What is the next style revolution in goaltending?

[shooter27 116]

I was having a conversation with a few friends over the weekend and the topic of the next stylistic revolution in goaltending came up, so I figured I'd ask here, particularly for you goaltenders out there (I'm looking at you Law Goalie). Do you think there will be another stylistic revolution in goaltending and, if so, what will it be? Obviously goaltending styles have undergone a number of revolutions over the years. Up through the 1970's the stand-up style was the predominant style, and in some views the only way to play. Then the 80's came around and we had the revolution from the stand-up to the reactionary style (kind of like the current Thomas/Brodeur hybrid styles of today) becoming the dominant style of the day. Then in the early-mid 90's we had the next revolution where the butterfly became the predominant style. Obviously, both the reactionary and butterfly styles were around before they became the dominant style, but I'm talking about when the styles became both predominant at the pro level and in terms of being taught to young goaltenders (as it seems like the butterfly is the only style being taught to youngsters today).

So the question is really a two-parter, is the butterfly style so good that we've reached a point where there will be no more revolutions in goaltending and only continued evolution of the butterfly, or is there something better out there? And if there is going to be another revolution, what is it going to be? Is it already being taught somewhere or is it something that is going to come out of nowhere?

[Law Goalie 147]

I'd argue that pure butterfly play - which began with Roy and the Allaire brothers' teaching and reached its zenith in Giguere's Conn Smythe - has been increasingly irrelevant since the early 2000s. It is, however, still very widely taught. The problem is that it's very easy to teach the drop-to-block, passive, 'no holes' butterfly, and it works extremely well against unskilled shooters, and especially when equipment is not carefully regulated and obstruction-type penalties go largely uncalled. It's easy to pitch to the coaches, easy for the coaches to understand, and easy for the coaches to teach; it's kind of the LWL/1-3-1 of goaltending, a percentage game that has a very high likelihood of success at lower levels, but which is enormously detrimental to athletic development because of its narrow focus.

If what you mean by 'the butterfly' is playing from the ice up, rather than playing from the stance down, I'd say you're right: we're there, and it's not going to change. No matter how you fiddle with the flow of the game, the geometric reality is always the same: most goals are scored in the bottom quarter of the net. A goaltender ignores that reality at his peril. This has been true since the earliest days of the game, when goalies were forbidden to drop *at all* even in making specific save movements; we can thank my graven image, Prayin' Benny, for making a mockery of that to the point that they changed the rules. Still, Albert Forrest is silently cursing that rule in the circe of hell reserved for goalies, just as the ghost of Frank McGee, with his unimpeachable record, laughs every time someone is impressed by a hat-trick.

Even so, good goalie coaches - at every level - don't teach the blocking butterfly to the exclusion of all else; they don't even teach in a way that would allow i*anything* to be taught so exclusively. Good goalie coaches, like all good teachers, teach to the strengths of their students, not to some arbitrary standard of pseudoperformance. What Thomas' periodic dominance reminded us, as did Brodeur's resurgence, is that you don't have to be a physical freak like Hasek (or, frankly, Jon Quick) to play intelligent, responsive/reactive, situational goaltending. Neither Brodeur nor Tim Thomas are exceptional physical specimens, yet they are extremely gifted and successful athletes.

The next great 'revolution,' such as it may be, will come the moment someone oversimplifies the position again to the point at which it can be widely and badly taught, just as the Allaire Brothers did. The best goalie coaches will continue to develop their goaltenders as individual athletes, not as blanks for industrial fabrication; they'll teach them the tools and help them develop their unique physical and mental abilities. It would be folly to make Lundqvist play at the top of the crease, just as it would be folly to keep Brodeur deep in his net; that's not to say you won't see them in those positions, but that their ability to read and control the play derives from the peculiar ways in which they see the game, and their strengths in playing to it. Some Philistine will probably decide that because he often sees Quick in an incredibly wide, deep stance, often in paddle-down, sliding back and forth, that his goalies and indeed all goalies should play like this all the time; Quick has been successful doing this, so everyone should be successful doing it exclusively. For a time, some may; the kids he'll teach at first may already be sufficiently developed athletes to handle this kind of overtraining, and intelligent enough to see its limitations. But the subsequent kids will become as inured to it as so many are to the passive butterfly today, and so the charlatans will be on the lookout for the next thing they can palm off as the snake oil of netminding.

A final point: it's always good to be more interested in the teaching credentials of a goalie coach than in the playing credentials; personal skills are no substitute for sound pedagogy. Judge Mitch Korn based on his playing days, and you wouldn't have the first clue that he was the most important goalie coach of the last two decades; Steve McKichan's B.Ed. and his track record of instruction and innovation are far more significant than the fact that he worked his way into the NHL and got hurt - that speaks to his personal diligence, not to his teaching ability.

[Jason Harris 31]

I'd agree with most of what you said, LG, but one quibble I'd make is there was a time when goals weren't necessarily scored in the bottom quarter. t recall reading a book that referenced a study which plotted thousands of NHL goals from the 70's. Based on the goaltending style of that time, they found the most common area that goals were scored were middle of the net on the stick side (above the skates and below the paddle, I believe).

My take on this comes from having started playing goalie in my early to mid 40's, while still preferring to play out. What I mean is I'm one of the backup goalies at our drop-in, which is occasional during the winter but fairly regular around summertime. What I find is my style of play always improves over the summer, because I sort of innately begin to realize it's all about playing the odds. While I'd say my style is closest to Thomas, at that beginning of summer I'm more upright, then I begin to butterfly more as the summer progresses. What happens is I'll tell myself after a shot, "Oh, if I stayed up I would have stopped that!" Then I'll say, "Man, if I dropped I would have blocked that!" Ultimately, I begin to realize that I would have stopped more by dropping than I would have been staying upright, so I begin to drop more often.

I tend to think we may have settled on the What -- a dropping, butterfly foundation -- but each goalie will alter it to suite their preferences. Some will challenge more, some may wait longer before dropping, but it's a pretty good method to protect the bottom part of the net. Throw in a goalie who's tall and flexible and the top of the net begins to be protected better also.

[shooter27 116]

If what you mean by 'the butterfly' is playing from the ice up, rather than playing from the stance down, I'd say you're right: we're there, and it's not going to change. No matter how you fiddle with the flow of the game, the geometric reality is always the same: most goals are scored in the bottom quarter of the net.

This is definitely what I meant when I said "butterfly" as I don't know enough about goaltending technique to debate and "active" vs. "passive" butterfly, or what have you. It just seems odd to me that today all goalies look so similar (to my eye) for the most part when they're making saves when back when I was first learning the game they were all so clearly unique in a lot of ways (again to my eye). Other than a couple notable differences they all just look so interchangeable from a style standpoint (actual skill and talent aside) that it's kind of shocking to me. I also have to wonder why it is so effective. Yes, I know that the majority of goals are scored in the bottom 1/4 of the net and it's easier to be accurate in just shooting direction than direction a height combined. But, given that today's shooters have grown up in the era of butterfly goaltending I would think that they've worked on shooting high enough that they can be just as effective high as they are low, if not more so, yet that doesn't seem to be happening. Frankly, when I played in college I had a harder time keeping the puck low than I did shooting high, but I guess that's why my coach was always yelling at me about missing the net..

So it sounds like your thoughts are that unless something is done that radically alters the ability of shooters to score in the upper 1/4 of the net then the butterfly (for lack of a better term) will be the predominant style of goaltending. I'm wondering what that something would be to radically alter that ability. Is there something that could be done that doesn't make the game drastically different (eg bigger curves not bigger nets) to improve the ability to score up high or is the geometry simply going to outweigh any amount of adjustment or practice shooting up high?

[Law Goalie 147]

Jason, I'd be curious to know whether they were plotting straight shots - unobstructed releases into the net - or all goals, including tips, rebounds, wraps, jam-plays, tap-ins, etc. I definitely agree that 16-inchers blocker-side are a perennial premium target, and a go-to shot especially when tight, closed-ankle stances made the five-hole a lower priority; it's just that wide open shots, even in the 70s, are relatively rare in comparison. They do, I'll acknowledge, account for an unusually high percentage of highlight-reel goals, and it would be nearly impossible to get footage of every game going back even to the 70s and look at goal placement (rather that straight shot-to-goal placement), but I still have a hard time imagining that the majority of goals were scored off of placed shots, let alone placed shots to one part of the net.

Shooter, the active/passive distinction is largely a question of purpose. A passive butterfly goalie makes a wall of equipment, throws it towards the puck, and hopes to get hit; an active butterfly goalie uses the butterfly as, in effect, a stance on the knees rather than on the skates, and secondarily as a save-movement on core and five-hole shots. The easiest way to spot passive butterfly goalies is that against the vast majority of shots, they'll butterfly with their elbows welded to their ribs, their gloves pinned back to their hips, and their sticks flapping in the breeze; a goalie with 'active hands' has them out in front of his body, looking to catch or deflect pucks rather than just getting hit by them.

I'll grant you that those differences are a lot subtler than, say, between Rogie Vachon and Ken Dryden, or Glenn Hall and Tony Esposito. Like anything else, as training has become more specialised, the tools get standardised. I do think, though, that it's a worthwhile distinction to draw.

I completely agree that shooters have adapted to passive butterfly play: look at the decline in Giguere's play post-lockout, or the number of goals that get snapped past Gustavsson's ears the more he plays like Allaire wants him to. I've scored a grand total of four goals in organised games in my entire life - the first and second were two decades apart - but from what I've seen and been told, it's hard enough to hit the net with a 200lbs defender on your back, let alone with some lunatic like Carcillo coming in to decapitate you. Going bar-down with regularity is a difficult skill to master; doing it on the fly is much harder; doing it under pressure from world-class defenders, especially when refs are getting lax on holding and obstruction again, raises the bar so high that only a handful of guys on the planet can score more than once every couple of games.

Even with *no* defensive pressure, goalies still have between 66% and 95% success in shootouts (the freak high-end being Garon and Malcolm Subban), even when the opposition's goalie coach is giving per-game breakdowns on exactly how to beat them. The crux of the geometric problem is the aerial angle: the angle from the puck to the crossbar at the point of release. The further away from the net you are, the greater the available aerial angle; but more than, say, about 25' away, nobody on earth is going to beat an NHL goalie with an unobstructed shot more than 1% of the time. Inside 25', the aerial angle starts disappearing pretty quickly, and it drops even more with even a moderate depth of challenge from the goalie.

Put it this way: when Lundqvist butterflies on the goal-line with a fully upright torso, you can't hit the crossbar over his shoulders. The further out he comes, and the closer in you get, the more he fills sideways. Apart from small gains in lateral mobility and large gains in vertical (ie. from to back) mobility, there is no reason for him to play on his feet, and precious few (given his terrific play-reading, vision, and reflexes) for him to challenge out, except as a situational tactic.