HockeyBuzz is honored to have Brian Propp as our special Thanksgiving Day substitute blogger for the vacationing Eklund. A five-time NHL All-Star, Brian scored 424 goals and 1,004 points in 1,016 regular season games, plus 64 goals and 148 points in 160 Stanley Cup Playoff games.

Brian will discuss a topic that he can offer his expertise in as player who spent 15 seasons in the NHL and played in five Stanley Cup Finals for three different clubs: What does it take for an NHL player to adapt to a change in environment, whether it’s his rookie season, a change in coaches or a trade to a new team?

One thing I learned in my 15 years in the National Hockey League is that every role is important on a team. My main role happened to be scoring goals. But if I hadn’t been surrounded by truly outstanding teammates, and played for some very good coaches, my own success wouldn’t have been possible.

In hockey, it’s all about paying attention to all the little details that go into scoring goals and winning games. Unless everyone’s doing it, it’s not going to work. On several occasions over the course of my career, I found myself needing to adapt to new situations: a change in coaches or teams, learning a different system and/or getting in synch with new teammates.

Every time you play for a new team or coach, you’re on edge. I don’t care if you’re the best player on the team or the worst, you’re starting fresh and you are playing to earn your ice time. When you are coming out of junior hockey, or coming from overseas, you are usually the best player or one of the best players on your team. There’s a big drop-off in talent level from the best players to the rest of the team. That’s not the case in the NHL.

In the NHL, you’re competing against the best players in the world and there really isn’t much drop off. Everyone can really play. So if you don’t pay attention to detail and do the little things right, there isn’t a place for you. It doesn’t matter how much skill you have or how much God-given talent you have. The guy who works harder will beat you out if you aren’t ready to compete.

There is really no “set… amount of time that it takes a player to adapt to a change in team environment. It varies from one player to the next and from one set of circumstances to another. As a rule of thumb, it usually took me a couple of weeks of practices and games until I felt fully adjusted to systemic changes.

My initial adaptation to the NHL from junior hockey went pretty smoothly. When I got to my first training camp with the Philadelphia Flyers in 1979, I wasn’t intimidated by the hockey part of things. The Flyers’ coach, Pat Quinn, reminded me a lot of my former junior coach with the Brandon Wheat Kings, Dunc McCallum.

Like Dunc, Pat was a big rugged defenseman in his playing days. He was very good about describing the system and letting it be known what he wanted me to do. Pat paid a lot of attention to detail, so things like breakouts from the defensive zone and other parts of a system that can give new players trouble were made clear quickly.

What took a little more time for me was getting used to living in a big metropolitan area like Philadelphia rather than in the small towns of Western Canada. Of course, Philly is also a real big sports town, and there’s pretty intense scrutiny in the press. Talking to the media took some getting used to as a young player. Nowadays, young players often get some media “coaching” — and there are guys who really need that, as well as education about the dos and don’ts of social media — but none of that existed when I came into the NHL. Dealing with a large media contingent was a new and daunting experience.

At my first training camp, Bob “The Hound… Kelly took me under his wing. He’d been with the team for 10 years, and he really helped me feel like a part of the team. Kelly’s a guy who is always joking around, but he was very serious about hockey and about winning.

By opening night of my first season, I felt excited about our team and confident that I could do what was asked of me. I scored a goal in my NHL debut and went on to score 34 goals and 74 points as a rookie on a team that posted a 35-game unbeaten streak and went to the Stanley Cup Final.

There were bumps along the way, but the transition from junior hockey to the NHL was not a big problem in my case as it often can be for young players. Many other successful players take a few years to feel comfortable in the NHL, so I was pretty fortunate in that regard.

During my career in Philadelphia, we changed coaches three times: Quinn to Bob McCammon (late 1981-82 season), McCammon to Mike Keenan (for the start of the 1984-85 season) and from Keenan to Paul Holmgren (for start of 1988-89 season). Every time that happened, there was an adjustment period.

As my old teammate Brad Marsh alluded to in his own blog for HockeyBuzz yesterday, the most dramatic adjustment was definitely the one from “Cagey… McCammon to “Iron Mike.… Our teams under McCammon had a lot of talent but were lacking in structure, and Keenan certainly was a big believer in structure and detail! He was also a lot more aggressive in his inter-personal dealings with his players, whether it was face-to-face or in front of the entire locker room. That definitely took some getting used to.

Ultimately, our teams had a lot of success under Keenan (two Stanley Cup Final appearances) and I also thrived as an individual. Apart from my scoring stats those years, I think those years helped me become a complete player.

Late in the 1989-90 season, I was traded from the Flyers to the Bruins. That was an all-new experience for me after being in Philadelphia for over a decade. I had never played for or with Bruins head coach Mike Milbury before going to Boston but I knew assistant coach Ted Sator well from his time as an assistant with the Flyers. It also helped that the Bruins played a style that was not all that different from what I was used to in Philadelphia.

I only spent a short time with the Bruins, but things went well (12 points in 14 regular season games; 13 points in 20 playoff games en route to the Stanley Cup Final). The next season, I joined the Minnesota North Stars.

This transition took a little longer than most of the previous ones. Our coach, Bob Gainey, employed a left wing lock system, which was new to me and which I didn’t particularly enjoy as a more attacking-minded player. But by the end of the first month, I started to get comfortable with the system.

Our team didn’t have a great regular season (27-39-14). However, things gelled at the right time. We ended up making a run to the Stanley Cup Final – the fifth time in my career I played for the championship – and I had 73 points in the regular season followed by 23 points in 23 playoff games.

The common thread through all these changes was that I wasn’t going at it totally alone. I communicated regularly about hockey issues with my teammates and developed an understanding of exactly what my coaches wanted from me.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the U.S. and Happy Holidays to all!