While other Blackhawks practiced winning puck battles or adjusting their skating stances this summer, Alex Vlasic practiced napping.
“It’s a good life,” Vlasic said Thursday, laughing.
But it was something he needed to learn how to do. And it’s not like he didn’t grind during on-ice workouts, too. Life may be relatively good for any 24-year-old man making $4.6 million per year to play hockey for his hometown team, but this sport isn’t easy.
Vlasic learned a tough lesson during the latter portion of last season: He hadn’t been taking care of his body well enough. A massive workload wore him down, and his energy levels dropped in March and April. He ultimately logged more than 1,900 minutes — 14th-most among NHL players — over a full 82 games.
This season, he has focused on improving his recovery habits after getting home (or back to his hotel room) from work every day.
Getting more sleep is a critical part of that. He bought an Oura Ring that tracks the length and quality of his rest and provides a “readiness score” based on that data. He discovered he needs at least eight hours to get a good score.
“After your game, it’s hard for me to fall asleep,” Vlasic said. “I’ll fall asleep at, like, 2 [a.m.] sometimes because my adrenaline is pretty amped up.
“If I get six hours of sleep, [I need to] make sure I come home from a practice and take a nap and look after myself that way. I don’t like napping because I feel like I waste my day away. But this summer, I was taking some naps just to make sure I was feeling good.”
He also plans to use his Normatec, an air-compression-based massaging device for his legs that looks like a pair of ski pants and feels like a blood-pressure monitor, every night before going to sleep.
“It’s supposed to flush the lactic acid out of your legs,” he said. “I had some last year, and I would use them if I was feeling kind of tired. But I’m going to try to do things more proactively.”
He hopes those techniques will help him better maintain his stamina. After all, his workload isn’t likely to decrease much — if at all — under new Hawks coach Jeff Blashill, who moved him up to the first pairing with Sam Rinzel on Thursday after previously pairing him with Connor Murphy.
Vlasic isn’t guaranteed a break in February, either, because he has a chance of making the 2026 U.S. Olympic roster.
His prospects will increase if he can replicate his defensive analytics of 2023-24, when he broke onto the scene in impressive fashion before struggling a bit — like everyone on the Hawks — in 2024-25.
One of Blashill’s priorities is for the Hawks to spend less time in the defensive zone, which can happen by winning more battles and making smarter plays after winning those battles.
When Vlasic was skating rather than sleeping this summer, that’s something he focused on, as well. And spending less time in the defensive zone would be one obvious way to improve his results.
“I worked a lot more with puck-handling and trying to keep the puck on my stick in difficult situations,” he said. “I feel more comfortable — when I’m in close in a battle — hanging on to it and looking for that quick little pass through somebody’s feet or stick.
“Guys are on you so quick, especially the bigger, faster teams that you’ll play. You have to make those quick passes and quick reads. Especially when you’re getting swarmed, it’s not going to be an easy pass to make. You do have to be comfortable under those situations. All the best players are really good at finding those quick outs.”
