Another Chicken or Egg Story

By now, most serious hockey fans have seen the following video, and many have replayed it until almost memorizing the moves — if it’s even possible to memorize them.

Anyway, whether you’ve seen this clip before or not, I’d like the visitor to watch it a time or two, before allowing me to say my piece…

Okay, that thing about the “chicken or egg”…

Well, what really bothers me nowadays is something the previous generations of hockey players never faced. And by that, I’m talking about the video fads we now see on the likes of at least Instagram and YouTube, and sometimes on LinkedIn (actually, for my money, Instagram is the absolute worst of them).

More to the point, my concern is that young players nowadays really need someone to interpret the likes of the above video, and the myriad of other such moves they’re seeing all over the Internet. There’s little doubt, even, that kids are constantly trying to outdo each other, with wild move after wild move after wild move.

Now, don’t get me wrong, because I think kids of all ages should want to eventually have those kinds of skills. The problem — again, concerns putting such things into perspective.

More specifically, about the chicken and the egg… I need to say right here and now, that moves like those aren’t going to win a player a pro roster spot, a college team spot, or even a high school slot. No, a player has to be fairly able in almost all of the game’s skills, as well as be smart when it comes to thinking the game on both sides of the puck.

So again, what I’m talking about is perspective, or devoting the appropriate amount of time and attention to all the abilities that will help a player advance in the game.

All that said, a lot of my former players and students might be scratching their heads right now, and thinking back to how much I always loved teaching puckhandling. And, they’d be right. However, if they think back a bit more, they’ll quickly realized that I always kept things in perspective. Many of them even became pretty successful coaches, mainly because they developed a well rounded knowledge of our game.

So, going back to that chicken and egg thing one last time, let me suggest that young players — or especially those who oversee their development — better appreciate where the most time must be spent in order to progress up the hockey ladder.