Brendan Smith Has 'Perfect' Icebreaker with Pavel Datsyuk | STALL MATES

There always appears to be some intimidation and nerves when a player walks into their first NHL locker room for the first time as a rookie.
And then there's walking into the 2011-12 Detroit Red Wings locker room for the first time. One glance around the corner and you were sure to spot an eventual Hall of Famer or a superstar in the league, Niklas Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg among them.
Now imagine you are 22-year-old Brendan Smith, called up to the NHL for the first time, about to live out a childhood dream, and that's the locker room you walk into.
"Well, that locker room for me was wild because everybody was older than 30," Smith recalls. "But you looked around the room and everybody's basically a Hall of Famer, or are going to be, so it was it was intimidating."
In more ways than one some of these players were Hall of Famers. Certainly, on the ice but also how they managed to break it when newcomers like Smith arrived, someone intimidated by their presence.
Smith remembers that first day well.

"We had a workout that day," he began, "And just remember, I was working out with Cory Emmerton, we were the young guys at the time. And we're right behind Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk. You're supposed to follow the guy in front of you. So, our trainer at the time, kind of give us a quick glance of what was going on. And then he's like, 'Hey, if you don't know (what to do) ask the person in front of you.'"

Those directions seem easy enough to follow. Except for the person in front of Smith was non-other than Red Wings legend, Datsyuk. In front of him? Henrik Zetterberg.
Nothing like being a rookie.
"I had to ask Pavel, and was it was side touches," Smith said remembering the exact exercise. Side touches are an exercise designed to target a person's obliques and other core muscles. "I said, 'Hey, Pavel, how many?' and he said, and he always had a broken English, he was like 'What?' I was like, 'How many?'"
What happened next, Smith called a perfect experience for the first day.
"Lift shirt," Smith remembers Datsyuk saying. Smith was being sized up. He lifted his shirt.
"He goes 'Yeah, you do 100'" Smith said with a laugh. "Like it was the perfect experience."

In the locker room itself, Smith sat in a corner spot with Brad Stuart and Jonathan Ericsson. He called it a quieter area where he didn't have to be the focal point, but that didn't mean he wasn't noticing what was going on. There were pranks and weird mannerisms, and like in In any interview about what goes on inside an NHL locker room, there's a lot of prefacing with 'I wasn't involved in this' or 'I'm not going to name names.' And that's where we start with Smith.
"One individual was upset with the other and he drilled his shoes into the stall," he said with a smirk. The holes were in the heel of the shoes and the culprit put the gel insoles back on top.
"When he tried to pick them up, he couldn't get them because they're drilled into the wood. "That was a really good one. There's other good ones that we can't really share. But there was always something like people's pockets getting sewn up with their keys in there."
Smith says there weren't too many quirks from the players sitting near him in the corner of the Red Wings locker room, but he definitely saw some unusual routines from his corner. It's always the goalie stories that are the best and oftentimes the strangest.
"Jimmy Howard always had a bunch of things, he'd always walk with his hands up," he recalled, "his elbows couldn't touch his body, they always had to be up."
After many years, particularly those first six years in the league with Detroit, Smith has learned from some of the best. But now, as he peers his head into the New Jersey Devils locker room for the first time, suddenly at 33, he is the exact same age that Datsyuk was all those years ago when he was asked to lift his shirt.
"It's exciting because there's so much pizzazz and flair and you get to be in and join them and I like that. It definitely is an atmosphere I enjoy and I kind of relish in it."