flip12

@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.

It is a bit lower than P28. It’s more consistently rockered from heel to toe, which probably makes it difficult to get a good reading on. CCM also tended to measure their lies higher than other brands like Easton, which was kind of a standard for a while. Warrior was notoriously low in their measurements until they changed to match others. Another example of CCM’s high lie measurement bias is P46. They had it at 5.5 or 6 while they labeled P28 as lie 5. I’m sure they had P28 at 5 because that was the industry norm at the time. Both curves were the same lie as their predecessor curves were though: P46 came from E4, with an Easton lie of 5 and P28 came from E6, with an Easton lie of 5.5. Somehow Easton messed everyone up by calling P28 lie 5, possibly because they were listening too much to Bjugstad. He was apparently behind the push for P92-5 but it wasn’t 5 by the old E4 standard. Easton had more pressing issues at the time so worrying about lie measurement consistency could easily have been an oversight. Long story short, P29 is lower than a lot of other patterns on the market these days. CCM has always just measured stuff on the high end of the lie scale.

Do you still have your old VH or True boots?

Interesting they’ve changed the eyelet pattern to Graf’s classic skip to the top. Makes sense for their concept.

Makes sense. Catalyst is one gen older than Hzrdus. Edit: Duh. I see what you meant. They just updated Cat so you'd expect a HZRDUS update next, and then maybe a new line replacing Cats.

Same. I have a pair of Air 9000s that are still holding on from the ‘90s. They’re beat up, but still amazing.

True has some deal with Tackla, so their new pants have the classic Tackla fit. I’ve never had any wish for better than that. The fit, feel, function, and look are all great IMO.

I think the pitch / balance point shift is what I like most about the Ellipse II. The back being a little longer than my 13’+1 feels good, but the change in balance point is the most freeing thing about both profiles. I thought it was about achieving a similar pitch to VSi on 72-80 HiLo, but that’s actually a little less pitched than most hockey holders. Maybe it’s really about moving the center line of the blade to be where my push naturally is, which is probably somewhere close to the third wheel from the front.

That sounds interesting. I may have had a quad on my first pair of MLX. The eBay seller I got them from didn’t know what the steel specs were, but I liked the feel. It was like a flat on the heel that fell into a ramp as you rolled forward. I have Ellipse II on my Cat7s now. It feels better than what they came with, but I’m not bothered by the flatter back portion. Some say it feels longer than Quad II. I’m more interested in seeing how long of a single radius I can roll with and at what balance point. I think balance point is the most effective variable for my skating. The shorter front on combo profiles and Ellipse don’t seem to be much of a feature for me.

My Mission Proto Vs had a metal d-ring instead of the plastic loop. I think it was one generation before they went to the plastic loops. I don't think I used it. I just laced snug, but not overly tight, all the way up. The cut on those was like 90's Tacks on Ozempic. I think that was the basic idea behind the Proto line. By reducing the volume with lower vamping, it made for a nice snug fit, similar to Tacks with the ankle hinge flex, but more connected. The first two generations of Vapors were similar in that respect. The ankle creasing made for a boot with great forward flex while maintaining lateral stability.

The boot flex definitely has some effect on this equation, though I was stumped just when I thought I was getting it. I had some VSi's converted to ice, on VH/Step holders, thinking they'd be as amazing on ice as they were on their original 72/80 HIlo. They were not. They felt comfy, but pretty much as frustrating as any other ice hockey skate I've tried, with a few exceptions. I think that was the moment that I decided to actually start trying out profiles, which I had been thinking about doing for a long time. My favorite boots do feature a similar degree of forward flex and lateral stability as the Proto Vs did though: Vapor 8, Vapor 10, Mega Air 90, 703, and MLX with the right tongue. With the right boot, like the Vapor 10, even a profile on the opposite end of the spectrum feels quite nice. I can only imagine how Vapor 10 on my ideal profile would feel, once I find it.

I'm not the best to comment because I'm drifting toward the long end of the profile spectrum. I think the closer I get to what my skating mechanics were developed on, the more natural I feel on the ice. I really honed my skating for hours in my apartment building's parking lot on '96 or '97 Mission Proto Vs on a 4 x 72mm chassis. The more my blades mimic the pitch and flat radius of those rollerblades, the more natural I feel on the ice. I get why some skaters would feel locked on rails in a 10' radius, but my mechanics seem to center around something closer to 20' +2. 13' and Ellipse II, both at +1 pitch, feel perfectly short and quick to me. 13' neutral felt a little rail like, but as soon as I had it redone with +1 pitch I never felt stuck on the ice again. It seems like the shorter front sections can mimic the effect of pitch if you don't actually want to mess with pitch. My favorite ice setup so far has been Cobra's stock 11' (now I think they're doing 10') on what felt like at least +2, compared to the +1s I have at the moment.

I love the Vapor 8 and 10 perforated steel though. I was skating on some again with the Vapor 10s I picked up. I was really enjoying the feel of those blades until one of the Tuuks cracked on both towers. I've only skated on LS perforated steel a couple of times. I don't really remember it being all that different from standard LS steel.

Found a better shot of it:

The original black set that debuted on the Vapor 8 did, but the LS2 perforated steel from the Vapor XX era had wide wedge perforations that lined up with the holes in the holder bridge as seen here on the best player ever deliberately excluded from the Hockey Hall of Shame:

I'm the same: 9.5 R in True, 9 Fit 1 in Vapor. Bauer's Birkenstockier toe cap makes the difference.

I was thinking of Cobra and VHStep's aft bolt too. It's hard to tell from the pictures I've seen. The wavy shoreline of the holder where the rivets go reminds me of MLX. I know Cruikshank said they were working on boots and holders with D'Cosi, but it's hard to find anything on them. I agree, it doesn't seem like this is actually Bauer.

PowerFlyByeBye

Different profiles for different people though. I feel much more agile on 13'+1 than I did on neutral 10' or 9.5'/10.5' (if that's True's stock profile). I don't feel the blade catching at all when I don't want it to. I'm thinking of going to an even longer profile next. I haven't tried any of the more complicated combos, but I really don't want a super short profile in the front of my blade as well as the added pitch. The added pitch is enough. Just like ROH, I'd say go with what works. If you get good enough grip at a shallower hollow or if you have enough agility and quickness at a longer radius, it'll only help. As soon as the blade is grabbing when you're not expecting it there's too much dig, either front-to-back/profile or side-to-side/hollow, and it's time to back off. That's my work-in-progress theory.