In the midst of the Stanley Cup finals, the thoughts of
even serious people may turn to hockey. I make no claim
to pundit-like seriousness, but I do confess to a love
of the sport, and especially the craft of goaltending,
which has fascinated me since early childhood. Growing
up in hockey-mad Quebec, I played on scrappy pick-up and
local teams in preparation, so I hoped, for one day tending
goal for the Montreal Canadiens, a team I idolized. It
didn’t work out that way, alas, but my interest
in the game never flagged, and I still follow the careers
and study the technique of the major NHL netminders.
One thing
I’ve noticed is that, although individual goalies
each have their unique styles, the collective mode of
goaltending has changed dramatically. The heroes of
my early youth were all stand-up goalies, occasionally
with a slight shoulder-hitch—though sometimes,
like Gerry McNeil of the Canadiens, they would go to
one knee, the pose he favored on his hockey card. It
looked rather classy. Nonetheless, they all pretty well
stood their ground, or ice, for the most part vertically.
The greatest
of them all was the Detroit Red Wings’ Terry Sawchuk,
whose like, I believe, has never been equaled. But they
were all masters of the craft, and none wore masks (until
Jacques Plante of the Canadiens introduced the protective
device). Harry Lumley of the Toronto Maple Leafs was
a brick wall. Al Rollins of the perennially weak Chicago
Black Hawks did, at times, resemble a sieve, but that
was no fault of his own. If he’d had a strong
defense in front of him, instead of the platoon of sad
sacks who roamed the blue line instead of the attacking
zone like a clutch of befuddled tourists, he might have
achieved greatness. Sugar Jim Henry of the Boston Bruins,
whose face looked like a puck-pummeled tattoo parlor,
was an intimidating fixture between the pipes. No matter
how many times he was stretchered off the ice, he would
always return stronger than ever. At 5ft. 7in., Gump
Worsely, shipped from the Rangers to the Canadiens,
was a mighty mite. None were inclined to scrooch the
ice or flop around, except when the situation demanded
it.
Today’s
practitioners of the noble art are a different breed
altogether. Their default position is the deep crouch,
which makes some sense since most are a good half-foot
taller than their predecessors and are able to cover
a larger portion of the net. But the “top shelf”
remains their weakness. I have rarely seen Jonathan
Quick of the LA Kings—whose extraordinary reflexes,
be it said, live up to his name—rise from his
hams. Even the greatest goaltender of the current age,
Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Tampa Bay Lightning, virtually
impenetrable for the last few years, has been perforated
in the Cup finals by the Colorado Avalanche, who have
discovered an over-the-blocker weakness in his armor.
If Vasilevskiy would stay upright, as did Sawchuk for
the most part, he might scarcely lose a game.
I don’t
mean to imply that there were not other stellar goaltenders
who flourished in the more recent period: Plante himself,
Glenn Hall, Ken Dryden, Billy Smith, Patrick Roy, Martin
Brodeur, Carey Price, to name a few. But the earlier
generation of stalwarts, playing with poorer equipment
against fewer teams that could benefit from an obviously
more rigorously selected and thus better talent pool
of stickhandlers and sharpshooters, remain the giants
of the profession.
I am baffled
by this modern style of protecting the cage, shared
by practically every netminder in the League—except,
to a degree, by the brilliant Igor Shesterkin of the
New York Rangers, who won this year’s Vezina Trophy,
and by the Colorado tandem of Darcy Kuemper and Pavel
Francouz, especially the latter. What has caused this
paradigm shift? Why have goaltenders almost universally
decided to “go down” or “hug the post”
rather than follow the example of Terry Sawchuk and
his tradecraft mates?
Of course,
as noted, being taller and generally larger than their
precursors, they blanket more of the net, but tending
goal on one’s knees has its, so to speak, downsides.
There’s a lot of slipping and sliding around,
and the posture impedes the kinetics of defense, the
ballet of anticipation. Primarily, it reduces what every
goaltender depends on, what we might call “visionary
scope,” the ability to see the play developing,
to recognize where the secondary shooters are, and where
they are likely to reposition themselves. Standing tall
helps to see through the “screen” intended
“to take away his eyes,” as the sportscasters
like to say. I’m not suggesting that the modern
goalie never stands upright, but the trend toward crouching
low to the ice is epidemic. And I don’t get it.
If I were
a poet, I’d be tempted to play with symbol and
metaphor and say we are witnessing a sign of the times,
however frivolous the notion. Are we as a culture returning
to a more primitive stage of evolution? Is Homo Erectus
now gradually sloping toward the drooping status of
Homo Prolapsus, masked, padded, shielded, and though
taller than our ancestors, somehow smaller than they
were, less daring, less responsible, less willing to
risk injury? Are we intent on seeking safety from the
flying projectiles of the contemporary world, like those
tiny viral pucks that a workingman Sugar Jim Henry would
have no fear of and a citizen Terry Sawchuk would manfully
deflect, relying on a natural immunity against being
too easily scored on? We are not tending to our duty
of spotting where the shooters are. So we stoop and
bend and crouch and play it safe while the red light
flashes behind us, like the worst goaltender ever to
don the pads for the Les Canadiens, the ineffable “Red
Light” Racicot.
Mere speculation,
of course — just having fun with the game of hockey
and willing to play the game of life, to see through
the screen that our adversaries have put before us without
crouching before the vicissitudes of existence, as we
are now prone to do. That, I propose, should be our
goal.
