One of the best free-agent pickups this season has been Dallas Stars forward Matt Duchene. And in this feature story from The Hockey News’ April 29, 2013 edition (Volume 66, Issue 23), Ryan Kennedy put together a profile on Duchene in his time as a member of the Colorado Avalanche.
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Renowned hockey skills coach Darryl Belfry worked with Duchene early in his NHL days, and while Duchene wasn’t an elite performer – although he was a point-per-game player at the time Kennedy’s story was published – Belfry said Duchene had the technique to keep up with his NHL peers.
“Young players, when they move from junior to the NHL or from one role on a team to another, they don’t necessarily know what skill got them there,” Belfry said. “For Matt, his best attribute is his skating ability. What we found through video analysis is that he was generating offense off the rush, but not down low. He was either stationary or had no speed. Now, he has movement down low. He can manipulate defenders.”
Duchene remained an Av through 2017, but it has taken him some time to ascend to where he is with the Stars today – a difference-making talent who understands his role. Getting confidence from his coaches was a key, and Duchene now offers an array of tools that makes Dallas a front-runner for this year’s Stanley Cup.
“He’s the type of young man that needs the reassurance that he’ll come out of his slumps, that the skill will come out,” then-Avalanche coach Joe Sacco said of Duchene. “He’ll get down and he needs to be reminded that he’ll get out of it. There will be highs and lows. What I’ve liked about Matt this season is his overall consistency. Not just from an offensive standpoint, but moving towards being a complete player. His play away from the puck has improved and certainly the effort is there to play 200 feet.”
REMADE IN THE ROCKIES
Vol. 66, No. 23, April 29, 2013
By Ryan Kennedy
Matt Duchene is a renaissance man. Always has been. Not only is the fourth-year pro a very good hockey player, but he also plays guitar and once designed the jersey for the high school team in his hometown of Haliburton, Ont. Which is to say he knows how to translate things from brain to fingers.
But last season, his brain was tripping him up and the rest of his body wasn’t following. The kid who burst onto the NHL scene as an 18-year-old with the Colorado Avalanche in 2009-10 saw his points per game drop, as well as his ice time and his plus-minus. After being named to the all-rookie team and playing in the All-Star Game as a sophomore, Duchene was hit with injuries to his ankle and knee that limited him to 58 games after missing just three total in his first two campaigns. Something was amiss and it was time to reassess his approach to the game – starting with his off-ice regimen. “I got away from my game plan,” Duchene says. “I went overboard in the weight room and got away from what made me tick.”
The slick speedster went from an athlete who cared about form to one who focused on big weights and big reps and it wasn’t working. “I started listening to a lot of outside sources, too many different voices,” he says. “I needed to get back to my roots.”
So this summer, he went back to Haliburton and Laurie Kah, who along with Sidney Crosby’s trainer Andy O’Brien and on-ice skills coach Darryl Belfry got Duchene’s body in tune. The results have been excellent: Duchene was a point-per-game player for the first time in his young career, making magic with P-A Parenteau on Colorado’s most dangerous line. “Matt has a real intrinsic feel for his body and that’s why he can apply lessons so quickly,” Belfry says. “You can tell a player something or show it to them, but most of your top young players today are feel-based, a motion goes from awkward to comfortable. Matt can understand when he can feel what is going on.”
Belfry, who is based in St. Catharines, Ont., works 1-on-1 with a host of NHLers from John Tavares and Patrick Kane to Shawn Horcoff and Dan Girardi. Duchene and Crosby worked with him in Los Angeles over the summer, with glowing reports. “He put us through our paces,” Duchene says. “He’s been huge for my game.”
Belfry keeps in touch with his clients via video during the season, hammering home the specific skills he wanted them to develop. “Young players, when they move from junior to the NHL or from one role on a team to another, they don’t necessarily know what skill got them there,” he says. “For Matt, his best attribute is his skating ability. What we found through video analysis is that he was generating offense off the rush, but not down low. He was either stationary or had no speed. Now, he has movement down low. He can manipulate defenders.”
Duchene’s skating is what Belfry refers to as the pivot’s “Pandora skill,” which when added or improved opens up other skills in a player’s game and allows him to make big gains in a short amount of time. From there, a “habit profile” is created, containing objectives Duchene is to use each game (there’s a “magic number” for these, but the amount is a trade secret for Belfry). For instance, if Duchene can be a threat off the wall in the offensive zone, he can force defenders to switch the man they’re covering. That opens up more opportunities for Duchene and his linemates, since chaos favors the attackers. Changing speeds is also important for the Colorado center to keep in mind. “No matter how fast you are,” Belfry says, “guys can gap you at the NHL level.”
It almost appears to be kismet that Duchene has played alongside Parenteau this season, where the former Islanders wizard and the big-bodied Jamie McGinn have been glove fits for the 22-year-old. “P-A likes to slow the game down,” says Avs coach Joe Sacco. “He has a lot of patience with the puck and he’ll curl around at the blueline and hold onto it. ‘Dutchie’ is a straight-ahead, push-the-pace kind of player, so they work well together because P-A can dish him the puck when Dutchie has speed.”
But before the skilled center refined his skill game on the ice, he had to become one with himself in the gym. “If you’re in the right position in the weight room,” Duchene says, “you’ll be in the right position on the ice.”
With Kah, the Colorado star was getting back to fitness routines he had done growing up, activities that were movement – based and organic. “I was always comfortable with my strength,” he says. “But I was disconnected. My legs were working on their own, my core was working on its own.”
With Kah and O’Brien providing a 1-2 training punch, Duchene got right. He met with O’Brien in Los Angeles, spending all of June with the guru and really getting down to brass tacks. “The first time I met Matt, we spent five or six hours just talking,” O’Brien says. “I really just wanted to get to know him. His numbers were significantly down from the previous year and I wanted to know why he thought that was.”
Duchene thought he lacked jump in his game, so O’Brien began to do some detective work. Was there a biomechanical issue? After all, Duchene had sustained injuries to his knee and ankle last season. Could it be neurological? Timing is everything for an elite athlete and if the messages aren’t getting to the right place at the time, all the raw power in the world won’t matter. As it turns out, it was a bit of both. Neurologically, Duchene had an undiagnosed intolerance to gluten. An autoimmune reaction to that caused inflammation, general stiffness and decreasing flexibility, so he went through a total diet change (see sidebar).
Biomechanically, Duchene’s earlier injuries were indeed having a lasting effect. “There were definitely times where he felt under-recovered last year,” O’Brien says. “What we found is that he had a really limited range of motion in his hip. That was causing a lot of deficiencies.”
Duchene’s ankle, knee and hip were not working together in synch and that’s what it’s all about. O’Brien’s directives worked on better posture, hip flexibility, better activation in Duchene’s core and even the angles of his shins. “At first it was so difficult for me,” Duchene says. “It was always like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. I wanted to get more hockey-specific and he’s the best when it comes to hockey training. He finds my weaknesses and helps them. He’ll definitely be my trainer for the rest of my career.”
On the ice, the new trainer noticed Duchene had some inefficiencies in his techniques even an elite skater could stand to eliminate. “We talked a lot about the way he moved on the ice when he was making plays,” O’Brien says. “For example, when he crossed his feet, his body moved upwards, whereas you should be staying low in order to accelerate.”
With the body taken care of, Duchene still had the matter of his head. Losing was not familiar for a kid who followed success in junior on the Ontario League’s Brampton Battalion with a playoff berth in his NHL rookie season, where the Avs nearly upset top-seeded San Jose in the opening round. “He’s a very passionate individual,” O’Brien says. “And he’s very passionate about the Colorado Avalanche, the team he grew up cheering for. It weighed on him. But to Matt’s credit, he says, ‘I’m better than this.’”
And though Duchene’s 67 points as a sophomore improved upon his 55 points as a rookie, last season his points-per-game average was nearly slashed in half. “Maybe he put a little too much pressure on himself to score, rather than focus on his other responsibilities,” Sacco says. “He’s more confident this year, much like he was in his first season. When you’re 18, you’ve got nothing to lose. You just go out and play your game.”
Which, thanks to the lockout, is what Duchene got to do in the fall when he joined the legendary Frolunda franchise in Sweden. The Canadian kid rang up 14 points in 19 games for a team on which the leading scorer for the full season (fun trivia: it was Henrik Lundqvist’s twin brother Joel) only totalled 34 in 55 contests.
From there, it was on to Switzerland, where Duchene played a couple games for Ambri-Piotta before joining Team Canada at the Spengler Cup, where a loaded Canucks squad also featuring Tyler Seguin and Jason Spezza overpowered a Davos team buttressed by Joe Thornton and Loui Eriksson. “It was an absolute blast playing in Frolunda and Ambri,” Duchene says. “And I can’t say enough about the way Hockey Canada treated us, just class all the way. Coming off of last year, I felt rejuvenated. It was a test, a trial.”
Duchene admits Year 3 of this NHL career held a steep learning curve and though his coach points out that the player’s youth more than excuses some of his missteps, he also admits that sometimes the driven talents are the ones that need more help. “He’s the type of young man that needs the reassurance that he’ll come out of his slumps, that the skill will come out,” Sacco says. “He’ll get down and he needs to be reminded that he’ll get out of it. There will be highs and lows. What I’ve liked about Matt this season is his overall consistency. Not just from an offensive standpoint, but moving towards being a complete player. His play away from the puck has improved and certainly the effort is there to play 200 feet.”
If only the rest of the Avs had followed suit. Colorado was put under a cloud right away during the shortened campaign when the effort to re-sign heart-and-soul center Ryan O’Reilly went south in a public way. Duchene’s 2009 draft mate (O’Reilly also jumped straight to the NHL after the Avs took him 33rd overall) missed the first month and a half of the campaign due to the impasse, while new captain Gabriel Landeskog was held out a month after sustaining a concussion in Game 4.
Overall, the Avs had one of the worst offensive attacks in the NHL, despite the growing array of talent assembled by the franchise. With the playoffs a dream right now, the team must look at where things went wrong. “We had some really big games where we played well and others where we didn’t,” Sacco says. “If there’s a lesson this year it’s that when you don’t have your ‘A’ game, you want to at least bring your ‘A-minus‘ or ‘B’ game instead of your ‘C’ game because that’s when things go into the ditch.”
Still, it’s hard to look at the core of Duchene, Landeskog, O’Reilly and netminder Semyon Varlamov and not see promise, particularly since several solid young blueliners are poised to bring even more offense to the team soon. “It’s going to come together,” Duchene says. “The consensus among the guys on our team is that we have the talent and we have the character.”
With a crack squad of specialists helping him along the way, Duchene’s point-pergame pace this season seems like the new norm for the young Avs star, rather than an aberration abetted by the shortened season. With body and mind now firing on all cylinders, it’s going to be even more difficult for the opposition to slow him down.
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