The Nipawin Hawks wrapped up their pre-season schedule with a .500 record as they finished 2-2-2.
Heading into their second week of pre-season action after splitting a home-and-home with Flin Flon Sept. 2 and 3, Doug Johnson, the Hawks’ head coach, wanted to see a little more effort from the players, which he has already addressed and is getting some improvement for the most part.
“It is a process,” he said. “Are there things we need to work on? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, I think we’re in a pretty good spot.”
After splitting the home-and-home with Flin Flon, the Hawks split their series with Melfort winning 4-0 in Melfort and losing 4-2 in Nipawin, before dropping a pair of shootout losses against Melville, 2-1 in Melville and 4-3 in Nipawin.
With the Hawks playing six games in eight days, there was not a whole lot of time to work on systems, so Johnson said they spent a lot of time working on building chemistry among the players.
They did the process a little differently, however, said Johnson, who noted in previous years they would keep the lines the same, whereas this year they wanted to get as many players playing together as they could.
Johnson noted this approach seemed to work, admitting that chemistry is something that is built over time, and said he liked seeing how the players reacted to different situations.
“That’s part of the process too, is to see who can deal with a little adversity, who can maybe play in a role that they’re not used to or not too keen on. But everybody has to do what’s best for the team. It’s not what you want, it’s what’s best for the team right now.”
With pre-season now complete, the next challenge for the Hawks will be to pare their roster down to 25 players, and Johnson said some guys made it difficult, while others just left, which he admits was unfortunate to see.
“But we like what we have and I thought that camp was very good and a lot of guys opened our eyes up.”
Heading into the regular season, Johnson said the Hawks will be spending a lot of time at practice this week working on their defensive play, noting that while their overall goals against was good, the goals that they did give up were the cause of some poor mistakes.
“We just have to fix the bad habits, fix some of the mistakes that we’ve made defensively and then work on a little more structure. We’re not going to beat them to death with our systems, we want a little more creativity this year... but we also have to make sure that there is some semblance of structure out there.”
