In the past two days, I’ve attended the Montreal Canadiens’ Development Camp held in Brossard, QC.
It was an excellent opportunity to better understand the MTL Player Development department’s ever-evolving process and to steal some best practices that you can employ with your players.
In the first of a multi-part series, here are some of the themes of the two practice days
Click here for my Twitter recap thread with clips & brief notes.
In the next few days I’ll be doing a drill-by-drill video breakdown, as well as share one mind-blowing learning from Adam Nicholas’ innovative approach to drill design. In the meantime, here’s a very brief overview of what MTL did and didn’t do.
Format
9AM-10AM goalie session
11AM-12PM Fs & Ds on separate rinks - station drills, no goalies
12:15PM-12:45PM all players on same rink - small area games
No afternoon on-ice sessions
Focus
What I saw:
First touch on puck retrievals & rim collections
Puck protection & finding plays under pressure
Timing & quick-strike offense off bad pucks
Practice-to-game transfer of above skills
What I didn’t see:
(No rush play or rush defense drills)
(No isolation shooting or skating drills)
Ex: Boston Bruins
(No shot blocking or pure physicality drills)
(No systems/tactics/explicit style of play drills)
Raw Clips Download
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hockey Tactics Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.