I open the door.
He looks up. He does not look surprised. He looks like someone who left a light on and was waiting to see who it brought in. I do not examine whether the light was on for me. Examining it would require a category I have spent thirty-five years not building.
"Defensive breakouts," he says. "Columbus game. Their forecheck is overloading the strong side and your D-pairs are getting caught in the same rotation."
He says "your D-pairs" as though I am personally responsible for the defensive corps, which I am not, but which I find less irritating than I should.
I sit down. He has a paper towel on the console with crumbs on it that aren't from his terrible coffee.
"Dinner?" he asks, glancing at the paper towel in my hand.
I look down. I'm still holding the paper towel from Wes's bread.
"Medical intervention," I say.
"Should I ask?"
"No."
"Good. I wasn't going to."
He rewinds the clip. We watch the breakout develop and fail.
"The strong-side D is cheating up too early," I say. "He's reading the first pass before it happens and committing. If he waits a half-second, the lane closes by itself."
Caleb rewinds. Watches. "You're right. The gap closes naturally if the weak-side forward backchecks to the slot."
"Which he does. On this shift, at least."
"On seventy-one percent of shifts, actually."
I look at him. "You calculated that?"
"It's what I do."
"Seventy-one percent gets you scored on in May."
Caleb pauses the clip. "That is both statistically annoying and probably true."
I look at him. His mouth does the thing again, the almost-smile, and I look back at the screen because looking at his mouth is not something I'm prepared to do twice in the same minute.
"You read it live," he says. "I need a spreadsheet and four viewings to catch what you saw once, at full speed, with a forward trying to put you through the glass. One of us is doing this the hard way."
"You're doing it the slow way. Slow and hard aren't the same."
"I'm aware of the distinction." A pause. "You sound like my GM."
"I sound like someone who's been right about defensive breakouts since before you could drive."
It comes out drier than I mean it. He laughs. Not a polite laugh. A real one, short and surprised, like it got past a checkpoint he didn't know he was running. The sound changes the room. I look back at the screen, because the screen is safe and his laugh is not.
We watch film for twenty more minutes. We don't discuss anything other than the game. The not-discussing is comfortable. Somewhere around the seventh replay of a weak-side rotation, I notice I am not watching the screen. I am watching him watch the screen. His eyes move in a pattern: puck carrier first, then weak-side support, then the gap between the defenseman and the boards. He reads the play the way I read the play, from the structure outward. We process the game the same way.
I watch him for two minutes. He has a habit I've started cataloguing without meaning to. When he's concentrating, he pushes his glasses up with one knuckle. When he's about to saysomething he isn't sure of, he takes them off and cleans them on his shirt, buying three seconds. He cleaned them before he said "your D-pairs." He's cleaning them now.
"You should go home," he says, not looking at me. "It's late."
"You're still here."
