Rather than going through a typical morning skate, the Philadelphia Flyers elected to spend their Saturday morning practice at Central Park in New York City as they prepare to play against the Rangers tonight.
The Flyers aren’t strangers to outdoor hockey anyway, as they appeared in the 2010 Winter Classic against the Boston Bruins at Fenway Park (as you can see in the photo).
You can tell they had a pretty good time in that change of pace practice, as defenseman Andrej Meszaros discussed.With the towers of Manhattan in the background, the Flyers stepped on the ice at Lasker Rink in New York’s Central Park for a planned-but-unpublicized outdoor workout. Though his team didn’t arrive in the Big Apple until the early hours of Saturday morning for Sunday’s game against the Rangers, coach Peter Laviolette opted to have his troops take the ice at 1 p.m. for what was, by NHL standards, a casual workout -- sweatpants and shin guards were the order of the day, and the low boards and piles of snow in the background gave a distinctly non-professional look to the whole affair.
“It brings back memories of when I was growing up, skating with the guys and having fun,” Slovak-born defenseman Andrej Meszaros told Flyers TV. “It’s nice to be outside again, even if it’s a little chilly.”
Here’s video of the practice, via the Flyers.
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