Players Call Shots as Change of Pace

Normally one to bark out commands throughout each practice session, Mighty Duck Coach Randy Carlyle was unusually quiet Wednesday as he mostly stood by the boards and occasionally gathered up scattered pucks.

Instead of assistant coaches Dave Farrish and Newell Brown mapping out drills, it was Keith Carney, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Vitaly Vishnevski and even rookie Ilya Bryzgalov providing the direction.

No, the inmates haven’t taken over the asylum. It was a day for something different in the middle of a long season, or as Carney said, to break up the “monotony.”

“A nice change,” the defenseman said. “Guys still worked hard and got their work done.”

Carlyle said he has done something similar during his coaching stints on the minor-league level.

“We just wanted to see how smart the players are,” Carlyle said with a grin. “Players always think they have the answers to the drills in practice. So we let them pick the drills that they wanted to do.

“We judged by the work ethic and the commitment to the drill on whether we’d add anything. They worked extremely hard and did a good job.”

Not that it was always smooth. The lightest moment came when Bryzgalov laid out the instruction of the shootout practice while still wearing his mask.

“It started out as one shootout drill with breakaways and then I think it was changed two or three times,” Carney said. “It turned into something that ... I don’t know what it turned into.”

When asked to sum up the player-run practice, forward Andy McDonald joked, “We had a lot of generals and not enough soldiers. There were 23 guys trying to shine.”

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Forward Rob Niedermayer has yet to begin any workouts as he is still trying to shake the symptoms related to the concussion he suffered Nov. 1, which has caused him to miss three games.

Carlyle said team doctors have reexamined Niedermayer and found nothing to indicate he has a serious problem. But the coach noted that Niedermayer has had treatments in a hyperbaric chamber to increase the flow of oxygen into his system.

“Hopefully that will have some form of expediting his symptoms,” Carlyle said.

Niedermayer will not play Friday against Washington and probably won’t be available for next week’s games at Boston and Ottawa.