Alexei Petrikov decided to take the offseason to work on some of his more physical defensive skills. Once of the things he has been working on is checking and hitting. One of his training coaches came up with a fun drill for him to work on involving some of the tackling dummies from American Football. His coach sets up the dummies around the ice, and Petrikov has to skate around and check them in a specific order. To make sure that he is not making illegal hits, there is a powder on the dummies that will show where the hits are being made. After a run of the drill, Alexei and his coach will go around and check the location of his hits, so he can make adjustments within the next run. Sadly, Petrikov's hit numbers haven't gone up much since he started this regimen, but he is planning on keeping up with it. Hopefully Petrikov's numbers will improve over the season and he will become more of a multifaceted player.