It's no secret that David Backes has not been getting the results on the ice that he or his team wants since signing with the Boston Bruins. In an attempt to improve things, Backes looked to figure skating over the summer. He says he hired a figure skating coach to help with his movements on the ice after meeting with some pre-teen figure skaters.
“So the whole story is I was skating with my old high school, just kind of playing shinny on one sheet. And I had a text from a friend of mine, said that her sister-in-law's sister's on the other rink with a bunch of little girls that would love for me to go say hi to them,” he said. “They were doing a drill, so 12-year-old girls, I'm jumping in the drill with them and I couldn't do the drill,” he recalled. “So it was maybe the most humbled I'd ever been in my life. And I went home and I said this is divine intervention, and I called that skating coach and I said ‘I need you to help me.' And she helped me. It was painful at times, I'm not going to lie. But I think it's translated into what I needed to have.”
Backes says he worked with the coach, Katie McDonough, three or four times a week over the offseason. The 35-year-old says he's definitely seeing and feeling the improvements in his skating, which appear to be shifting to his game. By several accounts, he's looked better during this preseason than he has in a while, which is great news for him. He was scratched several times last season, including during the last three games of the Stanley Cup final during St. Louis.
Backes is on the last two years of a a five-year, $30 million deal he signed with the Boston Bruins on July 1st, 2016. He is a verteran of 928 NHL games.
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Source: WEEI Radio
