Doing more with less
NASHVILLE — Take a close look, a really close look, at what Matt Duchene is doing these days.
Duchene is lighting it up — eight goals and 13 assists in 19 games before facing the Nashville Predators on Monday — despite using a stick that seems like it’s half the size of what everyone else is using.
It’s almost a mini- stick, appearing to be better suited for a bantam or even pee- wee aged player, not even reaching his shoulders. It’s several inches shy of the traditional standard — touching the chin with skates on, touching the nose with skates off.
The shorter twig comes with a healthy nod towards Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby.
“I changed it during the lockout year ( of 2012- 13),” Duchene told Postmedia. “It kind of came hand in hand with changing how I trained. A big part of that was my hip flexibility got a lot lower to the ice. Sid and I trained a lot together. Basically, I looked at his stick and cut mine halfway between mine and his and that became too long for me, even then. I used his as kind of a marker.”
As high- scoring role models go, Duchene could certainly do worse. Both experience success by keeping the puck close to their skates, maintaining control by spinning off checkers. In the past dozen games or so, Duchene has been particularly dangerous beating defencemen to the outside and slicing his way to the front of the net, just outside the crease — a staple of Crosby’s game.
“He’s got amazing flexibility and strength,” said Duchene. “I feel like because of the training we both do, that’s something I developed as well, over time.”
Senators’ goaltender Mike Condon says Duchene and his stick creates netminding nightmares.
“He’s definitely good at lowering his shoulder and going to the net and he does that because with that type of blade — if you look at his stick and how short it is and how sharp it is, we sometimes joke it’s like a 60- degree iron — he can get it up high so quickly,” said Condon.
“He can elevate it almost a straight 90 degrees up, like you saw in Philadelphia ( against Flyers goaltender Alex Lyon on Feb. 3).”
In days of old, Condon says, defenders might have been able to slow down Duchene with a hook or a hold as he cut inside, but the officiating clampdown has opened up the ice even more for him.
Duchene hasn’t copied everything about Crosby’s game — “I’m a little bit more straight up than he is at times because of where my stick blade is flat,” — and as a student of the game, he’s always experimenting, trying to find any edge he can.
If you’re into hockey nerd stick science, Duchene is your guy. Pure goal scorers tend to use extra long sticks with bigger curves. Playmakers often go shorter, with flatter blades. Duchene likes to consider himself a hybrid, capable of having success scoring and setting up plays.
“I thought I was going to give up some on my shot and I didn’t really,” he said. “I just went with more flex, so the shorter you go, the more flex you need to add. You don’t have the leverage on a shorter stick, so you have to create it with flex. It’s an addition problem, basically. You take this away to get this, you’ve got to add this to keep something. That’s kind of the way I look at it.”
Whatever math equations he’s using, he’s getting the right answers.