WASHINGTON — “Be hard to play against!”
“The Journey starts here.”
“It’s a great day for hockey!”
“Stay hungry.”
“Details of discipline, discipline of details.”
“Own it: Own your team. Own your game. Own your habits. Own your attitude.”
Ok, you get the idea—and maybe you’re even feeling highly motivated. Also, maybe not, but these are just some of the messages you’ll find in the visitor’s dressing room at Capital One Arena, which is set to host a pivotal Game 5 on Saturday night, when this tied-up second-round series between the Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins shifts back to Washington for a best-of-three.
And no, the visitor’s room isn’t decorated that way because the Capitals want the Penguins to feel motivated and comfortable. Hardly. It’s because the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions really know how to make the road feel as un-road-like as possible.
“I want it to feel homey,” says the man responsible for all this signage, Pittsburgh’s long-time equipment manager, Dana Heinze. He trucks around an extra trunk filled with signs that he puts up and tears down in every visiting locker room, throughout the season.
“I have new ones made up for the playoffs, and I change it up every year,” says Heinze, who’s been on staff with Pittsburgh for 13 years, where he came after a stint in Tampa Bay. “I kind of go crazy.”
He does.
As soon as you head down the hall to the visitor’s dressing room, you’ll see evidence of Heinze’s work, which includes a sign taped to the ceiling. He can’t even wager a guess as to how many he puts up, but put it this way: Were it not for the size of the visitor’s dressing room at Capital One Arena, which is among the tiniest in the league, you might mistake this for a Penguins home game, for all the decorations in there, including team flags.
The biggest piece is a giant Penguins-logo carpet that Heinze plunks right in the middle of the room, which nobody’s allowed to step on (the logo part, at least), meaning the gathered media in Washington are tip-toeing along the periphery. A lot of teams in this league don’t have logo carpets in their home dressing rooms, let alone on the road.
“It’s definitely a professional operation,” says towering defenceman, Jamie Oleksiak, who joined the team back in December. “No doubt about that.”
The fan investment tips you off to that fact, too. Because it’s a four-hour drive between cities, you’ll find a fair amount of Penguins fans in the stands for Capitals home games during this series.
As the league’s leading scorer in the playoffs, Jake Guentzel puts it, “you can just tell the city is more invested.”
That describes Heinze’s approach to his job, too. In simple terms, he’s responsible for equipment and making sure it gets from city to city. But he also makes sure he arrives before anyone else does on game days, so he can take 20 minutes to put up all his signs and lay down individual-sized Penguins carpets for each player to rest his skates on.
“I take each locker room and I try to turn it into some sense of Pittsburgh, if you will,” he says. “I just dress it up.”
Heinze, who was born in Johnstown, Penn., where they filmed the classic of all hockey classics, Slap Shot, has been doing this his entire career, dating back to 1988, when he got his first gig with the Johnstown Chiefs of the ECHL.
“It’s kind of my thing,” he says. “A lot of people used to make fun of me, but now everyone’s starting to copy me, so that’s a form of flattery, I guess.”
You could also make the case it seems to be working, judging by this team’s recent success, but Heinze isn’t the superstitious type who believes these signs contribute in any way to winning. “I just want my players to be comfortable in the environment they’re in, that’s all,” he says. “You look at it, it looks 100 times better than the blank white walls.
“The guys appreciate it, I know that.”
It’s of course nothing compared to what you’ll see in Pittsburgh—you’ll lose count of the number of large silver cups you see around the rink, designed to look like Lord Stanley’s, to remind everyone of the five the city has won. Walk around and you’ll see “Let’s go Pens!” flashing on public transit bus screens, Sidney Crosby jerseys on kids and grandparents, and the Penguins’ interesting take on the word “Believe” — They’re spelling it 3elieve. Get it?
But certainly, Heinze is doing as best he can to bring as much of that feeling on the road.
“I think you walk in here and it’s like, wow, you’re in Pittsburgh! Even though you’re not,” he says. “Plus, it looks cool.”
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