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badger, I can almost guarantee the tilt is being caused by the interaction of your pants and thigh-boards with your pads. Seriously, get rid of the thigh-boards and find yourself some knee-pads. Whatever annoyances the knee-pads may present, they are nothing on the problems that thigh protection attached to the back of the pads can cause. If you can find a pair of John Brown's, they are worth their weight in gold; failing that, the new CCM KPPRO ones look promising. I talked about them a fair bit in the 2015 CCM catalogue review, but I haven't had a chance to get my hands on them yet. It's also possible that your pants themselves are jamming on the backs of the pads. Remind me: what pants/pads are you using? If they have flat thighs, large ridges on the outside or inside of the thigh, or thick padding on the inside of the thigh (around the leg) the pants may also be among the culprits. That said, there are some technical improvements that can make modern pads behave a little better. The main thing is to try to be as 'snappy' or 'crisp' with your knees as possible. When you're driving your knees down, really drive that movement with internal hip rotation; conversely, when you're recovering, snap the knee(s) back up through external rotation. As long as your pads are strapped properly -- loose enough to allow your knee to rotate behind the pad, but not so loose that you're falling out of them -- your pads will stay facing forward (ie. square to the plane of your body) consistently. Snapping your knees down will ensure that they don't get 'jammed' at the corner of the back of the pad and the knee-block, and snapping them up will ensure that the pad stays square as your knee returns to a standing position. You can practise this without full recoveries. Butterfly, then snap one knee up (until your skate-blade is on the ice) then slam it down again, and alternate; when you feel like you're getting really good coordination, you can start lifting the alternate leg while the other is still going down. From there, it's just a short move to the 'impressive' (but only minimally useful) double-leg or 'pop-up' recovery, which doesn't require anything like the core strength or balance that many people think it does. If you find yourself trapping or squeezing a lot of pucks on top of your pads, that's usually a sign that a goalie is holding his (or her) hands a little far back. Try holding them well out in front of you, so that they're in your foveal (forward) visual field, rather than in the peripheral field. This may feel utterly bizarre at first -- you may feel like a Romero zombie, reaching out in search of brains -- but your hand/eye will improve dramatically, and, in addition, holding your gloves further forward makes them 'bigger' to the puck's perspective, 'cutting down' the shooting angle even further. (It's like having bigger gloves for free.)

While you may never be able to prevent diffuse axonal injury with a helmet, there are certainly ways to make helmets that help to dissipate shearing impacts. The problem is that they invariably create either disposable or mechanically complex helmets, and always very expensive ones, and those aren't things most hockey players are willing to accept. Even among goalies, who carry a minuscule risk of concussion (properly speaking) but an enormous risk of repeated sub-clinical trauma (which we're barely beginning to understand), very, very few goalies are willing to spend money to protect their brains.