FLICK OF THE WRIST
James van Riemsdyk and the lost art of the backhand shot.
There’s the backhanded compliment and the backhanded slap. Note that neither is admirable. Which brings us, elliptically, to the backhanded shot. Or more colloquially just: The Backhander.
It’s admirable, though not so frequently seen anymore around the NHL — deployed less than 10 per cent of the time by shooters. Exceedingly rare on the fly, off the rush, unless it’s, say, Sidney Crosby doing the rushing. He is a master.
“Yeah, but look at his stick,” James van Riemsdyk of the Leafs was saying before Friday night’s 3-1 loss to the Red Wings. “He’s got a super straight blade.”
The curve threw a curve to the backhand, back in the ’70s. Even if we’re no longer in the Bobby Hull slapshot era — his blade looked like a boomerang — and the tape measure coach’s challenge that was all the rage for a while, the backhand has never made a huge comeback from the glory days.
“The reason you don’t see many backhands anymore is because guys generally have bigger curves in their sticks,” JVR posits. Makes it hard to get off a decent backhand shot.
“From further out, that’s not a shot you take unless you think you have a good chance to score. Most of the time, coming into the zone, you’ll just throw the puck on the net forehand, which is considered a good play in today’s game.” Pity. Where has all the beauty gone? Van Riemsdyk is actually among the few forwards who will go backhand on occasion, albeit mostly when he’s parking his huge bulk around the net, sniffing for a tip-in or a deflection.
“Being around the net, you have to create angles,” he explains. “I use both sides of the blade.”
Goalies dislike the shot because it’s often unexpected.
“It’s one of those things you don’t see very often,” says Toronto backup Curtis McElhinney, Friday night’s starter at the spanking new Little Caesars Arena. “There’s only a handful of guys that actually use it. It’s not really a shot that rolls off the stick. It’s more of a shove.
“Definitely it’s harder to read. But I think it’s a useful shot. Obviously the distance is the biggest thing. You can’t be too far from the net trying that one out, but I still think it’s a good shot — unpredictable.”
A great practitioner of the backhand art was Mats Sundin — deke the D on the rush and reverse the puck on his blade, freak out the goalie with the same abrupt reversal on a breakaway. Nobody did it more adeptly, or prettily, or lethally than Sundin. So we got him on the line from Stockholm to talk about it.
The trademark move took years of practise, says Sundin.
“When I started out my career in the NHL, I watched a lot of centremen. I was fortunate enough to play with Joe Sakic early in my career and then Doug Gilmour.
“As a centre, you need to be able, without putting the puck on your right shot — in my case I was a right shooter — you need to both pass and shoot off your backhand. For me, it was an adaptation. As my years in the league went on, I got better and better at it.
“It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t a gift. It was working on it all the time.”
Sundin disagrees that the backhand is in danger of extinction.
“A lot of the best centres in the league today are still very good with it. I think you need to be able to take passes on your forehand or your backhand to be a top centre. Sidney Crosby comes to mind right away.
“It’s really not that complicated to deke and go to your backhand. Crosby does back-passes in his own end and in the offensive zone that are as good as his forehand passes. He doesn’t have to move the puck to his right side. That makes him so much fun to watch.”
The big Swede used a straight stick for most of his career, until the final few years when he adopted a moderate curve. “Never had a big one because, playing centre, you take faceoffs and, obviously, you can’t get too big trying the backhand when the puck is dropped.” Who knows where it would end up. These days, the pure backhand is perhaps most frequently plucked from a shooter’s arsenal in the gimmicky shootout. Their clumsiness with it often makes them look foolish or the goalie brilliant. Sundin is of the opinion anyone can become effective with the manoeuvre if they’ll only learn to love it a bit more.
“Absolutely. Just like any other skill, the more you use it, the more comfortable you’ll be with it.”
Van Riemsdyk has the made the shot a focus: “Definitely, I work on it a lot in practice.”
But staying on the ice late after practice, flipping backhand after backhand after backhand, doesn’t replicate the harassment he encounters around the ice in real games.
“The thing is, during a game you usually don’t have the time to take that shot.”
Backhand, forehead, wraparound wrister or junk puck, JVR has racked up a team-leading 15 goals.
At this point, we’ll backhand this column to the crucial output van Riemsdyk has contributed, especially as a vital component of the power play — he’s responsible for half a dozen of the Leafs’ total with the man advantage.
Toronto’s special teams have been weirdly flagging in the PPG department over the past week, a key reason why they’d dropped their last two games. Which can’t be blamed entirely on the injury absence of Auston Matthews.
Like his teammates, the winger insists it’s a fleeting funk; all teams go through such scoring slumps. Unlike his mates, though — and coach Mike Babcock changed up the lines a bit again in Thursday’s 2-0 loss to the Wild — van Riemsdyk hasn’t really experienced a scoring dry patch. He’s been among the most consistent of Leafs, on pace for 30plus goals, toying with 40.
As 2017 nears its end — which, for the Leafs, will occur in Las Vegas — debate about van Riemsdyk’s immediate future will intensify. As a free agent come the summer, he’ll be an attractive commodity. But can the Leafs afford to serve him up on a trade deadline tray if they’re serious about making a Stanley Cup run in the spring?
Thirty-goal scorers don’t grow on trees. Moving van Riemsdyk might be prudent to open up salary-cap space, but his offence would be difficult to replace, particularly with sophomores Mitch Marner and William Nylander having lost some of their rookie lustre and apparently needing a compass to find the net, no matter how much the coaching staff implores them to shoot more.
It surely would make more sense to keep van Riemsdyk in the fold as an “own rental,” the term coined by former GM Dave Nonis.
“It’s been fun coming to the rink every day,” says van Riemsdyk, who endured so many of the bad years in Toronto. “I’ve enjoyed my time here. I have only good things to say about the organization and the city in general.
“My job right now is to just focus on playing. Put all that other stuff to one side until it presents itself as something I have to think about . . . Usually everything works itself out. Whatever may be will be. We’ll see what happens, I guess.”