PHN: Third period a dent in Aeros' flight plan; more from Constantine

Ha. I like the title this time. Pretty good.

Anyway, here's my latest ProHockeyNews.com piece.

I had some good photos lined up but due to the density of the Aeros schedule, we just had to get it published before the stats got outdated. I'll save them for next time, I guess.

Lots of great stuff from Constantine in this one. I could listen to him talk about hockey all day. After one game, when I asked him how a team achieves consistency (more on that below), he apologized for being "long winded" as he answered my question. Are you kidding me? I'm always a little sad when our interview time is over.

That said, I have several pages of quotes from him that didn't get into the piece, so I figured I'd share a few that stood out to me here:

On the bottom line:

All you want from your athletes from a coaching standpoint is that we keep acknowledging the issues and keep moving forward and keep working on what we need to work on and just concentrate on our next day and improving in the next day. Honestly, I'm not looking too far in the future at anything other than just keep addressing the issues.

On comparing seasons:

I think we're way further along than we were at this point last year. It took us at least 20 games before we were remotely close. I think we understand more now than we did a year ago. It's hard to judge. You're always trying to compare sometimes but your only reference point is where you've been, and we don't always want to look back at where we were last year. We have to find an identity that works for the team and they have to get together as a team and decide as a team what they want to be, so those are all works in process for any team.

On what kind of road team the Aeros are:

I don't even know how to judge our road trips yet, because of, you know, two in Manitoba and then travel to Toronto on game day in a different time zone. Then the last time on the road, we played 4 in 5 nights and one at 3 on a Sunday afternoon and then another game at noon on a Tuesday.

I don't really pass judgment yet on such a small window, especially when our road trips have been so challenging from a fatigue standpoint. I think if we spread some of those games out, I think I'd understand our team more, but I know so far we're not a very consistent team from period to period, from game to game, and even on an individual basis we don't get a ton of consistency yet, and that's something we have to continue to strive for is just a little more consistency.

On how to get consistency out of a team:

I think consistency comes from the effort you put into preparing. Your preparation the 48 hours before a game, into the game, and even your ability to handle the ups and downs of a game, because a game might have fatigue factor, might have a criticism factor, might have a "you've made a mistake" factor, it might have a physical intimidation factor, it might have "we're up by a couple" like tonight.

The only way to beat all of those adversities to consistency is to have a pre-game plan and a during game plan that puts you back on track as quick as possible, and that's part of becoming a good professional, is to develop those plans. So we have to help the players work on that.