Flyers' Berube running a boot camp

CRAIG BERUBE is in midseason form. This can be a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to an NHL head coach finishing up his first-ever training camp. But when the team in front of you has been notorious for starting poorly over the last couple of seasons, it is, for him, the only way to go.

So the quotes keep jumping from the page, as tonight the Flyers finish up a brutal preseason schedule that seems more like an act of revenge than one of negligence. He's "disappointed in our veterans and the way they performed" one night, fried at his shoddy defense the next.

Three games in three nights, four games in five nights. Exhaustive skating in between. This has been less training camp than it has been boot camp.

"You have a philosophy for your team and you have to demand things that everybody needs to do," Berube was saying yesterday. "I can't worry about guys who think they can't handle it. Well then, they need to be pushed so they can handle it.

"I think that your camps should be hard and you should be pushed. It prepares you for the start of a season."

It also serves to remind you of what went wrong at the start of last season. By all accounts, the Flyers were not pushed hard in a camp that began and ended with major injuries, launched their season lethargically, causing their coach to be fired three games in and ultimately, their general manager to be bumped upwards.

Peter Laviolette and Paul Holmgren were replaced by Berube and Ron Hextall, no-nonsense guys when they played, and not much different now that each wears a suit to games.

Of course, Lavvy and Homer were not exactly touchy-feely, either.

From the moment the Flyers were eliminated last spring, Berube has been sounding the warnings about arriving in camp out of shape or not working exhaustively once there. And while he said yesterday that, "I haven't even brought up last year's start" to his players, they were given specific training schedules and even nutritional guidelines to follow over the summer.

There would be, they were told, no playing yourself into shape. Not after last summer's debacle, which chairman Ed Snider called, "One of the worst training camps I had ever seen."

"There's no team in the league that wants to have a bad start, right?" Berube said. "But the start of that is that you've got to come in great shape. And to a man they did that. I thought practices were good. We had some good games and some bad games during the preseason. Lot of different lineups."

Yeah. A little crazy. And with less than a week before the season opener in Boston, a little hard to read. Claude Giroux, whose awful start last season exacerbated the Flyers' troubles, was missing until the last week with a groin injury. Some nights most of the Flyers were on the ice, some nights the roster was made up of future Phantoms. Tonight, against Washington, the Flyers finally will look like themselves.

But what is that? The team from the front of last season, the one that made a big push in the middle, or the inconsistent, goal-challenged version that entered and exited the playoffs?

"This is a mental game," said the coach. "We all know that. Physically, I think we're ready to go, but mentally you've got to make sure you're ready to go. And to handle adversity and to handle a lot of different things."

Such as the heightened attention to the early part of the schedule. The first 10 games in this town, this season, are not like the first 10 in other NHL towns. Not after last year.

"The media in this town is tough and they're going to talk about the starts the last couple of years," Berube said. "The fans. That's all part of it. So from a mental standpoint the players have to prepare themselves for all that stuff.

"You can't just say don't think about it. That's hard to do. But handle it and go play."

It's going to be an interesting ride. A coach looking to build a resume. A suspect team looking to build upon its second-half promise, looking maybe not to just forget last season's start, but use it as a motivational weapon.

Less than a week out, I asked Berube if he had a feel one way or another yet.

"I think we're not bad," he said. "The preseason schedule was a little bit out of whack. With the games being mounted up three or four in a row. That was tough to get lineups properly in there. So we've got one more game to work on things. But I think we're getting there."

On Twitter: @samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon