The Chicago Blackhawks' locker room stayed closed for more than 20 minutes after Sunday's 4-2 loss to the New Jersey Devils at the United Center, which was unusually long.
Turns out there was a players-only meeting.
It didn't sound like it was very animated. It was more on the calmer side and meant to serve as a galvanizing moment for the group early in the season.
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"We had a good heart-to-heart," Corey Perry said. "That's the brotherhood. You're not putting anybody down. That's not what we're here to do. That wasn't the message. It's more of being brothers and being able to talk about it and figure it out as men.
"That was kind of the message, that we're a team here, we're brothers. It's not putting anybody down, it's to make everybody better."
Ryan Donato respectfully declined to share which players spoke up but acknowledged it was the usual suspects, the veterans and players that wear a letter on their sweater.
"There's a reason they've been in the league and had so much success their entire careers," Donato said. "As a younger guy or younger guys, sometimes it's easy to kind of just be so excited that you're in the NHL that you don't really know what's going on or kind of soaking up the information, you’re just so worried about the next day.
Chicago Blackhawks
"But with these guys here, they do such a good job of just leading them in the right direction, showing them the ins and outs. Sometimes the messages are tough messages, but you look to those guys for those messages and they do a great job at it. We’ve just got to make sure we do a better job of receiving that information."
Accountability and playing as a team seemed to be the main talking point inside the room.
"Just being connected," Seth Jones said. "Being simple when we need to be, time and clock management. The little things of the game. It's the little details that we're off. Our shift lengths are too long. It's just small things like that that can really kill you in games."
Said Donato: "We've just got to rely on each other more. It's tough. We showed up tonight and we could say what we want to do and sometimes we don't execute. Just holding each other accountable and growing as a team and becoming like a brotherhood, like a lot of guys have said in here.
"The more than we can rely on each other, the more you can grow as a team. Obviously, tonight, it hurt a little bit. And a lot of the things that we preach, we didn't do and it came back to bite us."
Blackhawks head coach Luke Richardson was not part of the meeting, and he prefers it that way.
"That's good," Richardson said. "They hear enough from me before and during the game. If they feel there's something that needs to be said, it usually goes a longer way when the leadership guys and whoever feels they need to speak up."
If you're thinking that Sunday's game was a weird one to have a closed-door meeting, you're not alone. They honestly didn't play bad. The effort was there.
But the Blackhawks are trying to set a high standard for their younger players in the locker room and they don't want any of them to get used to losing, even though the schedule has been brutal through the first month of the season and it would be a perfectly reasonable excuse to blame the inconsistent start on that.
"I remember my first couple years, some of these meetings happened, and you hope that it sticks with you," Jones said. "You hope that it makes you not change the way you think or play the game, but understand that you have a role on this team.
"We have a few words that we live by on this team that we came up with before the season started, so we want to live by some of those and hold each other accountable at the end of the day. It's not mother-effing guys and things like that, but if you make a mistake, your teammate should be able to tell you when you're wrong and vice versa."