Law Goalie

I'm loving the Bauer heritage gloves.

Wife got a great offer from UofT to stay for her PhD -- great for her, since it was her first acceptance, though I wasn't the least bit surprised, and great for her family, who are pleased as punch, but also great for us because it means there's at least a chance we won't be moving. Still, we'll see what happens as the other letters roll in.

That's very cool of Easton, and also of Reebok. I had got the impression that Reebok was a little... reserved, to put it diplomatically, about stuff like this.

Bonne réponse. :D

It will happen. Mark my words. It would be exactly like pulling your team off the ice if the fans were throwing things at them during play. The problem is that because ONE asshole can ruin a game this way, it's hard to use forfeiture as a penalty. Let's say they put the onus on the home team to keep lasers out of the building: seemingly good idea, until a visiting fan brings out a laser pointer and shines it on his own goalie's chest for a few seconds to get a forfeit win. I suspect what you'll see are games being suspended temporarily for a quick search, and home teams fined severely - worse if they can't find the laser and the game has to be stopped and finished later. That will force teams to step up security, and make the simple point that for the majority of the fans in attendance, they're hurting their own team financially to do it. I would also suspect that some kind of league-wide ban will be put in place for fans who do this, ie. they'll never be let into a game again. Well, one streak or another has to end there. :)

Blow the damn whistle - that's the right call. Giguere's grace period starts tonight; 15 games max, unless the Leafs' D undergoes a massive renaissance.

That little fact was certainly part of the impetus behind the Phaneuf deal.

I eat my words about Sjostrom and Kulemin - nice bit of work. And yet Wallin magically managed not to be involved...

Late bloomer. He's had more than a few 'awkward moments' in junior - but then again, if your goddamned body wouldn't stop growing, you'd have a few of those too. :) Huge potential as a shutdown guy, with definite Chara possibilities if he fills out and improves his coordination. Very, very impressive at the WJC. I like pairing Phaneuf with Beauchemin; puts him in a similar role to what he was in back in Anaheim, as a support guy for a genuine #1 guy. Classy move by Exelby, especially as he's on his way out of town anyway. The advantage to keeping Finger up (at least for now), is that a team with major injuries on the back-end (eg. Vancouver) may get desperate if their guys don't hurry back. Nolan Baumgartner & co. were holding the fort fairly well out West, but they're beginning to get exposed. While Finger won't net a high pick or a prospect, a straight waiver move is certainly possible which would take his $3.5M through 2012 (IIRC) off the books, and a late- to mid-round pick isn't entirely out of the question either. Burke can always play the financial card, and say that they're happy to pay him to watch games from the press box, forcing any team that wants him to give them something. On the other hand, I'm sure he'd be thrilled just to see the back of him. But why, why, WHY do they stick Kulemin with Wallin and Sjostrom? The guy could be a legitimate first-liner, and they stick him with the new guy and Captain Invisible. I mean, it's bad enough on Sjostrom, coming into Toronto and getting assigned to a line that has to play 'Where's Wallin?' instead of hockey.

Lookin' good. Now you just need to fight a southpaw to get that nose back into place...

Deveaux - although he might still be suspended.

Damn. :(

Pure speculation on my part, but I don't think it's far off the mark. Hockey is in the bloody stone-ages in performance psychology. Herb Brooks got into a tiny little bit of it when he was studying the Soviets, and Scotty Bowman was incredibly shrewd in how he handled his players, and hockey's a much more difficult case than, say, cycling or wrestling or even cricket, because it's a highly generalised and reactionary team sport. There's some very interesting and quite terrifying stuff out there on single-event performance. Tim Noakes' activation tests are borderline Mengelean; make the VO2max bike test look like a peck on the cheek.

If ever there was a textbook case of a blue-chip athlete being psychologically mishandled, it's Carey Price. Compare this with how the Pens handled Fleury, who was touted just as highly but had a few skeletons in his closet from the World Juniors and the Q playoffs, and it's night and day. There is a way to let a young goalie play his way into the NHL elite, and this is not it. IMO, it started when they traded Huet for a second; the ultimate cost was Price's safety net. So Huet leaves in the summer via free agency: big deal. Keeping him for that playoff run means Price doesn't have to face it alone. Suddenly the veteran's gone, and a young goalie is thrown from a internally supportive environment into an internally competitive one with Halak. I'm sure there are *some* goalies who would have benefited from such a change - guys who might have chaffed under a veteran presence - but Price is apparently not one of them.

Just wait to see what she does when the rest of the goalie gear starts rolling in!

At least he has the excuse of a couple dozen concussions. Most of the others are just unqualified idiots.

Dom would be proud!

It's a fine line. On the sublimation side (literally), I love Warrior's idea of using the entire lateral gusset as one continuous sublimated piece: saves on weight (no more Jenpro letters sewn on), simplifies construction, and makes the whole pad and its branding look much, much slicker. They certainly could have done more. IMO, the only places you really need synthetic leather on a pad are the medial surfaces, wrapped maybe an inch over onto the face of the pad, and major structural points like the top and bottom bindings, and the vertical roll. Pretty well the entire face of the pad *and* the leg-channel could have been sublimated. Would that have been too radical? Maybe. I think Lefebvre has been incredibly shrewd about how he has developed the Reebok line. Every year, there are only a small number of very specific changes that take the gear forward. He certainly could have gone bindingless on both gloves this year, but he chose to do the glove first and wait on the blocker. Even the jump from the 590 to the original Premier Series pad wasn't that extreme.

I once fought one of my prospective teammates at a pre-season game for doing that in a warmup. It's one of the few things I absolutely don't stand for. My one suggestion, short of actually attacking him (probably not advisable at a public session), is to hit him with a puck when he's unprepared. Make it look accidental, blame the hockey gods, etc., - "Oh, I was just try to fire it off the glass. Maybe we should all do a better job of looking before we shoot, eh?"

Trust me - they don't care if he hits them with it, but if he can place it reliably where he did (14" blocker side), and keeps them honest with the odd fake, there aren't many normal goalies (ie. not full-right) who will be able to answer that bell.

...And you can't stick a sharpener into your goalie's mask bag and toss it on the bench if you forget to lock it in the glovebox. :) I finally got to have a proper on-ice session with my goalie skates on 100/50 (coming from 7/16 ROH), and it was stunning; posted about it in the goalies' FBV thread.

That's another great example. They practically fought in shifts on those Bruins teams, and he had to be ordered to keep his gloves on even after he had his jaw broken.

To be fair, Chara was playing hurt in that series, and wasn't half the player he is now: he was still coming into his own. He's far better at managing the physical side of the game now, not to mention about ten times more mobile than he was. I also don't think he's the least bit worried about Colton Orr - he's more worried about getting an earful from Julien if he risks a broken hand to let a fourth-liner take him off the ice for five minutes. Chara's got the same problem Larry Robinson had. He has the credentials and skills to be listed as a heavyweight, and he's built a reputation that buys him a wide berth, but he's too valuable to his team to be taking all comers. This puts him in the awkward position of fighting guys like Lecavalier or Iginla or Doan - who is certainly in his class as a player and leader, but certainly not as a fighter - or career goons like Orr, Laracque and Boogaard. Does anyone think a Norris contender should be risking not only five and a game but his whole season on a guy who pays eight minutes a night?

Exactly the point I made: surely a helmet with a visor is safer than one without. The only counter-argument on that score is, of course, the one that says a visor bolted in at the sides (ie. that can't be flipped up) impedes emergency first aid. This may be true, but Health Canada seemed entirely unaware of it: they told me that as far as they knew, it was a facial coverage issue. They also had no clue about the safety issues involved in an ill-fitted mask. That's the insane part: the government body doesn't even know the standards upon which they're enforcing the law they wrote, since they left the standards entirely up to a private company. It's not the blind leading the blind so much as people willingly putting on blinders and allowing themselves to be lead because they're too lazy and/or ignorant to look where they're going.

Not a retailer, but one did fill me in. It's Health Canada cracking down on certain sections of the Hazardous Products Act that have basically gone without enforcement until now. The change in policy had mostly to do with other products - cosmetics, certain power tools - that are in much wider circulation, but visors, helmets and masks got pulled in too, largely because of the WJD goalie mask certification-fraud fiasco (thanks, jackasses). The HPA has been on the books for years, but it's an enormous set of regulations: it took them a while to get through with the really serious stuff and move on to things like lip-gloss and athletic equipment for adults. Pros have exemptions, but it's unclear how far down the line it will carry. Frankly, it smells like Health Canada budget-justifying to me, combined with a bit of a cash grab on the CSA's part - they are, after all, a private company with zero public interest, which is why their tests on goalie masks have bugger all to do with how the mask actually protects against localised impacts. When I spoke with Health Canada, they seemed completely ignorant of the nature and construction of masks, or of the differences between CSA-approved and non-approved visors. Some of them believed all visors were out, until informed otherwise. Some insisted that only cat-eye cages were being ruled out for goalies, which is in fact wrong; it's any mask that hasn't passed the pointless, expensive, and repetitive certification process, ie. any custom-made or even custom-padded mask, unless you feel like paying $10K every four years to have your personal mask certified. The actual effect will be a serious reduction in fit and thus protection and safety at the high end for adult goalies. Another fine achievement for the CSA.