Last July, roughly three weeks after he backstopped the St. Louis Blues to their first Stanley Cup, completing one of the unlikeliest success stories in NHL history, Jordan Binnington sat down in the lounge of a Toronto-area tennis club and mapped out his immediate future.
This wasn’t some half-assed, back-of-the-napkin exercise. Upon showing up to meet with Andy Chiodo, his offseason goalie coach, Binnington promptly spread a stack of notebooks, folders and calendars onto the table, and produced a slick silver pen. “The kind of pen when you have a purpose,” Chiodo says. Over the next hour and a half, Binnington took the lead in plotting every second of his summer schedule: when he would skate, what drills he would do, which areas he would focus on, how long he’d spend on vacation … each day scripted through training camp.