
“Back then, that was not even an idea or a thought,” Chara, 41, said of bypassing the morning skate. “Unless you were really hurt or injured a little bit, then you took some morning skates off. But other than that, everybody was on. No exceptions. It was just the culture. Skate, skate, skate. That’s the way it was.”
Today, with kale smoothies being more popular than tallboys, what was mandatory has since been loosened. Depending on the team, the morning skate is no longer required, especially during stretches of travel or heavy game scheduling.
In some circumstances, data gathered via wearable devices has led to the routine’s outright banishment.
Like most Finnish teams, Jokerit Helsinki held morning skates. But when the club moved from Finland’s SM-Liiga to Russia’s KHL, its travel skyrocketed. The information Jokerit studied from its Firstbeat heartrate monitors convinced the club’s decision-makers the team was better off scrubbing the morning skate to compensate for its KHL travel.
“They were still in a recovery state when they woke up,” Jensen said. “When they were allowed to sleep in, those were really important recovery hours in the late morning. The big deal for them was playing within seven different time zones because Russia is so big. It’s a little bit of a different situation than in the States. But what is applicable is that their biggest finding was by eliminating the morning skate.”
It is a reasonable guess, then, that pushing back practice would improve recovery and promote better health. It is just a guess. There are no teams that have synchronized practice and games, and thus no data to work with.
So teams are doing their best with the current template. The morning after a game, players continue the recovery process at the rink. The data they’re compiling through such routines encourages this behavior. A morning practice also gives players enough time to recover after the session and before the next game.
“Sometimes it’s often beneficial from a recovery standpoint to get them in to do a little bit of lighter-intensity, lighter-volume work to flush the legs out,” said Emma Beanland, sports science manager at Catapult Sports, which allows teams to monitor workloads, among other things, with its wearables. “It’s an opportunity to get in there to the facility to do a massage, have a shake, eat good food in the morning.”
By now, players consider this schedule second nature. That can be a good thing.
“There’s a comfort to that,” said Dina Gentile, professor of sports management at Endicott College. “A lot of times in sports, folks call these things rituals. That can go awry, like if you have a certain athletic trainer who’s been taping your ankle and not available, so you can’t perform. We try to use the word routine more. If it’s another trainer there, you’re still able to perform. It’s a mental game.”
If players have settled into their current routines, it’s possible they could adapt to later practices — and possibly thrive. Lifestyle, however, would suffer.
Culture shock
Cassidy was used to practicing at night. During the three seasons he spent in Alleghe in northeastern Italy, Cassidy and his teammates on HC Alleghe practiced at 7 p.m. His teammates had day jobs.
“My partner was the local cop,” Cassidy said. “My other (defenseman) was the town plumber.”
It is not that way in the NHL. Some of today’s players have never held other jobs. Their skills have given them families to spend time with or nightlife they enjoy. Practicing at night would compromise their lifestyles.
“You’d have to have a very understanding group,” Cassidy said. “And you’ve got to have understanding wives. You’d really have to be in sync with that and have some top-end guys that said, ‘I’ve done this. It works.’ ”
The Canucks, given their home base in Vancouver, face the most troublesome travel schedule in the NHL. As such, they have sought outside help. In 2011, the Canucks hired Fatigue Science, a company that studies how sleep affects human performance, to optimize their travel, rest, and practice schedules.
The Canucks, however, did not regularly practice at night.
It would not be good enough for a team to have a forward-looking coach, general manager, and sports science personnel to turn a practice schedule upside down. They would have to convince players, many with families, to forego dinners with their spouses and children in search of a theoretical spike in performance.
Good luck, in other words, telling Chara, Patrice Bergeron, and David Backes that their current routines no longer qualify.
“It would be the time when kids want to see you before bed and you can spend some time, whether playing with them or reading them bedtime stories, and you’d be like, ‘I’ve got to go,’ ” Chara said. “Then you’re dealing with traffic. You probably have to leave at 5 for 7 o’clock practice, and it’s rush hour. That’s another thing you’re dealing with — accidents, rush hour. So I think it would probably be tough.”
The most likely recipe for adoption would include a young team, an experienced coach, and a data-driven organization. The first team to try it would be considered cuckoo. But a lot of old-school thinkers rolled their eyes when morning skates were diminished, enforcers dropped off rosters, and brown rice replaced pregame pasta.
Progress requires a pioneer.