Sporting an opinion

The remaining crowd completed an unremarkable practice from a visual standpoint - more guys tripped over themselves than scored highlight-reel goals. Taylor had to jump in to demonstrate a couple of the drills himself.

They'll be back at it again at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Center Ice Arena in Ontario.

Karl Taylor's post-practice quotes:

We've got lots of work to do, there's no question about it. We've got seven guys in the American Leagues right now and when they come, they're going to push guys out of jobs. We treat everyone the same. We've got some tryout guys who haven't been coached in a long time, don't know what they're doing. Some of our own guys haven't skated in a while. So it's a work in progress.

Today still was a success. We got some physical conditioning in. We wanted them to learn and know what we had to do. They didn't execute it perfectly all the time, but they definitely know what they need to do.

We just did physicals late last night, chalk talk in the morning. When we do physicals at this level, you're not allowed to do anything physically with them whether it's testing or any of those things - you can't do it if someone has a pre-existing injury. They check 'em out head to toe - past injuries, history, what's the matter with you, do you have bad shoulders, whatever. We know everything that's wrong with the player physically. The doc checks 'em out like we would have a physical - blood pressure, checks his bones, knees, ligaments, shoulders, make sure we have a real strong history on the player so there's no surprises when we get into the season.

You want good practice habits. I want them to learn what I expect. The first day is less about teaching, more about work, and having them understand what my expectations are, how I run a practice, how we do things. These guys don't know. There's four guys on the ice that have played for me before (Jon Francisco, John Germaine, Ryan MacGregor and John Murray). None of these guys know anything about me. We're moving through drills quick, they don't know what's going on. They'll catch up or else they'll be left behind and looking for work.

Is it like football, where you give players a playbook?

No. Some hockey coaches will do that, but this game's not that complicated. I don't feel you need to do that. The systems, I'm not a big playbook guy. What we do is simple enough that we teach it day to day. Most of the guys have been doing what we're doing for a long time. I saw a quote from Sean O'Donnell, he got traded from Anaheim back to the Kings, it's his seventh team. He said, 95 percent of what the coaches do is pretty similar. There's small things and small adjustments each guy likes. That's it. The game's a simple game. The team that competes the hardest usually wins.

When do you get the AHL guys back?

Manchester plays two exhibition games. They'll be making some releases on Monday. The NHL started really late. Usually the American League is done now. This is the first year it's set up this way. A lot of teams on our level (ECHL) have waited until Monday to start camp til their guys come back. I couldn't wait.

Will you make cuts before the first exhibition game next Friday, or try to get everyone into a game?

We're gonna see. If someone sticks out that we think doesn't deserve to be here, then they won't be here. We'd like to give everyone a game, that's not always the case; we only have two games to prepare for the season. Yeah we'd like to evaluate, but we want to make sure we use them for making our team better and play regular-season games. Our opening-day roster has to be submitted October 15.