Temperatures reached north of 60 degrees in St. Paul on Monday, but it felt like a blizzard besieged the inside of Xcel Energy Center.
The floor of the arena looked like a snowstorm hit after players chewed the ice into oblivion during 20 minutes of conditioning. Afterward, the coaches had to get out the shovels in order to work overtime with youngsters Joel Eriksson Ek and Tyler Graovac.
"I haven't done those since high school," defenseman Ryan Suter said of the conditioning drills. "Not in the NHL. It's good. You have to be in shape and the way it was done, we had fun with it. If you get all mad about it, you don't get anything out of it."
After running a hard practice for nearly an hour, coach Bruce Boudreau sounded like a drill sergeant as he urged players during the ensuing skate-a-thon.
"We did that drill in Fort Wayne in 1991," Boudreau said. "You look for the reaction that I think we got today. That's the reaction we had as players. It's hard work. It's a lot of skating. It was enthusiastic and ended the way I wanted it to end. I was pretty happy with it."
With a day off Tuesday, Boudreau felt the timing was right. The four-part drill started with "up-and-downs" where players skated the length of the ice eight times. Then, they skated four times around cones before moving on to iron crosses, where inside each faceoff circle, players did "stops and starts" from the dot to each side of the circle.
Finally, players did four sets of "blue line to blue lines," where they started on their stomachs and backs. The fourth lap was player's choice, so there'd be, as Boudreau said, "some pretty funky endings," like belly flops and slides on knees.
Players were hooting and howling.
