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Every one of us has bad days, when personal problems make it almost impossible to even think about our jobs. If we do show up at work, our production suffers.

“Mentally,” Ottawa Senators winger Bobby Ryan said, “you just can’t get there.”

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Ryan had a lot of those days last season and the season before that. Head coach Guy Boucher alluded to it heading into training camp in September and again on Monday, when he all but guaranteed Ryan would be more like the player he was in the Stanley Cup playoffs, when he was second in team scoring, than during the 2016-17 regular campaign, when he ranked 10th.

Ryan credited Boucher, a psychology major, with helping him get through his troubling times.

“I had some things that needed to get settled away from the rink, I’ll just put it that way,” Ryan said to a couple of reporters after practice. “I was having a very tough time with it and he helped me a lot through it, really. He gave me a little bit of a longer leash than most people would. It wasn’t until mid-January, February, that I started to get those things settled, those family issues put away. When I got that all dealt with, then it was a little easier to come to the rink every day.