Islanders Patrick Roy Explains Why He Put Second Group Through A Two-Hour Skate On Day Two Of Training Camp

Patrick "Herb Brooks" Roy is putting his players through tough skates to open up training camp. He explained why he's gone with this approach.

EAST MEADOW, NY -- After setting the tone on day one of training camp, New York Islanders head coach Patrick Roy isn't taking his foot off the gas. 

After the first group scrimmaged, a much smaller second group hit the ice, ending in a bag skate.

The hunch was that with fewer skaters, it would be a shorter practice.

We couldn't have been more wrong. 

The second group, consisting of the Islanders' top line, top defense pairing, and mostly other NHLers, was on the ice for nearly two hours. 

The first half consisted of routine drills, battles, odd-man rushes, and special teams work before Roy bag-skated the group.

Usually, a bag skate signals the end of practice.

Not on Friday.

For another 45 to 50 minutes or so, the players continued to do drills in tight battles before ending with a mini-game courtesy of a Barzal dagger:

Roy's trying to send a message, and the service says full bars. 

"It was good for them to do the skating and then going to do the skills on the other side," Roy said.  

"For them, it's to understand that we need to continue, even if I'm tired, you know? And that's what the objective was. Having them skate at the end of the practice and going to the other side means your legs are hurting, your arms are tired, and your body's tired, but you still need to continue to focus. 

Roy continued: "I think that's going to help us to get some consistency in our play. It's going to help us after the first period, going in the second, going into the third. An area that I hope it's going to help us a lot is the back-to-back games, being able to perform better in those back-to-back games."

It's not meant to be easy, and the players know that. Most of the second group actually said they felt better on Friday than they did on Thursday. 

Matt Martin shared that they were told before the skate that they'd have more to do after the sandbaggers, but...

"It was on the board that we were gonna go over and do some skill work. I think most of us forgot about it while doing the back-and-forth," Martin said. "But yeah, we were aware that we were gonna go work on some things."

As for how rewarding it was to finish the marathon practice:

"It feels good to be done for sure," Martin joked. "A lot of reps through the practice. Forget about the bag skate, but the practice aspect of it, there were a lot of battles. You're getting more than half the reps that you normally would -- more than half the rest you normally would.

"It's a skate that tests your willpower while kicking up the endurance. The thing I like is that there are just a lot of body battle drills right off the hop here. We're not just doing flow drills necessarily. We're bumping into each other. That's always the hardest part of the conditioning to get back. So it's good to get it in early."

When Roy was playing, he didn't do much in the offseason, which meant there was more work to be done in training camp to prepare for the upcoming campaign.

"Our training camp was longer back then [to prepare]," Roy said.  "I mean, come on, three days, and you're playing a game. We had almost 10 days before playing a game in the past. So, it's really changed. I wasn't doing [all of the skating]. I realized, especially with coaching juniors and talking with Lou about different things, that this is the best way to get the mindset back and push their mindset to respond to whatever challenges come up. And I think that's a good way to do it."