Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

The biggest difference between a junior player and a veteran pro is being able to properly gauge how much gas he has in the tank.

There's not much mystery to major junior hockey, not a lot of intrigue when it's teenagers that you're talking about. But one mystery is how John Tavares scored 72 goals as a 16-year-old but dropped to 40 the following year. Yes, he missed several games because of a commitment to the world under-20 team. But still he dropped from better a goal-a-game pace to a two-goals-every-three-games rate. As George Constanza would say: Shrinkage. In any language it loses little in translation.

I asked Tavares about it a while back and he had a pretty telling comeback. "I had played a lot of hockey and it took more out of me than I thought," he said.

Tavares then went through it -- it started with the Summit Series in the summer of '07, eight games with practices run by Brent Sutter and travel through about a dozen time-zones. No one's idea of a vacation. From there right back into the fray with Oshawa and then on to the world juniors and another bunch of intense practices and another trans-Atlantic flight and games with more pressure than most teenagers could hope to bear. Then right back into the fray once more just days after. The way he laid it out, it was a real roller-coaster ride.

This brings us to the stretch run of this year's major seasons. The race is supposed to go to the swiftest ... but try telling that to the guy whose gauge hits E. You can't win if there's no gas in the tank.

Back when the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup I had a brief conversation with Ken Hitchcock about practices and player management. "We led the league in one category this season: days off," Hitchcock said. It wasn't that Hitchcock was customizing his approach with a contending veteran team in the tough-travel Western Conference. He seems to be sticking by that philosophy with Columbus.

It is the most underrated aspect of sports. They talk about being rested and ready -- well, rested doesn't just mean having a night's sleep. "Rest" isn't the best word -- "recovery" is more like it.

This is going to be a big factor the rest of the way in the junior season. You could see in the CHL Prospects Game that Evander Kane wasn't at his best -- in fact, in against players in his own year he didn't look as prominent as he had playing up a couple of years at the world juniors. Fact is, this year he'll not only play more high-level hockey than ever before in his short, sweet life but he'll travel more to boot. It starts with a trip to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for the under-18s in August. Then U-20s in Ottawa -- you might think that the travel was too rigorous but consider that he had an extra cross-country return flight tossed in his itinerary. Then back to Oshawa a couple of weeks later. (Don't imagine that Hockey Canada and the CHL have juniors flying business class.) And that's just to compound the arduous bus travel that's just part of playing in the Dub.

You might presume that some of the best players who didn't make the world junior team would be well poised to have big second halves -- rest being the main consolation for not making the team. Not the way it works out. Take Matt Duchene in Brampton. Like Kane, he played in the under-18s last summer. He was cut by the under-20 team in December ... you're presuming that this and a small break over the holiday season would leave him fresh as a daisy for the rest of the second half of the season. Not the way it played out, though.

At the Prospects Game, I asked Duchene how important it was for his Brampton teammates Cody Hodgson and Evgeny Grachev to get some downtime after the world juniors. "I needed them to get back as soon as they could," he said. "I was getting worn out."

That's the harder one to track. It's easier to see how Kane would be worn ragged, harder to figure out what extra burden has been taken on by players whose teammates have had world-junior obligations or injuries. It's not just hard to see from the seats. It's nearly as hard from the inside. It's tough for the coaches and even for the players.

Take the coaches first. Their first impulse is to push players, to make them better with more work, that practice is the solution to all problems. In fact, practice sometimes exacerbates problems. There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of an orange. I thought it was interesting that Dale Hunter gave Tavares a day or two off and waited a game before putting him into the London Knights lineup -- this after Oshawa threw him right back in there after the world juniors. Hunter has a good handle on these things and I'd expect him to find a way to keep him fresh the rest of the way.

Then there are the players. They're even less likely to see the need for rest. Almost all the best players are the hardest-working ones -- by virtue of their work ethic they've achieved a level of excellence. By a work ethic, not a rest ethic. It's the biggest difference between a junior player and a veteran pro -- the veteran has a sense of how much gas he has in his tank and knows when to pull over at a station while a junior just figures he has enough to get wherever he has to go. For the likes of Kane and Duchene that's a long run that started in Europe in early August and for some top drafted players it's a run with detours through NHL training camps and the under-20s.

It looks like Tavares at 18 is back in the form he showed at 16 -- maybe the goal-scoring isn't quite there but his all-around game is dramatically improved. It's going to be fascinating to watch the races down the stretch, where the race might go to the swiftest or it might go to the rested.