11/16/2023 0 Comments Gigantik slap happy game![]() ![]() Pads that had been made of heavy leather, deer hair, and felt were replaced with nylon, plastic, and foam rubber. Read next: A Forgotten Black Founding Father But with new masks that protected the head as much as a catching glove does the hand, goalies could bring the rest of their body down to fill more of the net, especially if, instead of positioning themselves in their standard crouch, where one body part folds in front of another to cover space already covered, they extended their legs laterally to the lower corners of the net in what is called the “butterfly” style. If you watch game footage from the 1970s or earlier, you’ll see that most goalies played in an upright “stand up” style, for safety if not for efficiency. Getting hit in the face with a puck, at least until the advent of much more protective masks in the 1980s, always seemed a bad bargain. But to bring all of his body below the bar would mean exposing his head to 100-mile-an-hour vulcanized-rubber projectiles. For Vasilevskiy, who is 6 foot 5 on his skates, almost two and a half feet of his body mass resides above the bar, blocking nothing but useless air. The principle of goaltending is to put as much of your body between the puck and the net as possible, as often as possible. The next ones were both less organic and less predictable. This was only the beginning of the changes. The goalie’s silhouette-for protection, of course-correspondingly ballooned. The popularization of the slap shot in the 1960s, and the much lighter composite sticks that came later, changed all that. Both were introduced to take away at least some of the sting of a catch or a block. A leg pad followed the contours of a leg. A goalie’s glove, as in baseball, began as something closer to an actual “glove,” and followed the contours of a hand. In most of hockey’s first century, heavy, stiff, wooden sticks limited a shot’s speed and lessened the need for goalies to have anything but rudimentary equipment. Never in hockey’s history has a tail so wagged the dog.Ī goalie’s equipment is big because a puck is hard, can be shot with great velocity, and can injure, sometimes seriously, an inadequately protected goalie. ![]() The real and ongoing story is about how goals are scored in today’s NHL, and how teams have to play to score them. The less urgent tone of practice offers goalies little preparation for the jamming, bumping scrum of goalmouth action. And this season, in these early weeks, scoring is up slightly and save percentages are down, just as they were after other shortened NHL seasons. It is not about fewer goals being scored: The total number per game doesn’t change much from year to year. It is a story that has evolved very slowly, almost without change or notice for hockey’s first 100 years, then, since the 1980s, in actions initiated by goalies mostly, and counteractions by NHL regulators, players, and coaches, until today’s state of near-acceptance and resignation. This story is about goalies and their equipment, and about how they’ve learned to use it. This story is not about any particular goalie, but about the position itself and how it increasingly dominates the way hockey is played, and not for the right reasons. From the side, his belly seeming to hang low in front of him, he looked like Humpty Dumpty. The problem was right there on the screen: Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy, 6 foot 3, 210 pounds, athletic, fit, one of the very best goalies in the NHL, in the handshake line after the Lightning had won an early-round series in last season’s Stanley Cup playoffs. ![]()
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