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jstewismybastardson
Lord Shitlord aka El cibernauta
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I had a good chuckle when i read this ... how does Kevin keep his job? It all starts from the very top doesnt it?
This weekend's big news is that Steve Tambellini decided it was time for a change in the medical staff and dismissed Ken Lowe along with the locker room staff. Never before in Edmonton history have the guys with the smaller blurbs in the media guide been the subject of so many front page articles.
All of this makes Mayors Manor's interview with Chad Moreau, much more interesting. In it, Moreau discusses the 05-06 team, his relationship with Craig MacTavish, remaking the Oilers and he responds to Pat Quinn's suggestion that he was behind the injuries. After the jump, a look at some of the interesting items from the interview.
The Oilers have never been known as a cutting-edge team - fans like to make fun of the fact that the organization has never moved on from the 1980's, the "Boys On The Bus" era - so it comes as no surprise that when Craig MacTavish asked Moreau to become part of the organization in 2005, training wasn't a top priority. While most teams had responded to the training revolution in the 90's, the Oilers were still in the dark ages. According to Moreau:
The weight room was very small, I'd guess maybe a 500-750 square foot room. It had a very low ceiling with a bunch of pipes overhead. For example, Chris Pronger couldn't even push a bar over his head without crashing the plates into a pipe overhead....So, we had this horrible - tiny, tiny - training room. We couldn't even put the whole team in there at one time. We had to work out in shifts, with half the guys working out before practice and the other half after because we just couldn't fit everybody in the tiny room we had. I even had to bring equipment in for them, just so we had enough stuff.
Moreau remade the Oilers facilities and with the help of Chris Pronger introduced a regular training and fitness regimen, including training days spent away from the ice. Moreau also spent time on the Oilers' nutritional needs. Though most teams had begun to understand what kind of menu was necessary to fuel the highest-level athletes in the world, the Oilers again were stuck in the cheeseburgers, pack of smokes and a six-pack for dinner days of the 80's:
When I first came to the team I was shocked at what they were eating on the planes. I couldn't believe what guys were eating, so I went to work right away with some changes. It didn't make me the most popular guy though...especially with the staff guys, believe it or not. We did away with the processed meats and garbage...we were doing more fruits and salads.
But Pronger's departure made it harder for Moreau to maintain his program in Edmonton and the following years saw the team move away from their regimen. According to Moreau, even Craig MacTavish, the man that asked him to come aboard in the first place, didn't have conditioning at the top of his priority list with such a young team:
When they lost some of the veteran players starting in around 2007 they wanted to spend more time on the ice with their younger players. I would talk with MacTavish - who I always had a great working relationship with...we needed to spend time in the weight room like the first season I was there...So, I think one thing that happens when a team starts to panic, when they start losing some games - especially if they have a younger line-up...they start spending so much time on the ice the players start to lose some of that strength base that they built up in the off season. You really start to see this in the second half of the season and into the playoffs. In fact, I saw this with the Oilers. When I was with the team we would do mid-season testing and their testing scores would be significantly lower than when they first came into training camp on day one. I would express my concern to the training staff...that this could not only lead to decreased performance, but higher injury potential.
This weekend's big news is that Steve Tambellini decided it was time for a change in the medical staff and dismissed Ken Lowe along with the locker room staff. Never before in Edmonton history have the guys with the smaller blurbs in the media guide been the subject of so many front page articles.
All of this makes Mayors Manor's interview with Chad Moreau, much more interesting. In it, Moreau discusses the 05-06 team, his relationship with Craig MacTavish, remaking the Oilers and he responds to Pat Quinn's suggestion that he was behind the injuries. After the jump, a look at some of the interesting items from the interview.
The Oilers have never been known as a cutting-edge team - fans like to make fun of the fact that the organization has never moved on from the 1980's, the "Boys On The Bus" era - so it comes as no surprise that when Craig MacTavish asked Moreau to become part of the organization in 2005, training wasn't a top priority. While most teams had responded to the training revolution in the 90's, the Oilers were still in the dark ages. According to Moreau:
The weight room was very small, I'd guess maybe a 500-750 square foot room. It had a very low ceiling with a bunch of pipes overhead. For example, Chris Pronger couldn't even push a bar over his head without crashing the plates into a pipe overhead....So, we had this horrible - tiny, tiny - training room. We couldn't even put the whole team in there at one time. We had to work out in shifts, with half the guys working out before practice and the other half after because we just couldn't fit everybody in the tiny room we had. I even had to bring equipment in for them, just so we had enough stuff.
Moreau remade the Oilers facilities and with the help of Chris Pronger introduced a regular training and fitness regimen, including training days spent away from the ice. Moreau also spent time on the Oilers' nutritional needs. Though most teams had begun to understand what kind of menu was necessary to fuel the highest-level athletes in the world, the Oilers again were stuck in the cheeseburgers, pack of smokes and a six-pack for dinner days of the 80's:
When I first came to the team I was shocked at what they were eating on the planes. I couldn't believe what guys were eating, so I went to work right away with some changes. It didn't make me the most popular guy though...especially with the staff guys, believe it or not. We did away with the processed meats and garbage...we were doing more fruits and salads.
But Pronger's departure made it harder for Moreau to maintain his program in Edmonton and the following years saw the team move away from their regimen. According to Moreau, even Craig MacTavish, the man that asked him to come aboard in the first place, didn't have conditioning at the top of his priority list with such a young team:
When they lost some of the veteran players starting in around 2007 they wanted to spend more time on the ice with their younger players. I would talk with MacTavish - who I always had a great working relationship with...we needed to spend time in the weight room like the first season I was there...So, I think one thing that happens when a team starts to panic, when they start losing some games - especially if they have a younger line-up...they start spending so much time on the ice the players start to lose some of that strength base that they built up in the off season. You really start to see this in the second half of the season and into the playoffs. In fact, I saw this with the Oilers. When I was with the team we would do mid-season testing and their testing scores would be significantly lower than when they first came into training camp on day one. I would express my concern to the training staff...that this could not only lead to decreased performance, but higher injury potential.
