Morning practices are a regular thing in the NHL and they've been around for a long time. But Pittsburgh head coach Mike Sullivan is cutting down the amount of morning skates his players have to put up with. In fact, while talking to the media Monday, Sullivan called morning skates "overrated" and used an analogy dealing with his mother's ham to express how useless he feels they are.
“It's, like, why do the whole league have morning skates?” Sullivan said. “It reminds me of when my mother cut the side of the hams off before she cooked them. And I asked her. I said, ‘Why do you cut the side of the hams off?' She says, ‘I don't know, that's what my mother taught me.' So, I asked my grandmother. I said, ‘Why do you cut the side of the hams off before you put them in the oven? She says, ‘That's easy. I didn't have a pan that was big enough.'
“So that's my analogy about morning skates.”
It seems Sullivan believes the entire league only does morning skates because that's the way they've always done things, even though they have very little value. We're certain many players would love it if AM skates were eliminated, but we don't see them being gone any time soon.
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