Coaches' navigation of Christmas break can set tone for strong 2nd ...

The Coaches Room is a regular feature throughout the 2024-25 season by former NHL coaches and assistants who turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher.

In this edition, Trent Yawney, a former assistant with the Los Angeles Kings, Edmonton Oilers and Anaheim Ducks and head coach with the Chicago Blackhawks, writes about how coaches feel and what they do during the Christmas break.

Everybody looks forward to the Christmas break. It’s a great time of year. It’s special.

A lot of players, once the schedule comes out, the first place they look is that Christmas break. Where are we going to be? How many days off do we have? Can I go home? Can I get a trip in somewhere?

The coaches and the support staff are doing the same thing, from equipment managers to trainers to therapists and the like; it’s not easy to get home during the season, so if the schedule allows they’re excited to do it.

But on the hockey side, there are teams now that don’t want this break to come. They’re the teams on a bit of a heater. They’re the teams that are feeling good, feeling that positive energy, and they don’t want to turn it off, if only for three days.

Then there are teams that are struggling that are welcoming a three-day respite.

The Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres are perfect examples of this.

The Senators have been playing well. They’ve climbed into a Stanley Cup Playoff spot. Their coaching staff is seeing them play the way they envisioned them to play when the season began. They’re having success. They’ve been on the road, together. There’s a lot of energy around the room and in the city. You combine that with the Christmas time of year and there’s a lot of reason to feel good, so you want to keep her going.

The Sabres are in a situation where they’re probably going, ‘Man, this break will be good for us just to get away, to get with family.’ It gives you a perspective. Sometimes it’s just good to get away for everybody just to breathe and come back fresh.

For a coaching staff, the Christmas break provides a demarcation in the schedule to take stock in where you are as a team, how you’ve developed to this point and what’s to come.

It’s only three days off but it’s a time of the year where you’re 35 or so games deep, you kind of have an idea of where you’re at as a team obviously in the standings, the teams in the playoffs at this point and out, and what your schedule is like coming up. Maybe post-Christmas injuries, guys coming back, all factor in too.

However, and it can also be like a big diesel locomotive; once it’s rolling it’s hard to stop, but once it stops, sometimes it’s hard to get it going again. You know that you can go 4-0 into the Christmas break and 0-4 coming out of it. That happens.

That’s what will make what happens on Saturday and Sunday interesting as teams come back. It’s not that everybody is back at the starting line even again, but it becomes about revving it back up and sprinting essentially to February, when the next break comes for the 4 Nations Face-Off. That’s not easy.

When that 4 Nations Face-Off comes, everybody is going to do this again with the difference being 92 of the best players in the League are going to be playing in a high-level tournament. The rest are not. The rest have a much longer break.

Coaches will be hoping at that time that the players playing in the 4 Nations are coming back healthy and those who aren’t are coming back in shape and ready to hit the ground running.

It’s good to have the break, though. This is the time of year when you can get distracted, when your mind can wander away from the task at hand because of the holidays and family and planning.

Now that we’re on the break, for a coach it’s OK for your mind to wander because for three days the task at hand doesn’t have to be your primary focus. You don’t lose touch with what’s happening, but you remember there are other things that are more important.

However, coaches coach, right? So when you have some free time during this break, automatically your brain takes you back to thinking, ‘Well, we’ve got to go play the Islanders on Saturday.’ The wheels start to turn a little bit. You can’t stop them.

You’re looking at the schedule and what happened in the few games before the break. You’re preparing for what your theme might be going into the first game coming out of the break. You think about and analyze things that might have been creeping into your game in the games before the break.

For coaches, it used to be that maybe you were concerned about players coming back from the break, wondering if they took care of themselves. But that’s not a concern anymore. Players are so good at taking care of themselves. It’s not like they’re coming back 10 pounds overweight from a huge Christmas dinner or anything like that.

But you’re also looking at it from a standpoint that it’s three days when the engine has been turned off and now you’ve got to start up again. That’s what I meant when I refereed the diesel locomotive. You worry because injuries are a part of the game and you want to make sure that once you start you don’t get a little bit of a groin pull here or a tweak there or something else, and all of a sudden your season changes.

No one remembers a whole lot what happened in the first half of the year, but everybody remembers what happens in the second half.