their first Stanley Cup since 1961, it always makes me stop and think about what it takes to bring home the ultimate prize, whether it’s the Stanley Cup for hockey pros, the Lombardi Trophy for the NFL’s elite, or the World Cup for soccer’s best. For those feats of athletic excellence, it often comes down to not any one specific teammate but rather how a given collection of teammates work together toward a common goal.

They call it chemistry, that mysterious, unquantifiable intangible that you won’t find on any Moneyball-filled stat sheet. And while you can’t crunch it with Excel, you need only see it to believe it.

The National Hockey League season starts off Thursday night, with all 30 teams asking themselves the same question: Who has what it takes to get it done this year? Every player has worked all summer to get his body ready for what lies ahead: 82 grueling regular-season games and enough plane rides and bus trips to make a carny jealous.

What happens typically, before the season begins, is a meeting with all the players, staff and coaches the day before training camp begins. It’s usually conducted by the team’s general manager — the architect of that particular team. During the meeting, he’ll instruct everyone in the room that this is The Year, and that he has hand picked every guy in that room to do the job.

Although every team’s GM will say something to that effect, it’s only a handful of teams that will have the proper ingredients to make a serious run at the Stanley Cup. What are those ingredients? Sometimes it can be an elusive mixture, and most successful teams I played on excelled in all the usual basics: Coaching, on-ice leadership, veterans, systemic accountability, four quality lines, defense and goaltending.

But if winning teams have all those ingredients, then what separates the winners from the losers? That’s where chemistry comes in.

Really, that’s the most mysterious ingredient to put a finger on. If you knew how to manufacture team chemistry, you would bottle it and quit your job in a second. For a glimpse of what real chemistry can do, look back to last season’s Eastern Conference champion and Stanley Cup runner-up Philadelphia Flyers, who came from the brink of missing the playoffs to losing in overtime of Game 6 of the finals, a lone game away from every player’s boyhood dream.

But considering how the Flyers started off the season, to even be that close to hockey’s ultimate prize was once inconceivable. Philadelphia had high expectations when October 2009 rolled around, and after a number of players underperformed from the season’s start, the Flyers decided to make a coaching change.

They brought in Peter Laviolette, who coached the 2006 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes as well as the ‘06 U.S. Olympic team that competed in Turin, Italy. He was hired after the Flyers had just lost six of seven games and stood at ninth place in the Eastern Conference with a 13-11-1 record.

It didn’t get much better for Laviolette’s first 10 games as Flyers coach, posting a 2-7-1 record. So what triggered his team’s turnaround? Certainly, there were several factors involved, but what made the difference was Laviolette’s implementation of players’ respect for one another, because it’s only once you have that respect that the chemistry follows.

How did he do this? Well, I first want to look back at 2006, when Laviolette coached me to my only Stanley Cup championship. Before that season, in the fall of 2005, he took all of us as far away from a hockey rink as could be. We found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, climbing trees and dangling from a ropes course, helping our teammates navigate from the bottom of these trees and from one side to the other.

We weren’t only conquering our fears of heights, but also any inhibitions and communication issues that perhaps hadn’t boiled to the surface yet. It seemed that, after that day, we all realized the respect we shared for one another, that we were united in a common goal. But also that we were more alike than we realized. We all had fear, and we all had to communicate and trust each other.

With a Stanley Cup title on his résumé, Laviolette knew that he would command the Flyers’ respect, but he still had to find out if his players really knew each other. Did they have respect for one another?

This summer, I bumped into Kevin McCarthy, one of the Flyers’ assistant coaches, and asked him how Laviolette turned around such a lackluster team so quickly. While listening to McCarthy — also an assistant on Carolina’s ‘06 team — talk about those first 10 games, when they only won twice, I discovered that Laviolette was using a different kind of ropes course these days.

It was a rope that certain players had to follow, and it led right to his office door to answer some basic questions. He began with the leaders of the team and asked them things like What’s your defensive partner’s wife’s name? or What is your winger’s girlfriend’s name? How many kids does so-and-so have? was another popular one. What he realized is that nobody really knew each other. And no matter the field, whether it’s sport or business or whatever, you can’t succeed if you don’t know who’s on your team.

Over the next several weeks, he planned several team functions where, among other things, wives were invited, beers were imbibed, and players began truly knowing who it was they were going into battle with. Laviolette’s implementation of a higher-tempo game was the foundation of what this broken Flyers team needed, but it was new-found chemistry and respect that glued those pieces together.

And here we are, on the cusp of another NHL season, and the song remains the same: Who will have not only the basics but also the intangible ingredients to separate them from the pack? What team will respect on another not only on the ice but off it? Which team will have players who don’t point blame when things get difficult? And which team will have players asking what they can do for their teammates?

For all those questions and more, we’re about to find out.

Bret Hedican, an analyst for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area, played 17 years in the NHL, won the 2006 Stanley Cup with Carolina, and played on two U.S. Olympic teams. You can follow him on Twitter at @BretHedican.

Authors: Bret Hedican

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