Ask any NHL coach what the difference between a playoff team and a non-playoff team is, and the answers all kind of sound the same. There's a lot of talk about paying the price, about grit, about compete levels.
How do you quantify “compete” though? What does that even mean?ch
For Ottawa Senators coach Guy Boucher, one identifier stands above all the rest.
“If you don't compete, you can't win on a regular basis, and the best teams are great at the competing part of the game, which is boxing out in front of the net, crashing the net, screening, blocking shots, winning battles, taking checks to be first on puck,” Boucher told me after a Senators practice this week.