Yesterday the Phoenix Coyotes held practice at Jobing.com Arena, and I think it'd be fair to say head coach Dave Tippett was, um, on edge. You could feel playoffs in the air.
While he wasn't screaming and yelling, he very clearly conveyed a sense of urgency you don't tend to see during the middle of the season (and by "clearly conveyed," I mean he repeatedly banged his stick on the ice which means "pick it up before this gets jammed in your ass" in coach-speak) — for the Phoenix Coyotes and their middle of the pack brethren, playoff hockey has already begun.
When you're a bubble team — and the Coyotes consider themselves a bubble team, despite their current place in the standings - kicking it into overdrive this early has its pros and cons. Having the bulk of your remaining games against division rivals only adds fuel to the fire.
Referring to his team's upcoming game against the Dallas Stars, Tippett said, "I think they'll bill this as the biggest game of the season for them, and there's no reason we shouldn't do the same." Adding, "Their desperation level has to be at the max, and there's no reason ours shouldn't be either, so it should bode for a very intense game."
As a team, it's fantastic to be in that must-win mode a few games prior to playoffs for the sake of adjusting to the pressure and the inevitably ramped-up tempo. It's always tough to flip the switch from "mid-season effort" to "throw-your-body-in-front-of-a-semi-truck-if-it-means-stopping-a-goal mode" when it's still the regular season, but if you want to get into playoffs, some years you have to do it.
And for teams in the same boat as Phoenix in the West — Dallas, Nashville, Los Angeles and Anaheim, for example — this is one of those years.
Shifting into that mode early provides these teams with an advantage after the regular season - suddenly you find yourself in round one, comfortable with the intensity and pressure, and your opponent feels like he walked into a bee's nest while covered in honey. You know what you're walking into before the game because you know how your team needs to come out of the gates - if that pace gets matched, you're in for a war, and if it doesn't, your opponent is in for a steamroller session.
Teams that haven't had to flip that switch (those pretty little top seeds) are often caught off guard by the slap-in-the-face reminder of how crazy playoff hockey truly is. It's not that guys don't try the rest of the year, it's that they occasionally make the "safe" decision ("maybe I'll stay standing and hope this puck hits my shinpads instead of tossing my face in front of that potential one-timer").
Not anymore, brutha.
It all sounds like a nice little advantage for the mid-packers, until they have to face a certain reality — it's not exactly ideal if you're hoping to win a Stanley Cup, which I'm told some teams are trying to do. You know, the whole "big picture" thing.
It's fine if you're content with winning a round or two, but to make it to the very end gets harder - playoffs are a war of attrition, and if you hope to be winning in June, you don't want to start sacrificing soldiers any sooner than you have to.
At the NHL's current pace (and given the size of its players), it's inevitable that guys get injured occasionally. When you step up the level of commitment and sacrifice as teams are right now, it only gets worse (it doesn't help that more injuries happen when players are tired — it's harder to get out of the way — and playing that all-out dogged style tends to be a little draining).
It all adds up to mean your roster gets depleted too soon to complete the big run — you hope you can hang on long enough without getting seriously bitten by the injury bug, but it can't be avoided for that long. Think of it as a boxer "punching himself out" early in a round — of course it's great to come out swinging, but if you don't land that knockout blow, it can get awfully hard once you're too spent to keep punching.
Teams in the middle of Western Conference are, to say the least, coming out punching right now, as attested by Tippett's use of terms like "biggest game of the year". The standings are shifting with each turn of the day-by-day calendar.
Whoever gets into playoffs may have a leg up on their opponent early. The only question is if they'll have a leg to stand on towards the end.