Reading the Play: Huet Jumps into a Shallow Pool
Posted: July 10, 2012 Filed under: Reading the Play (Commentary) Comments Off on Reading the Play: Huet Jumps into a Shallow PoolJuly 10, 2012
InGoal Magazine reported yesterday that Cristobal Huet, who has tended net in Switzerland the past two years, wants to make a comeback in the NHL.
He served out the second half of his four-year, $22.5 million contract in the Swiss league after Chicago, fresh off its 2010 Stanley Cup championship with Antti Niemi in goal, decided Huet’s play didn’t justify his cap hit.
Now an unrestricted free agent, Huet will peddle his services in a lukewarm free agent market which this year lacks a marquee goaltender. Among the UFA goalies already signed, aging star Martin Brodeur, underachieving up-and-comer Jonas Gustavsson, and established backup Johan Hedberg round out the best of an uninspiring list.
The pool of goalies still available includes former elites past their prime (42-year-old Dwayne Roloson and 36-year-old Marty Turco); one-time success stories who failed to pan out (Calder Trophy winner Andrew Raycroft); and backups who have shown flashes of brilliance (Ty Conklin, who in 2007-2008 threatened to usurp Marc-Andre Fleury’s starting spot) as well as those who have failed to distinguish themselves (Dany Sabourin, whose forgettable tenure also backing up Fleury preceded Conklin’s).
The UFA goalie with the most notable specialized skill may be Brent Johnson, a third former Fleury backup, who boasts the best knockout punch in NHL nets. He dropped Rick DiPietro with a single punch in a memorable, penalty-ridden game at Nassau Coliseum on February 2, 2011.
Given the available options, Huet is a reasonable prospect. He may not throw a punch like Brent Johnson, but he is one goalie on the market who never played second fiddle to Marc-Andre Fleury.
Loose Pucks: Give Up the Day Job?
Posted: July 9, 2012 Filed under: Loose Pucks (Miscellaneous) Comments Off on Loose Pucks: Give Up the Day Job?July 9, 2012
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Roberto Luongo has advanced to the second round of the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 buy-in No Limit Hold’em World Championship — thereby surpassing his team’s performance in this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs.
Luongo finished the first day of play (Day 1A, the first of three starting flights, on July 7) in 297th place. He will play in Day 2 of the tournament tomorrow.
To date, Cory Schneider has shown no interest in poker.
From My Net: The Predictability of Hockey
Posted: July 8, 2012 Filed under: From My Net (Reflections on the Game) Comments Off on From My Net: The Predictability of HockeyJuly 8, 2012
Every hockey game starts the same way: a puck is dropped at center ice.
From that moment forward, what happens next is unknown. Once the puck lands on that center dot, a multitude of variables can change its trajectory in an instant. A rut in the ice, a bounce off the glass, a linesman in its path, a well-timed poke check — they all send the puck careening around the ice like a pinball.
When I discovered hockey as a spectator in my teens, the random motion of the puck made the game exciting but inscrutable. Sometimes I lost sight of it, and I needed the play-by-play announcer to help me follow the action. I loved the game — it was exquisite chaos — but the subtlety, the strategy and structure were lost to me.
That finally began to change when I joined the game of hockey as a participant, first as a skater and then as a goalie in an adult rec league. As I learned the game from the inside, the blur came into focus. From the chaos emerged order.
As I see it, the game of hockey boils down to one central struggle: breakout against breakout. The breakout — the controlled movement of the puck out of your defensive zone, forcing the opposing team to exit with it — is the foundation of the offensive attack and the fundamental skill every team must master. During a game, as the puck changes hands from one team to the other and play is established in one team’s zone, each team must regain possession of the puck and then break it out in an organized fashion, like a Chinese checkers player carefully marching her marbles out of her home triangle and onto the field of play.
Goalies have the best view of this back-and-forth struggle for control. We are constantly adjusting to each realignment of the players on the ice, each moment-to-moment rearrangement of the chessboard. Seen from my net, as I watch plays develop through the neutral zone, across the blue line, and inside my zone, the flow of action is broken down into a series of encounters, usually between two opposing players. Sometimes one player, the puck carrier, already has the upper hand. Sometimes it’s a 50-50 puck and control is up for grabs. When the players are evenly matched, the outcome depends on effort and chance. When there is a clear disparity in skill level, as often happens in recreational games, the stronger player will likely come out the victor.
As the two combatants approach their battleground, the small patch of ice where they will fight for the puck or one will body the other off it, I am already anticipating the most likely outcome. I am also weighing the winning player’s options, judging the most likely decisions to be made with the puck. As soon as that contest is decided, I move on to the next one, always trying to read ahead to the next play and keeping in mind the range of possibilities for the play after that. Great players, so they say, read several plays ahead — something beyond my own hockey acumen.
Sixty minutes of play go by in a series of instantaneous transactions, a constant flow of action and reaction, cause and effect. The players inside this flow of action must constantly judge their own place within it and how to adjust to the next change. Goalies are somewhat outside the play, observing from a distance much of the time, but we too must respond to each new event as the play develops. It’s an art that relies on instinct and intuition and a solid understanding of the game.
The classic hockey term for this art is “read and react.” It captures the beautiful paradox of the game, the marriage of intellect and reflexes. The moment the puck leaves a shooter’s stick, I react on pure instinct. I don’t want to think — if I do, I’m in trouble. Up until that moment, though, I am thinking and analyzing nonstop.
There is an elegance and a joy to this orderly, thoughtful, even deliberate action, all happening in the context of perpetual motion. But what happens when the order breaks down?
This weekend I found out. I subbed in net for a team that played in a division a step up from my usual level, and the opposing team featured a pair of skaters whose speed and skill were two steps above everyone else’s. My team was missing several regulars and my defense, in particular, was a skeleton crew. It included one defenseman new to the team, one defenseman just returning from a post-surgery layoff, and two forwards moonlighting on the blue line.
The result was sheer chaos in my zone. Opposing forwards set up house in front of the net and had time to redecorate. Defensemen sent the puck up the boards to a winger who wasn’t there. At one point, two players on my team skated full bore after the puck, collided, and knocked each other to the ice in a tangle of dark jerseys and socks. (“Same team!” came the inevitable cry, so often heard in rec league games.)
Struggling through the truly unpredictable action of this game reminded me how much I rely on the underlying structure and predictability of hockey to guide my own play. Hockey at its best is organized chaos, clean and messy at the same time. It is a series of strategic decisions executed at top speed, both choreographed and improvised. There is beauty in the orderly predictability of hockey, and there is beauty in the moments that transcend it.
Covering the Puck 
Reading the Play: Engineering A Better Goalie
Posted: July 11, 2012 | Author: Covering the Puck | Filed under: Reading the Play (Commentary) | Comments Off on Reading the Play: Engineering A Better GoalieJuly 11, 2012
As NHL fans and GMs wait for Shane Doan and Shane Doan waits for Coyotes ownership, Phoenix is receiving attention for signing a member of its off-ice team — goalie coach Sean Burke — to a contract extension yesterday.
The Coyotes promoted Burke, who had served three seasons as Goaltending Coach/Director of Prospect Development, to the new title of Director of Player Development/Goaltending Coach. Burke’s coaching resume features impressive results from his students in the Phoenix net: Mike Smith, Ilya Bryzgalov, and Jason LaBarbera all achieved career years during Burke’s tenure as goalie coach. He has been called a “mastermind,” a “goalie guru,” and, by Smith himself, “the best guy in the league at what he does.”
In Toronto, another Burke — Leafs GM Brian — has been fending off criticism of his own goalie coach, Francois Allaire — the original goalie guru. Allaire built his reputation by building the careers of goaltending luminaries including Patrick Roy and Jean-Sebastien Giguere. But recent critics accuse him of being “too dogmatic” and imposing a “rigid and outdated” style of goaltending that’s “more about solely playing the percentages and being hit, as opposed to making athletic saves.”
The playing-the-percentages approach to goaltending seems to have fallen out of favor lately. Critics argue that an overemphasis on technique and positional blocking produces goalies with subpar reflexes and athleticism. The Leafs GM tacitly conceded the point, noting, “We’ve encouraged Allaire to be open to more acrobatic styles.”
But not so long ago goalies were taking criticism for relying on acrobatics at the expense of sound technical play. During the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, the second consecutive Finals showdown between Chris Osgood and Marc-Andre Fleury, The Globe & Mail said of Fleury, “[H]e relies on his athleticism a little too much to get out of jams.” Retired NHL goalie Phil Myre, in a 2010 post on his website laying out “5 Commandments of Goaltending,” warned aspiring netminders, “Overactive goalies often get out of position and have to rely on reflexes too much.”
Joining the debate yesterday was an unusual source of goaltending wisdom: EA Sports, maker of the NHL 13 video game and its predecessors. On the NHL 13 website and in a newly published promotional video, EA Sports touts the upgraded goaltending in this year’s edition of the game. What do hockey fans want from their goaltenders? If the marketing department at EA Sports is right, most fans want goaltenders who shun technique for “the drama of the desperation save.” For these fans, “NHL®13 now features the most athletic goalies ever seen in a video game. In the first period or with the game on the line, your favorite netminders scramble with more versatility and anticipate like never before.”
So what is the best formula for better goaltending?
The experts at Hockey Canada, the organization charged with developing amateur hockey in the game’s native land, think they’ve perfected it. Here is Hockey Canada’s official formula for the ideal beginner goalie:
For advanced goalies, the formula becomes more complex:
Not satisfied with a simple percentage breakdown, Hockey Canada thoughtfully provides coaches with a downloadable spreadsheet for conducting “Goaltender Evaluations.” The 65-point checklist measures goalies’ strength on criteria as basic as “Skating ability” and as offbeat as “Size of heart,” “Controls temper,” and (naturally) “Coachability.”
But for all the competing and complicated attempts to define the ideal goaltender — whether by programming video game algorithms or charting percentages on a spreadsheet — the true measure of a goalie comes down to two simple questions, which happen to be the final items on Hockey Canada’s list:
“Can this player play? Would you want this player on your team?”