flip12

I gave up too soon, it's not PRO in the circle, it's his flex: https://media.gettyimages.com/id/2192989281/photo/washington-capitals-v-buffalo-sabres.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=bI-0OPPAJ_GGcrDg8sScdieCj8zdrvHUxuijqcUAE6o=

There's been a lot of chatter that it's PSHS, but I can't point to a definitive source pinpointing it. Someone probably has a clearer view, but the best UFO shot I can find is this one: https://media.gettyimages.com/id/2195387491/photo/washington-capitals-v-edmonton-oilers.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=YeRRoLqRuaBP92F2CD5uJ5ko8CPBBAbJSwAGRXG6FiI= It's a bit blurred, but I think that's the "PRO" circle logo at the end of the "PRO STOCK. INTENDED FOR OVIE USE ONLY." And that text alone is enough to implicate Geppetto.

He has been since around the end of his slump last season.

I think what’s confusing is the discussion of it being the P28 curve with the P92 face. It looks more like it’s what you describe, just a regular P92 curve with a little bump at the toe.

How? How do you get through the day?

Ha. I noticed that about CCM's P28, and Warrior's seems closer to that than Bauer. (TC4 was its own thing last I checked, they may have changed it.) I like CCM's sticks too, but the slightly more vanilla toe on the CCM and Warrior really appeal to me. Bauer's is a bit too augmented for my taste. Luckily, any P28 I've tried feels so nice compared to most curves that I don't have to look at it much when I'm using it.

😮 How do you even make your coffee then?

Forgot about the P86 angle, that makes perfect sense. Kucherov was a P92 guy before switching, as was Fisher. There might be something to that variant (if Kuch is using the Fisher) for those that want a little less wedge. I hope to get my hands on a Kuch stick soon. I’m a big fan of the P28, but a slightly less lofted version would be nice. How are you sourcing your Kucherov habit now? Are you going with MyBauer for all your sticks? I wish GePROtto would offer the Kucherov.

@Westside how much do they weigh compared to your other tongues?

Kucherov uses a very slight variation of a basic P28 (which varies at retail from company to company). I’ve read he uses the Fisher variant, perhaps the original P28, but I can’t confirm. I wish someone would do a podcast with Fisher to talk to him about his gear. His blade is possibly his greatest contribution to the game, but he was also an early tester on CURV boots and who knows what else.

Even from product pictures it's easy to see. I'm old enough to remember web images would load on the internet progressively: first very pixelated, then smoother and smoother, kind of like a thriller where the cops repeatedly ask the ITer to "enhance" 3 or 4x until the perp's face is revealed in crystal clear resolution. Gloves have devolved in the reverse of that: their geometries are composed of fewer and fewer polygons which makes for blockier builds. There are two ways to notice it--look at the top end gloves of a line that's been around over that time and see how they shed layers of complexity from one generation to the next and also look at the lower tier gloves from 5 to 10 years ago. Today's top end gloves look like bottom end gloves from 10 years ago. One example is Warrior's GX-archetypal glove--from MacDaddy/Dolomite, AK27, Luxe, QR1, QRL, QRE... they kept degrading. Top end gloves feel ok in the shop, but it's thanks to a lot of fluff and tricks--super flimsy builds with stretch gussets. Good for them. We pay the price (probably roughly the same as old top end gloves after inflation) and the price they pay to produce them drops. They don't last as long, so we're forced to dip into the scum pond again in a bit for a product that's probably degraded again but the financial gouge is still going to be just about as deep as before.

I remember David Booth talking about how much he liked his Trues because they allowed him to perform the way he wanted on a single radius, after having tried everything to make his previous boots work for him. Sounds very similar to your experience, just in a different make.

The way you put it, all of this reminds me of blade curves. Some will do the work for you, but it’s not as though you can’t shoot off the toe or do toe drags with a PM9, it just requires more mechanical work from the user rather than relying on the shortcut approach afforded by the tool. Programming has a cool term for similar neat-but-not-absolutely-necessary shortcuts: syntactic sugar. These complex geometries could be like mechanical sugar, making some much more comfortable performing feats that would otherwise be much too involved. For some, it’s the bees knees, for others it’s just meh. I’m kind of the same with curves. I used to be really dedicated to one in particular, but then I came to realize my golden stick was actually just balanced to my brain’s narrow tolerances. Now if a stick’s balanced right, the curve doesn’t matter all that much.

It's downright depressing how far gloves have fallen in 10 years. From '95 - '05 gloves got so much better insanely fast. From '05 - '15 (roughly) they peaked. From then to now it's just ugly all around.

Could be. If that’s the case he thought ahead and went to black CCMs for a bit before the switch, trying to hide the swap under the cover of darkness. If he really cared he would have had the EQMs black out the Hyp2rlite stain at the top of the quarters too though.