Badgers Open Their Season Tonight; Drewicz Says ‘Fundamentals, Physicality, and Showing Up When I Say to Show Up’

FRANK DREWICZ DOES NOT BELIEVE in previews. He has said this, repeatedly, to this reporter, over the past three weeks of training camp. “A preview is a story about something that hasn’t happened,” he said Thursday morning, watching his team run a two-on-one drill for the fourth time in what appeared to be a controlled, methodical rebuke of every hockey player who has ever thought a two-on-one was easy. “I don’t do things that haven’t happened. I do things that are happening right now.”

What is happening right now, at the Civic Center at ten-thirty on the morning the town opens, is this: Coach Drewicz is watching seventeen players run a drill with the focus of a man who has decided that this team’s season will be determined not by talent but by habits, and that habits are formed in the first three weeks of practice before the first game, and that the first game is tonight, so the time for forming habits is approximately right now.

“Fundamentals,” he says, for the fourth time this morning, as left wing Marek Piotrowski takes a slap shot from the point that goes approximately six inches wide of the net. “Piotrowski. Fundamentals.”

Piotrowski nods. He is twenty-six years old, six feet two inches, two hundred and ten pounds, and has the disposition of a man who has found that the most effective way to deal with criticism is to acknowledge it without indicating whether it has been absorbed. He has been playing professional hockey for four years, in three different leagues, in two different countries. He came here because, he said, “the coach told me this place was serious about hockey.”

He has been in the lineup for three weeks. He has not yet been entirely sure the coach’s assessment was accurate. “Very structured,” he said, diplomatically. “Very organized. Different from what I am used to. But I think better.”

Drewicz on Piotrowski: “Tremendous physical presence. Shot that needs work. Will get there. Good on the forecheck. Can take a hit. Can give a hit. Does not always choose the right moment for either. We are working on the discretion.”

At the center of everything, as he is designed to be, is Kevin Gallucci. He is twenty-four years old and has the particular quality of athletic grace that looks, to the untrained eye, like ease, but that is in fact the product of extraordinary amounts of deliberate practice. He scored thirty-one goals in his previous league. He could have gone to a better-funded operation. He came here instead, he said, because “this town felt like it meant it.” He elaborated, when pressed: “Some places are just markets. Some places are building something. This place is building something. I wanted to be part of something being built.”

That is not the language of a hockey player who has not given this some thought. Gallucci has given this some thought. He has also, his teammates report, given his Bespoke AI Model some thought, and specifically uses it to review video in ways that Drewicz has asked him not to, a discrepancy that both parties acknowledge and neither party seems particularly concerned about resolving.

“He knows I use it,” Gallucci said. “I know he knows. We have a kind of understanding.”

“There is no understanding,” Drewicz said, when this was reported to him. “There is a team policy. The team policy exists for reasons. The reasons are good reasons. Kevin’s results have been good. His reasons for the results are not my concern. The results are my concern.” He paused. “Don’t print that. It will encourage him.”

This reporter is printing it. The season starts tonight. The team looks, in the judgment of twenty-two years of watching hockey, like a team that is going to be interesting to watch. Whether that results in wins is a question answered in the games rather than the previews. Which Drewicz would agree with, if he agreed with the premise of previews.

Puck drops tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Civic Center. Box office opens at 6 p.m. Radio coverage on WTRB 1580 AM. Dress warm. The building is new and the ice plant is excellent but it is, as Gallucci noted, “a hockey rink in September in Wisconsin, which is to say: correctly cold.”

Don Pavalko is the Tribune’s sports correspondent. Game recap in Friday’s edition. Score updates at http://www.theinternetlives.net/sports. Go Badgers.