from James Neal of The Players' Tribune,

So I’m the guy who’s supposed to put the little rubber puck into the back of the net. Pretty simple. The only thing is, there’s a 6’5” monster wearing pillows standing in my way — and for some reason the dude can do full splits on skates. It’s insane. When I came into the league, I was just like every other kid: “Uh yeah, you know, uh, just go out there and fire it hard and heavy, top-shelf.”

Yeah right.

I’ll always remember my first day at training camp with the Dallas Stars. I skate out onto the ice and we’re all shooting around, getting loose. I’m seeing monsters like Jason Arnott, Bill Guerin, Mike Modano. Marty Turco is in net. It took literally one shot for me to realize that this was a whole different level of hockey. Arnott shot one from the top of the circle and got it past Marty. I tried to do the same thing. I went high glove, and Marty didn’t even have to flinch. The puck went right into his glove. I tried again — same thing. Then Modano comes down — bang. He scores five hole from the top of the circle.

I had to be in the middle of the circles between the hash marks to score on Marty. These guys were scoring from the top of the circles and from bad angles. They weren’t just shooting harder or more accurately than me. In the NHL, everybody shoots it hard. They were doing things before the puck even came off their stick to mess with Marty.

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