How psyche impacts player and team success in hockey
Everyone knows that a good workplace environment can lead to a successful business. The same goes for sports, especially in hockey.
How a team approaches the game on a daily basis can determine how a team plays and whether or not they’re a confident bunch. The correct mindset in a group can be the difference between winning a championship and not even being close to competing for one.
On Friday’s edition of Daily Faceoff LIVE, former NHL head coach Don Granato explains how a good and bad psyche could lead to positive and negative results.
Don Granato: The psyche is is everything. The problem is, it’s not tangible. So, that’s that’s the difficulty for all managers, really. It’s not any lack of their effort…it’s hard to you can’t you can’t project or predict that in the offseason. You can put your rosters together. You can go into training camp, and have a 500-page coaching manual and slap it down, and it’s impressive as hell, but the moment the other team lines up against you and there’s one puck and two guys competing for it, everything changes.
I can tell you that the Florida Panthers…everybody talks about their system. One of the biggest reasons they won the Stanley Cup is that they went out on the ice, and they set the bar higher than their competitors were willing or felt comfortable playing at. They challenged the competitive field….they won the battle of the psyche. You saw teams basically just quit in the playoffs against them because they got through to their psyche by setting the damn bar so high competitively. You see that through the league. So, I always say this: when you look at those standings, the teams are fighting for those last couple of spots, and we were in that situation in Buffalo. We did not handle the muddy water well enough. You lose game 60 and your media is saying, ‘Oh, my God, that was the game that’s going to cost you the playoff spot.’ You let it bog you down and you lose the next game. They say, ‘Well, they’re convincing. You’ve lost two in a row and you can’t lose two in a row at this time of year.’
I can remember a couple of years ago, the Washington Capitals got that last spot. They were like minus-52 on the year. It just didn’t bother them. Losing didn’t bother them or a loss didn’t bother them as much as the next team that was competing for that final spot. So, that’s how this thing is going to play out. It’s played out that way historically. The teams that can handle the imperfections, you get into these situations and you think, ‘Oh, my God, we have to be perfect.’ When you do that, it’s counterproductive and counterintuitive to success for those slots because you don’t enjoy that wide margin of talent like these top teams do.
You can watch the full segment and entire episode here…