How do you know what "style" goalie you are?

[srv2miker 0]

Okay, maybe a dumb question, but bear with a beginner here.

Right now I'm using Brian's Beasts that fit really well, and are good quality (plus I got a killer deal on them). They were the right pad at the time for me (and for the foreseeable future) but being the gear whore that I am, I'm already looking to the future and the pads that I'll buy next.

I know you can cut most manufacturer's lines two ways - hybrid and butterfly. My question - how do you now which you are? I find myself using the butterfly alot - I'm 6'3" and cover a lot of net, so I tend to bfly and play the angles. So I look at my Beasts and think "these would be great if the leg channel was little more bare, the landing gear was a little larger, and they were flat faced".

But, then I look at the NHL and a ton of "bfly" goalies use Velos, which are your classic flexible pad, which I equate to more of a hybrid style. So my question is, if both pads work equally well for bfly, how the hell do I pick which pad is for me? More flex or stiffer?

There's only so much trying on in the store can tell me, so it seems like a bit of gamble to drop $$$ one way or the other without being able to know for sure which style I'll like better.

To sum up - how am I supposed to know (with what little experience I have) whether I will like a stiffer pad or a more flexible pad? Is it the type of bfly (i.e. if my bfly is wide does stiffer make more sense?), or the seal I can create between my legs?

[Law Goalie 147]

There's a lot of confusion here.

To answer your ultimate question, you would want a stiffer pad in terms of VERTICAL flexibility (that is, bending the top of the pad towards 90-degree to the shin) if you both have and regularly use a wide butterfly, with your feet are apart, hips flared and your knees separated. If you are limited to or use more often a narrower butterfly (feet closer, knees together) a more vertically flexible pad will wrap more around your knees in the butterfly, rather than sticking straight like / \.

To confuse this a little more, something like a Turco-break RBK is fairly flexible at the top of the vertical but has basically no ankle break; a lot of people call that a "flexible" pad.

The Velo has a very soft ankle-break (to the extent that the HD piece in the shin actually sinks an inch or two into the ankle over time) and are very flexible at the knee- and thigh-breaks. These, too, are described as "flexible".

Then you have the kind of flexibility that nobody actually talks about: lateral. A really old-school pad with structural shin-rolls (not just stitched on, but integral to the pad) can be twisted *around* the vertical axis (ie. in the lateral axis) rather than against it (the traditional vertical flexibility at ankle, knee and thigh). Among the pros, look at Brodeur, Miller, and latterly Ed Belfour. They all wore RBK-skinned versions of the Heaton 10 (well, technically, Brodeur's are tweaked D&R Quantums) which was the last pro-level pad with truly functional shin-rolls. Most people don't even know what to call this; those who do will often still use that same basically meaningless, unqualified word: "flexible."

Now, leaving aside pads for the moment, there is a question of goaltending style alongside this. Note that I do not say "underlying this" - the equipment is an interesting but purely secondary concern.

Here, too, you will find a great deal of confusion. Fortunately, this is easier to cut through.

In every era of goaltending, there has been an orthodox method of stopping the puck: the accepted wisdom that most coaches teach (usually out of a lack of understanding) like the gospel, and to which most goalies devote themselves. In the era of Georges Vezina, this was 100% stand-up, straight as a rake. Now, it's the Allaire Quebec Butterfly (aka pro-fly), usually known as just plain butterfly and often espoused with religious fervor by people who don't know any better (just like old-school coaches who still yell at their goalies to "stand up!" on every shot). In essence, the thought is this: the Butterfly form fills more of the net from a greater range of angles than any other form. Combined with appropriate depth-challenges, you can cover 90+% of the net on every shot -- oddly, 100% opposed to the old 1980's mantra of "keep the shooter guessing." Such goalies tend to prefer huge equipment is a direct consequence of this: to them, goaltending is about presenting a particular 2-D form to the shooter's angle at all times. This is why poorly-trained Butterfly goalies tend to look less like athletes than over-equipped ice-dancers: they're not really making saves, they're just throwing shapes.

The breakdown is simple: if you are an orthodox butterfly goalie, you use that basic position in all save-selections. It becomes in effect more important than your stance. The nice thing about the orthodox description is that every instinctively understands that there is no such thing as "degrees of orthodoxy" - you either are or aren't.

Here, then, is the real difference between an orthodox and a 'hybrid' goalie: when the orthodox goalie is forced by circumstance to go 'outside' the Allaire Butterfly program (say, a head-first dive across the net) he will either flat-out refuse to do so, or having done it, would describe it as a "mistake," a momentary error or aberration in technique.

A hybrid goalie would say, in effect, "I'll do anything to stop the puck."

Everybody these days learns the Quebec Butterfly style - even an old hand like Belfour. The more and the more often you deviate from that orthodox norm, the more of a "hybrid" you are. So while there are no true degrees of orthodoxy, there are degrees of hybridisation.

This term is still a little vacuous, since a hybrid means "one thing combined with another" and we've only defined one thing so far - the Butterfly. Allaire disciples might be tempted just to call these "compromised" or "corrupted" butterfly goalies.

What we're really getting at is that a Butterfly goalie adopts that orthodox formal style; a Hybrid goalie studies the Butterfly and incorporates it with other things: pad-stacks, splits, paddle-down, Hasek-rolls, head-first dives, whatever. Good examples of this would be totally unpredictable guys like Tim Thomas (who still actually butterflies quite often), but Roberto Luongo is perhaps a better example. He uses the Butterfly up to a point, then throws technique out the window and uses sheer desperate athleticism to stop the puck, and is proud of having done so.

Returning to the pads, it's possible to see now why hybrid goalies would tend to use pads with greater vertical and lateral flexibility: they find themselves in a greater variety of positions when making saves. Sealing the ice in a full-split with RBK's is almost impossible; doing it in H10-clones is easy. With a butterfly-pad, in effect, your leg moves behind the pad to maneuver it into a certain positional form in front of it; with a hybrid pad, the pad will tend to move more WITH your leg.

Again, a butterfly pad is design for one thing: to rotate into a 90-degree wall along the ice facing the shooter every time. A hybrid pad *can* do this too, but is also designed to do other things. The best example of this in recent memory has been in the Bauer Supreme line. The original Supreme Pros were a very traditional, flexible pad: integral shin-rolls for lateral flex and knee-rolls for vertical flex, very flexible boot and ankle, deep leg-channel with shin-bars (their own little invention), and a deep boot channel. Fast forward to the X:60, which is the latest inheritor of that line: it's much closer to an RBK, but retains the gradiated flex through the knee-rolls, a slightly deeper leg-channel, a softer boot and ankle, etc. In general, the X:60 feels more like it's moving with your leg than 'in front of it' like an RBK.

Thanks for posting this Miker; fun way to start the day.

[srv2miker 0]

Hey Law Goalie,

You really need to write a blog or something, this stuff is too good to be wasted on just me!

Sounds like with my wide butterfly, the stiffer pads would be the way to go. I am definitely a "stop'em however I can" kind of guy, since my technique is really lacking. Oh well, it makes life more exciting!

Thanks for the help!

Mike

[Law Goalie 147]

Glad to help; it's a good warmup for the digits and the lexicon. I may trademark the phrase "throwing shapes" with respect to goaltending...

Sounds like what you need is a pad with a relatively stiff knee/thigh, a very flexible ankle/boot and plenty of laterla flex through the shin -- meaning your Beasts are a pretty damn good fit!