NHL netminders can no longer dress for success
Crackdown on goalie gear aims to increase goals
VANCOUVER • Efforts by goalies to make it hard on shooters to beat them with shots beyond just simple technique probably goes back to the beginning of hockey.
It wasn’t until the very last season of his NHL career that Corey Hirsch really understood how many of his peers weren’t just pushing the limits when it came to the size of the protective equipment they were wearing, but also blatantly landing themselves way into the cheating zone.
Hirsch, the former Vancouver Canucks goalie who now works as the colour commentator on the team’s radio broadcasts, was in the Dallas Stars organization in 2002-03. Signed to be the No. 3 man behind Marty Turco and Ron Tugnutt, Hirsch got two NHL games in with the Stars that season.
“It’s when I saw Marty pull off his jersey for the first time that I realized how much goalies were cheating,” he said this week. Not only was Turco wearing a big chest protector and a baggy jersey, but he had engineered his oversized goalie pants to have what amounted to a pouch in the front, so that pucks that hit him in the chest would settled there instead of spilling onto the ice.
“Patrick Roy used to have things sticking out the side of his pants,” he said.
And then he went back to the very start of his career with the New York Rangers: “The base of Mike Richter’s leg pads were 15 inches wide. They were like bells.”
Under the rules at the time, leg pads were supposed to be 12 inches wide. “When they’d come in and test, they’d give you five minutes to beat your pads in.”
It’s with all that in mind that we come to the changes in goalie chest, shoulder and arm protection that the league instituted this season.
As goalies have grown in stature and become masters of playing on their knees, their leg pads splayed out from side to side creating a nearly impenetrable wall along the ice, the league has become more aggressive in setting limits to how much net goalies can cover simply by showing up.
At the same time, of course, the materials and technology available for goalie equipment has advanced far, far away from the horsehair gear of yesterday. But so has, of course, the velocity of shots as players have become stronger and stronger and also been handed sticks made of synthetic materials, allowing them to fire shots at velocities unheard of in the days of wooden blades.
Although shooters may be able to shoot harder, goalies getting bigger while wearing better equipment than ever combined with focus from coaches on defensive schemes have driven scoring rates into a downward trend.
A year ago, the league pushed to make goalies wear more streamlined pants with less allowance for bagginess.
They wanted to force goalies to play more to make saves, to rely less on simply blocking shots.
In similar terms comes this season’s push to make what goalies wear on their upper bodies smaller.
The “floating” shoulder pieces are narrower than they were before and the arms have been made more streamlined, inevitably creating more natural gaps for goalies to contemplate.
And while Philadelphia Flyers goalie Brian Elliott was vocal earlier this week about the changes — “I’ve already sent a couple emails to (NHL executive) Kay Whitmore. I’m getting bruised like crazy on my arms,” he told the South Jersey Courier-Post — Canucks goalie Jacob Markstrom insists he has no complaints.
“Mine is basically the same as last year,” he said.
“It was already smaller than others.”
And he said that while he hates conceding goals, he was resigned to why the league was pushing for changes: “It’s like with the pants last year, you just have to get used to it.”
As detailed by Kevin Woodley and Greg Balloch in InGoal magazine this summer, the league was looking to maintain goalie safety while making pads more form fitting. While Woodley and Balloch noted that Markstrom and his backup Anders Nilsson, two of the NHL’s biggest goalies by stature, were likely to seem “smaller” under the new rules, they also pointed out that Tampa Bay netminder Andrei Vasilevskiy, another big goalie, played last season in a smaller Bauer-made chest protector and performed so well that he was a Vezina finalist.
Markstrom took a similar angle to the question of what smaller pads do.
“Focus on my technique,” he said.
LIKE WITH THE PANTS LAST YEAR, YOU JUST HAVE TO GET USED TO IT.