Dangerous time for goalies: Dryden
Hockey has changed dramatically since Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden was winning six Stanley Cups with the Canadiens between 1971 and 1979.
“When I was a goalie, the risks were pucks and sticks,” Dryden said before the start of a Heads Up on the Concussion Issue public lecture at McGill University. “The risks for a goalie now are not just pucks and sticks. They are getting run over in the crease.
“A goalie is pretty defenceless,” he said. “You’re focused on the puck, you’re not really aware of those that are crashing the net. Often you’re on your knees and you’ ve got somebody coming to the net at a pretty good speed. As you are unprepared and you’re not seeing him, you’re kind of blindsided to the whole thing. That makes you pretty vulnerable.”
Dryden thinks the NHL will focus on better protecting goalies over the next couple of years.
In the early days, goalies used a standup style as much for survival as anything else.
“What nobody really said at the time, and I never even really thought it through until afterwards, but a standup style is the compromise you make as a goalie if you don’t have a mask,” Dryden said. “You’ve got to protect your head somehow. The only way to protect it is to have it as high above the bar as possible. So what really began as the compromise for safety became the standard even if it wasn’t necessarily the most effective way to play. Then once you get perfect equipment, and especially the perfect mask, now you don’t need to do that.”
Dryden said the speed in today’s NHL has made it a much more dangerous game. He noted an average shift in the 1950s would last about two minutes with a lot of coasting and circling. A shift in today’s NHL lasts about 35 seconds at full speed.
“As you go faster, you have to play shorter shifts, have to be in better shape,” Dryden said. “Offseason training, off-ice training. All together, they generate a game that’s much more faster with more collisions and greater force.”
And more injuries.