flip12

He laces to the top in games though. I’ve seen a lot of pros skip their full skate setup in practices, or promotional/charitable on ice events, whether it’s skipping an eyelet they’d lace for games (Brett Hull as well as Marner) or not taping their tendon guards (P. Bure, Kovalev, Perron, Bondra, Gretzky).

I think I’m just looking a few generations of sticks ahead. It would probably be a thing in the pros first, but eventually trickle down. I see the texture application as a protective as well as a performance layer, which could be touched up as needed. I’m thinking about 10-15 years from now, not this year or the next.

I used to feel the same way. I realized though that what I was really tuning was the stick balance. If the stick isn’t at risk of becoming top heavy, a thick grip can feel quite nice. The sticks I’ve acquired over the years tend to be blade heavy for my taste. A 40g Big Butt Tacki Mac can totally fix a stick that’s unbalanced for me.

An expensive but consistent solution would be composite plugs molded to the desired shape, similar to the end plugs Ryan Smyth had made. Snap a stick and you could extract the plug and just transfer it to your new one. This would work for additive or subtractive shapes, like Petr Sykora’s grip. The finish of the part could achieve the desired tack and texture, given the right mix. These are uneducated guesses. There are people on this board with composite manufacturing knowledge that could shed more light on this perspective...maybe it’s cost prohibitive? It’s easily a huge space given the permutations of form and finish.

I see more and more players just taping a knob at the tip without any wrap traveling down the shaft towards the blade. People seem to be catching on to the effectiveness of the grip coating already on the shaft. I think it’s a matter of time until blade tape becomes obsolete as well. Pastrnak has already said he tapes his stick more out of habit than need, or something like that.

It depends on the person. Some of the best puck moving D in the NHL use it: Karlsson, Doughty, Ekman-Larsson, Letang. It’s an evolution of the Drury, with a functional remnant of its heel wedge intact. The added pocket at the toe is a little deeper, though, which steals the attention. I’ve never played a P88, so I could be mistaken, but my impression is its pocket is focused closer to the toe, which is why I could see the P28 working for someone coming from P88. My recollection has the Warrior variant in the tamer camp, where Easton’s E28 was less polished version of Kamil Kreps’ pro curve. Warrior, CCM and Bauer look to have smoothed out the Easton curve’s kinks a bit when fashioning theirs for retail production. True’s is a bit more rockered from the heel to mid-section of the blade with the heel and toe curves more unified than the others’ P28s. I don’t notice a drastic shift in how it plays from the E28 to the TC4, though. Since your son enjoys Warrior though, all of the P28 nuance is less important. As for playing the puck in closer to the body, Karlsson and Ekman-Larsson seem to use the P28 (or perhaps the Fisher Pro variant) at a considerably long length. The toe rocker might help compared to the P88 for handling the puck in tight. I don’t know where this defense should use this kind of blade, forwards that. Brian Rafalski’s blade looked like a mirror of Valeri Kharlamovs, a PM9 with a dental hook at the toe. If it weren’t for size descrimination delaying Rafslski’s NHL debut by a few years, he’d be in the Hall of Fame. Personally, I’ve slowly disarmed my need for a toe hook on my blade to play my best as I’ve become familiar with the other variables at play in puck handling, yet, I still prefer a toe biased pocket. It just seems to rest more naturally within my innate puck feel comfort zone.

What about the P28?

Base’s options allow a bit more flexibility in chosing patters. They have the Iginla in 4, 5, and 6 lies. Maybe get him to give the loft on the W03 more time. Controlling shot height when going from a little to a considerable degree of loft can be tricky at first, but with some conscious practice, initial awkwardness can be overcome. How are his saucer passes? A little loft can go a long way to getting good saucer passes off quickly. I know you said he likes to keep the puck on the ice for passes, but it’s good to be confident to throw a saucer when the situation arises.

Can you link to these studies?

Just wait. You’re in for a treat! Also, how can you call a winner without letting the other diver have their turn? Yeah, and not even a good cheese. A blue cheese inspired skate would be far better.

When the clap skate finally caught on in long track speed skating, every record broke immediately except for the sprint, the 500m. My guess is it negatively impacted the start but only significantly enough to lessen its adoption / performance benefit in that event. By the next Olympics, the top three or four finalists all beat the record time. I think True also overly restricts skating motion, which something like reducing facing and or cuff height would suggest. Graf is still the best biomechanically tuned skate I’ve ever tried. I think we’re on the cusp of a proper breakthrough in skates and everything else, but I doubt skiing is the direction forward. That’s been over-applied and we’ve seen the limits of its usefulness in hockey.

Have you tried everything out on the market? I find an end plug does a lot to bring the feel back in focus. True's 6.0 HT feels great to me without any balancing tricks required. That's the first stick I've tried that's been like that. I haven't tried the majority of the sticks out there though.

I tried a friend's during warmup the other day and I really liked it. Balance felt great. Took a few shots with it and found the puck jumped off the blade effortlessly and I could easily activate the kick. I didn't get too crazy because it's not my stick, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy one if I weren't flooded with sticks already. The only other semi-recent stick I've used is a Trigger 2 PMT and the balance of that stick does not agree with me at all. When I have time to focus and line up a shot, it kicks crazy hard, but I find myself fumbling with the puck and fighting with the stick to get it to do what I want to do. The True HT 6.0 was much more intuitive to me in that regard.

Does it have any performance effect?

Chara's also an investor in the company: https://www.forbes.sk/zdeno-chara-podnikatel-s-novou-paskou-na-hokejke-dobyja-nhl/

The ones at the closest True dealer weren't the same. There was clearly a structural and not only a surface difference. The difference in outer materials is obvious from a distance. The structural distance was something I noticed because I squeezed different parts of the boot to check for stiffness. There was a distinct softness to the collar of the goalie boot that was lacking in the player boot. I pressed on it and it gave in, where the player skate resisted as hard as I could reasonably squeeze. Without time on the True skate production floor, deconstructing both skates, or x-ray vision I'm unable to say where carbon begins and ends on True's boots. But the squeeze test on the pairs I got to inspect definitely showed True can make a skate that is structurally soft around the upper cuff, especially around the Achilles, because I've seen it. I can't say anything about how consistent that build is, if it applies in general to True goalie skates, but it is something I thought would be helpful to the OP. Would others be willing try the squeeze test for themselves? I won't be by that shop again for a while, but we could see if that's a consistent feature or a rare fluke within hours if others check their local displays or their own skates.

So not the same, like you said. It can’t be both, right?

The two pairs I saw at the LHS weren’t the same. There was a noticeably softer Achilles area on the goalie boot. They looked pretty much the same but performed differently in the squeeze test. Maybe the two pairs I saw were not representative of the actual builds..? On the other hand, that is the sole purpose of the display skates. I only have that anecdote to go off of though. Still, I have squeezed a True boot that happened to be softer in the Achilles so theoretically it should be something that they could do again. Of course, I know the boots roughly look the same, but the display pairs in Rødovre have a distinct stiffness difference around the upper edge. There was a clear lack of the same stiff shell under the surface in the goalie boot.

I noticed the True goalie skates on display at the LHS were softer in the Achilles area, where the tendon guard rivets in to the player skate; the player skates were as stiff as the rest of the shell there. If they could make you a player skate with a softer Achilles area for the tendon guard to attach to, I doubt you’d be sacrificing ROM compared to what Supremes offer. I’m not sure that’s a build spec they would be happy to fulfill, but it’s an idea. You could see if they have any other options to address that ask. You can’t be the first one to want to keep that feature in your boots.

Holy 💩!!! Can you do a gallery of the blade?

Aleksey Morozov used to do that grip as well:

What about Graf customs? They may end up around your price range as well. Knowing your preference for Micron 10-90s, they might be able to replicate that boot’s fit and flex. I’ve seen them do the flex notch and their Edmonton Special V-Cut skates feature a flex notch similar to the one on the Air 90s: ... That way you could get the proper size for each skate and a mix of more recent technology and your favorite old school boots’ features.

I was unaware of what MIPS is and found this, which seems relavent on several levels. https://pelotonmagazine.com/gear/mips-the-reality-behind-making-helmets-safer/

It just looks like the chunks that come together created a sort of rift where the pressure is. After looking at the red-lined picture, a depression along that border is apparent in the plain pictures. It looks like one or more of the underlying pieces has a flaw or something, like a curled edge maybe, that causes that indentation.

Did you opt for extra shot protection?