STOCKHOLM — After an eight-and-a-half-hour transatlantic flight from Detroit, the Red Wings stepped off the plane in Sweden on Sunday and went straight to the ice rink.
Joe Veleno had slept in the air, but by the time the Red Wings landed, it was early afternoon local time. To their body clocks? More like 7:30 a.m. No matter: it was time for practice.
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“I was so tired,” Veleno said.
An NHL practice after that kind of travel is not for the faint of heart.
“I think we knew that was going to be a little bit of a Sunday skate,” Andrew Copp said.
But the players’ energy level at practice was far from the point. With the Red Wings needing to make a sharp transition between six time zones in time to be ready for high-performance action on Thursday, they needed to do everything they could to get things started the right way.
That meant getting their players moving, and ideally, onto something resembling what was about to become their new schedule. So, bleary-eyed, they went to practice. And that was just the beginning.
“It’s a whirlwind,” Ben Chiarot said. “The whole trip kind of is.”
But considering the rare opportunity the trip presents, especially for native Swedes like Detroit’s Lucas Raymond, they find a way to make it work — largely via a built-in buffer after the travel. After their Sunday practice, Detroit had an off day Monday, followed by regular practices on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Moritz Seider said that Red Wings players received a PowerPoint presentation from their team dietician, Lisa McDowell, outlining what to do and what not to do to make their transition as easy as possible. Some dos: forcing yourself to stay up late early on, to push the sleep schedule back; getting sunlight in the morning; eating breakfast — even though it feels like the middle of the night — to adjust to the meal schedule; cold showers. There are nutritional elements that can help too, including supplements such as magnesium and melatonin.
As for the don’ts, players’ big takeaway was about avoiding naps, especially after 3 p.m., or for more than an hour. And for hockey players, that’s not an easy transition.
“If you nap,” Christian Fischer quipped, “then you just screwed yourself for the next 24 hours.”
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In a perfect world, of course, a normal person traveling to Europe might spend the week before their trip gradually adjusting their sleep and meal times to those of their destination. Maybe you’re eating dinner around 4 p.m. and in bed by 8 each night, for example.
But for a professional athlete?
“There’s just only so much you can do,” Alex Lyon said. “We played at 1 o’clock (Saturday in Detroit) and then we were on a plane at 10. So it’s like, you can’t go the entire week preparing or whatever.”
Especially because the built-in off days before and after the Global Series games mean these teams are already dealing with compressed schedules. Leading up to their flight, the Red Wings played on the road in New York Tuesday, a home game Thursday night, and then an afternoon contest the day that they flew. The 1 p.m. start against Columbus probably did help to get them used to that as a start time (their Global series games will start at 2 p.m. ET), but there’s certainly not a lot of time there for adjusting sleep or meal times in advance.
For a trip like this one, though, they simply do what they can.
“Everybody’s in the same boat,” Fischer said. “There’s four teams here, they’re all doing the same thing. It’s just finding a way. I think we actually were the first team to get here, and I think that’s probably a smart play by us to get here a day or two early. I think by (Thursday) night, I think most of us should figure out how to have energy by seven, eight o’clock.”
By Wednesday’s practice, not every Red Wing felt fully adjusted quite yet, but they were at least well on their way to bridging the six-hour time difference.
The most central element has been sleep. And for good reason: a thrown-off sleep schedule, especially for a highly regulated athlete’s body, can be disorienting — to all parts of the body. As of Tuesday, one Red Wings player quipped that his “digestive system is still not quite on track yet.”
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Lyon referenced a past trip he had taken to Europe, and how a three-hour afternoon nap on Day 1 had “completely ruined my entire trip.” That experience gave him a good baseline for how important it would be to get onto the right sleep schedule early on this time around.
At midnight in Sweden, it’s only 6 p.m. in Detroit. Even by 2 a.m., it still feels like 8 p.m. to an unadjusted body clock. And for those reasons, the wrong bedtime (even when it feels like the right one) can be easily confused for a nap. Veleno has found he’s been able to get to sleep at night, but then wakes up in the middle of it, unable to fall back asleep — basically, the textbook jet lag experience.
The general guidance is to avoid screens, but Fischer admitted to turning on Netflix the first night when he couldn’t sleep. But when it comes to skipping those naps, he’s tried to stay busy.
“I think I’ve walked around Stockholm for at least 10 miles,” Fischer said. “There’s a ton of things you can do. I think that’s the biggest thing: just don’t be in your room. Because if you lay on that bed, there’s a strong chance that you’re gonna fall asleep.”
Others, though, worry less about adjusting the schedule as a whole, and more about the two games they will play Thursday and Friday.
“That’s all that matters,” Chiarot said. “Because as soon as you play the games, you’re right back.”
And therein lies the next challenge.
Certainly, the Red Wings’ sole focus right now has been on getting ready for the two games they’ll play against the Senators and Maple Leafs. They are divisional contests with potentially big stakes for their season.
But in the context of the overall season, it’s quite the excursion to throw right in the middle of an 82-game marathon — concentrating a meaningful amount of off days in a short span of time.
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Two Detroit players who have done trips like this before said it’s easier going back. The overall grind, though, can still add up on the back end of a Global Series trip. Just ask the Colorado Avalanche, who played a pair of games in Tampere, Finland, in early November 2022.
The trip was a memorable one, with star winger Mikko Rantanen collecting a hat trick in his home country. After the third goal, the entire crowd chanted Rantanen’s name. Artturi Lehkonen led the team in sauna songs, and Nathan MacKinnon loved seeing the happy Finnish children watching games and practices.
But the travel wasn’t easy for the players. The Avalanche, who went to Finland straight from a New York road trip, had five days off leading into their first game with the Blue Jackets. They played a back-to-back in Tampere, like the Red Wings will in Stockholm, then had four off days before hosting Nashville. Then-Avalanche forward Evan Rodrigues said at the time that the jet lag was “horrible.”
“(The trip) takes a toll on your body,” defenseman Josh Manson said looking back. “When you’re over there you’re not just relaxing. You’re doing things. They keep you moving and stuff.”
Added Bowen Byram: “I think it takes a lot more out of you than you realize and you admit, but it’s also a really cool experience getting overseas, seeing a different country.”
Colorado winger Logan O’Connor said it took the team a good chunk of time to adjust coming back to North America. He felt he had just started to get used to Finnish time when the Avs headed back to Denver. Colorado played well immediately after the trip, but the team started to struggle with injuries. Byram, Manson, Lehkonen, MacKinnon and Valeri Nichushkin were among those to miss time in the month after the Finland trip. Some of those injuries were due to on-ice contact and can’t be attributed to anything related to the Finland trip, but the travel might not have helped the overall health and up-and-down performance of the team. After finishing November strong, Colorado won only seven of its 15 games in December. It was the club’s worst month of the season by point percentage.
“You can probably say it contributed a little bit to that, just a lack of sleep and the stress of it all,” O’Connor said.
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Toward the end of the 2022-23 season, coach Jared Bednar said there were a bunch of reasons he liked the international trip and a bunch of reasons he didn’t. He noted how the Global Series gave Colorado a compacted schedule for the rest of the season. The Avalanche had nine off days directly before and after the Finland games, and those were days they didn’t have later in the year for rest or practice.
“I think it does take a little bit of a toll on your season the way it sets up the schedule the rest of the year,” Manson said.
From Nov. 10, 2022 — Colorado’s first game back in North America — to the end of the regular season, the Avalanche played 71 times, tying the Blues for the most in the league.
“Set us back schedule-wise, recovery-wise,” O’Connor said.
Those are all elements the Red Wings, Maple Leafs, Senators and Wild will have to deal with in the coming months. But for O’Connor, who thought the trip was great for growing the game, playing a pair of games in Europe was a worthwhile experience — just one he’s not sure he could do every season.
“It can be hard,” said J.T. Compher, who was with the Avalanche for that Finland trip, and is now in Stockholm as a Red Wing. “But I feel like we’ve done a good job of taking it serious, trying to get acclimated and feel as good as possible on Thursday.”
(Photo: André Ringuette / NHLI via Getty Images)