ST. PAUL, Minn. — On summer Fridays, Matthew Schaefer’s training group holds a tournament: three-on-three, five minutes, four teams of three decided via draft; round robin, then semifinals and a final.
“You’ll take a break [after], but every game’s five minutes,” Schaefer said Thursday morning before the Islanders faced the Wild.
This to say that Schaefer, who on Tuesday night in Nashville, Tenn., became the first player to play all five minutes of an overtime period since the NHL has begun tracking the stat, wasn’t doing that much new. Indeed, Bryan Marshall — his longtime trainer who the Islanders recently hired as director of player performance — texted him after the 4-3 shootout win, saying those sessions had paid off.
“It’s pretty funny; those are the best days ’cause you always look up to playing it, and everyone takes it so competitively,” Schaefer said. “If you lose, you’re so pissed. It’s always fun when you can play against [Nazem] Kadri and [Sean] Monahan, all those guys [also part of Marshall’s group]. It’s funny ’cause there’s guys that, depending where you’re picking in the draft, you can pick a similar team and then you can go on a run for a few games, so teams are coming after you. It gets intense.”
For all the fascination with his time on ice, Schaefer himself is almost nonchalant about the subject. He loves playing hockey, and the overtime broke in such a way — a long delayed penalty, a timeout, then an Islanders power play — that playing the whole thing was weirdly possible.
“We’re in zone for a lot of it, and then they send it down for a guy coming out of the box, and I backchecked there,” Schaefer said. “There was no whistles ever since. It was broken up nicely where I wasn’t super gassed or really that gassed.”
Indeed, coach Pete DeBoer said he didn’t even ask Schaefer during the timeout whether he needed a breather. He merely looked at him and knew it would be fine.
“You can tell if a guy’s doubled over and bent over, huffing and puffing. He wasn’t,” DeBoer said. “That whole delayed penalty sequence was all in one. So it wasn’t a situation where I needed to check with him. I could tell he was fine.”
Kyle MacLean was back in the Islanders lineup Thursday, playing his same spot on the fourth line with Casey Cizikas and Mitchell Chaffee. Matt Kessel came out and Scott Mayfield stayed in, with the Islanders reverting to 12 forwards and six defensemen.
