The passes were a bit more on the crisp side, the speed of the drills was markedly quicker, and the players’ intensity level was ratcheted up a notch.

For the Lewiston Maineiacs, getting Sam Finn, Matthew Bissonnette, Pierre-Olivier Morin, Michael Chaput and Sam Carrier back into the fold at practice this week was a Godsend.

“It picks up the team’s intensity quite a bit,” coach J.F. Houle said. “I think it lifts the spirits of the team, too. After a tough weekend, it’s nice to have new faces in the room.”

All five of the Maineiacs’ skaters — along with goalie Nicholas Champion — had been away at an NHL training camp. One by one they trickled back to the team this week, with Morin arriving Thursday after flying in from Vancouver, where he completed a successful tryout with the Canucks as an invited player.

Houle said Thursday he’s not worried too much about any pro camp hangovers, either.

“They’re all down-to-earth guys,” Houle said. “They understand that they had a good experience in the NHL camps, but I don’t think any of them realistically expected that, this year, they would stay there, so I think they’re all ready to start their junior seasons now.”

The Maineiacs are getting their players back just in time. One of the league’s top teams, the Acadie-Bathurst Titan, will be in town this weekend.

“They’re good, they have some very good players and they’re always a tough team to play against,” Houle said.

One of the Titan’s biggest weapons is the player between the pipes. Olivier Roy, at least in name, is a former Maineiac, acquired via trade at the QMJHL draft this summer and then flipped to Bathurst in the package deal that included the No. 1 overall selection. He’s a consensus league all-star keeper, and is also coming off a successful professional camp with the Edmonton Oilers.

“We have to shoot the puck, we have to get pucks on net, jump on the rebounds and get traffic in front of him,” Houle said. “We have to get pucks through to him in traffic if we want to beat him.”

The other big piece of the Maineiacs’ game Houle was finally able to work on was the team’s power play. Adequate at best through four games, the team’s power play unit — all five of the players — were missing until Thursday.

“Now that we have them all back, it was nice to work on it,” Houle said. “Not saying that the other guys didn’t do a good job, but when you miss as much talent as we were missing, it was hard.”

Also on Houle’s radar this week was discipline, especially facing the Titan. Acadie-Bathurst is the most-penalized team in the league to date based on penalty minutes per game, at 28½. Lewiston, meanwhile, has accumulated just 61 total minutes through four games, though the timing and nature of the infractions are what irk Houle the most.

“We’ve stressed it to all of the players, and we met with a few specific players about it this week,” Houle said. “We hope they’ll get the message.”

If not, Houle said, they’ll sit. With everyone back, and after Christophe Lalonde’s suspension ends Friday night, the team has a few extra bodies around.

“It’s nice as a coach to be able to have the extra guys now, that way, if we need to, we can sit players,” Houle said. “They need to know that it they don’t want to do the job the right way, there’s someone waiting for a chance to get in there and play.”

Friday and Saturday’s games against the Titan begin at 7 p.m. at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee.

Tale of the tape

                         Lewiston     Acadie-Bathurst

Mascot             Maineiacs   Titan

Record             1-2-0-1        3-1-0-0

Goals for          17                18

Goals against   23                15

Penalty mins.   61                114

Players to watch: Lewiston — Michael Chaput (F), Matthew Bissonnette (F), Cameron Critchlow (F), Sam Carrier (D), Sam Finn (D), Pierre-Olivier Morin (F); Acadie-Bathurst — Sebastien Trudeau (F), Olivier Roy (G), Gabriel Levesque (F), Bryce Milson (F), Olivier Hotte (D), Sebastien Payette (D).