It’s morning. Time to shoot some pucks.

Out walk Clarke MacArthur and John-Michael Liles, to a $100,000 contraption that will let them do just that.

Gone are the days of shooting pucks and denting the garage. Or putting up the fake goalie in the net with the five holes clearly marked.

In this day and age of high tech and every advantage money can buy for a sports team, the Maple Leafs have given their players a new toy: A gadget called RapidShot. Like the batting cage has done for baseball for years — automated thrown balls so a hitter can practise — this machine passes pucks to shooters.

“It is pretty neat,” says MacArthur. “It’s like a Chuck E Cheese thing.”

But it also does so much more. It measures the players’ speed in accepting the pass, their velocity in shooting the puck and their accuracy in hitting targets. The targets, by the way, appear in the form of lights (in all four corners and the five hole) only at the last possible moment when the shooter receives the puck.

“You work on quickening reflexes and you work on your shot and getting it off quicker,” says Liles. “There are different things you can do and different things you can play. It is a great tool.”

Each player has his own swipe card. When it’s his turn, he logs in with the card.

“It tracks you and your trends, if you’re getting more accurate, which one is your weakest corner to pick, different things like that,” says Liles. “I think it is a great way to warm you up to get your body and muscles firing. . . . You spend a lot of time in the gym and this is a good way to mix it up on your body.”

Developed in Germany, and popular in Russia, the company was purchased by Walter Payerl of Michigan, who saw its use both as a tool for the developing minor hockey player, for scouts, for pros and for players coming back from injuries.

“If a player has a baseline, and we know he could shoot 70 miles an hour before his injury, what his reaction time was, and now he’s not able to do that, we have specific data,” says Payerl. “For concussive injuries, we’re able to show players and trainers the difference in their pure physical reaction time.”

But mostly, it’s fun. The company’s website tracks every shot for every shooter (about 55 million shots from 100 machines worldwide so far) and can crown champions. Payerl’s nephew, Adam Payerl, is the record holder at many age groups and now plays for the Pittsburgh Penguins top farm team.

Other NHLers can be found on the site; Jordan Eberle of the Edmonton Oilers is up among the leaders.

But a few NHL teams, Vancouver, Buffalo and now the Leafs, have their own and keep their data private.

It is morphing into a scouting tool. More and more, hockey is getting broken down into its various parts and this machine allows shooting to be measured accurately.

“People who know about it,” says Payerl. “If I tell you I have a 16 year old who is a 500-plus shooter, that doesn’t mean anything to you. But once you get to be familiar with system and knew what it meant, it would mean a lot. The scouts wold go: ‘Wow, that’s something. I need to see that guy. . . . He’s worth having a look at.’”

The Leafs found it a good investment even thought the target market is teenagers. Versions sell for as low as $20,000.

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“It’s good for all levels,” said Payerl. “The people who have the quickest improvement are 10 to 16 year olds. They’re going through strength, stamina and finesse improvements.

“The pros, it’s just fine-tuning, and prove to them there are different techniques to shoot the puck and receive the pass. It’s easy to show a pro if you leave them on their own they might have a .7 or .8 of a second reaction time. With a little bit of tweaking and letting them try different techniques, they’ll cut that in half quickly.

“Once you get that in their mind this is a technique they can get the puck off faster, then the puck is going to get to the net faster without them having to put another 10 miles an hour on the puck.”