HSJ on ‘Sixty Minutes of Hell’

The Free Press’s Helene St. James asked Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill to clarify the Wings’ “60 Minutes of Hell” mantra:

“It means hard to play against, making it hard for the other team,” Dylan Larkin said. “It’s a good model for us I think because we are capable of doing that with our speed up front and our defense.”

The shirts were the brainchild of coach Jeff Blashill, a variant on Arkansas’ Nolan Richardson’s ’40 minutes of hell.’

“We have to be hard to play against on a nightly basis,” Blashill said. “We have to make sure that we’re not a ‘tween-er’ team, we’re not kind of skilled but not winning the skill game and kind of hard but not really hard enough. We have to be miserable to play against every night.

“That means different things to different people. I have to find what that means to us. But we have to be more miserable to play against. I want teams walking into LCA going, boy, I don’t want to play this game, not this will be an easy one. It’s just kind of a reminder on a daily basis of making sure that we stay really, really miserable to play again.”