Warrior Ritual Full Set LTR: 'The Ritual Calling of a Goaltender'

[Law Goalie 147]

OPENING POST: Introduction, Review Specs, & (a rather long and historical) Preface

It’s not only conventional but genuinely important to open this project by thanking JR Boucicaut of Modsquadhockey.com along with Keith Perera, Eric Marvin, Frank Dagneau, and [the honourary] Dr. Pete Smith of Warrior Hockey for putting this together. MSH provides a unique venue for hockey product assessment through its Long-Term Review program, and Warrior have always been strong partners in the program and great believers in getting exposure for their gear in both senses: recognised for its quality, and subject to a high and ongoing level of scrutiny.

In 1922, a professor of engineering at the University of Toronto called H.E.T. Haultain got in touch with the visiting Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, and together they composed a ritual which is, in essence, a Hippocratic Oath for engineers, and which has been part of the secret life of modern civilisation since. Rituals are, as the poet Kipling knew, not merely holdovers from ancient tribal societies, but vital moments in the life of any civilised person, defining in particular the quasi-religious entry to those specialised groups - craftsmen, masons, lawyers, Olympians, PhD’s - in which a select few are initiate.And so, para Kipling, “The Ritual Calling of a Goaltender.”

The Obligation:

I, LG, in the abstract presence of these my betters and my equals in my Calling, bind myself upon my Honour and Cold Red Iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Goals or Faulty Technique in aught that concerns my games before mankind as a Goaltender, or in my dealings with my own Soul before the Warriors and the Great Smith.

My Time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any games or drills to which I may be called to set my hand.

For my assured failures and derelictions, I ask pardon beforehand of my betters and my equals in my Calling here assembled; praying that in the hour of my temptations, weakness and weariness, the memory of this my Obligation and of the company before whom it was entered into, may return to me to aid, comfort and contain.

Upon Honour and Cold Red Iron, by these things I purpose to abide.

Reviewer Specs

21.5” FTK (floor-to-knee measurement)

18.5” ATK (ankle-to-knee)

36.775” Limited Distance Size (NHL 11.2) = 4” skate allowance + 21.5” FTK + (20.5” knee-to-pelvis x 55%) per the Whitmore Formula

5’11” 225lbs

Warrior Ritual Pro (retail) Pads

Stock Senior 36+1.5

Other interacting equipment used: custom knee-pads (Brown 2000 with attached Itech Pro two-piece thigh shield common to Bauer, RBK, Vaughn, and Simmons pro knee-pads); CCM G8.PRO and 620G.PRO pants (NHL-spec XL); CCM/RBK Customlite cowlings (which are the only part of the skate to interact substantially with the pad).

Current pads: RBK Premier 2 custom, 35+1 (roughly)

Eric Marvin has kindly posted Warrior's official sizing charts to his Photobucket account: here's the one for pads.

And here’s a rough idea of how the Ritual sizing chart compares to Lefebvre/Reebok sizing:[http://www.hockey1.com/sz-leg.asp]

(edit: chart pastes fine into editor, but breaks on posting; see link above, but for reference it lists a 21" to 21.5" FTK in a 34.5" base pad size, and a 2.1" to 22" FTK in a 35" pad.)

1. Measure the distance from the floor (barefoot) to the middle of the kneecap, straight up, knee slightly bent. [Just as the Warrior Ritual diagram shows.]

2. Take the height of the goalie

3. Look at the chart and try the size accordingly.

4. The pad [base size] should be measured in the outside seams. [That is, along the face of the pad, alongside the vertical roll.]

The recommended pad sizing differs, but the FTK measurement and how it is taken are, thanks to Whitmore’s LDS formula, almost universal now, which is why the ATK measurement is no longer all that helpful.

*****A note on vanity and colour: I asked for and received the all white Rituals with black logos. I did this in the belief that the navy of my mask and pants would not be a very good match for the ‘royal blue’ Weave/Robocop Jenpro synthetic leather. What I can tell you now is that the ‘royal blue’ weave is MUCH darker than the regular, non-textured Jenpro of the same colour: the weave is actually an excellent match for navy blues, medium blues, AND royal blues. Warrior made an excellent decision to go all-weave in these pads to allow for a wider range of colour matches, and I made a boneheaded decision in not following that. Ah well: the vanity of human wishes was never more profane… the Ritual gear will still look badass in the pictures.******

Warrior Ritual Pro (retail) Glove & Blocker

Stock Senior size, Regular hands (left catcher; right blocker)

Current gloves: TPS Xceed & Vaughn T5500 catching gloves (both NHL-spec); CCM Gatekeeper (Brian Heaton’s benchmark bindingless blocker [woo] design), Brian’s A-Maxx, and Vaughn Velocity 1 (NHL-spec) blockers.

Warrior goalie glove sizing chart.

Warrior Ritual Stick

26” Senior paddle size, regular (left) Quick curve*

*slight mid-heel, slightly open face — like a giant Fedorov/Savard/Burrows/PM9/Forzetterdano); the deeper Backstrom ‘twist’ curve is also available, along with a 27.5” paddle sizes in both curves.

Other interacting equipment: de rigeur Tackimac silicon Wrapped Texture Command Grip applied immediately atop the shaft; Comp-O-Stik 1.5” white cloth tape & standard electrical tape; Atsko Sno-Seal beeswax waterproofing agent applied over cloth tape.

Current sticks: TPS Omega Nabokov ash/aramid pro-returns (24.5” paddle, 14.5 lie, comparable, slightly heelier curve); Ballistik (now Combat) .52 Calibre from TrueTemper (26” paddle, deeper mid curve — and yeah, it actually outlasted the company name…).

PREFACE TO THE REVIEW

There has been another wave of consolidation in the goalie industry: Bauer bought Itech/Mission, bringing in Greg Goyer and JR Lavigueur’s JRZ shop to do their pro production and development; Sherwood bought TPS’s hockey business and took Dave Wilcox in; Glenn Miller closed his shop and joined Vaughn USA, only to be followed by Wilcox when Sherwood folded its pro production; but the biggest move, the one that signalled a major shift in the goalie business, was Pete Smith signing on with Warrior. Nothing against those and all the other premiere goalie builders - they’re excellent craftsman and innovators - but even they will, almost to a man, admit how important Smith’s work is.

To put this in perspective, Pete Smith (who I like to refer to as Dr. Smith in the same way that one refers to Samuel Johnson as Dr. Johnson) is responsible for all of the inventions that underly modern butterfly goaltending — and more. Let that sink in, and realise that this guy is basically the Da Vinci of goaltending. The sheet/plank foam pad?— he came up with it around the same time, and probably before, James Lowson, and his developments in foam hinges yielded the Aeroflex design that Vic and subsequently Tackla licensed, and which Tom Barrasso made famous. The rigid knee-wing and raised knee-block?— two Smith inventions without which modern butterfly play would be impossible. The modern butterfly (née ‘pro-fly’) pad as a whole?— the Velocity model, designed by Smith, bought and branded by Vaughn in 2000: the same way that Warrior bought the SP6000 and brought the Doctor on board to build the Rituals. The sliding toe-bridge?— a contentious one, in some circles, but undoubtedly a Smith invention before Jim Kleinart at TPS gave it kinesiological approval. And now, of course, the bindingless pad design: first prototyped in pads in 1995, when the hockey world was almost two decades away from being able to wrap its collective head around something so radical.

Now that he’s at Warrior, Dr. Smith has a huge war-chest to finance his experiments, access to their enormous material resources, and the support of a first-class team, including some of the best pro reps in the business. This gives him the opportunity to get more goalies in more leagues performing the Rituals than would ever have been possible. The other remarkable thing about the Ritual Pros — the retail model priced below the Custom Pro built in Smith’s new Montreal shop — is that Warrior has managed to bring Smith-designed, Warrior-branded, pro-level pads available *at retail* that are selling for less (in some cases) than his SP6000s did as direct, made-to-order online products. Naturally, there are some trade-offs between custom direct and retail stock, but this is still something of an achievement.

What makes it possible is the simple genius of Smith’s bindingless pad design. Not only does it offer significant advantages in performance and durability, it’s also much less dependent on the hockey-specific expertise of the person putting the pad together. That’s not to say that having a pair personally made by the Great Smith himself won’t be a magical thing to experience; only that part of the magic of the Ritual is how easily it can come together in the hands of somehow who is an excellent craftsman but not necessarily a devoted goalie. In fact, as wonderful as the performance and durability of a bindingless goalie pad can be, Smith came up with the idea for his first bindingless design as a business challenge. In the mid-1990s, Don Simmons Sports gave him a per-unit price they were willing to pay, and he was working on prototypes that would simplify production to make that number viable. (Sound familiar?) What he came up with was the first bindingless goalie pad, the Smith LP17:

(Smith LP17 prototypes next to one of Tim Thomas’ Warrior Rituals from the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs: “you’ve come a long way, baby…”)

You can see that Smith has sewn Jenpro bindings over the bindingless toe and top of the LP17 pads; what is less obvious is that these bindings would *never* hold anything together if they were actually integral to the structure of the pad. They were, in fact, an afterthought — a purely cosmetic wrinkle thrown in at the insistence (perhaps the wise insistence) of Simmons to make a radical design a little more superficially conventional. Never underestimate the traditionalism of hockey: it took a full decade of seeing Pete’s flat-faced, knee-winged Vaughn Velocity design in the NHL and every league beneath (and nearly a decade prior in the show for his Aeroflex and Lowson’s Winlite foam pads, as well as the D&R Lazer and Quantum) before the ground had been sufficiently prepared for a bindingless butterfly pad. Even then, it took Warrior’s resources and commitment to pro representation to get them into the hands and onto the legs of the world’s best goalies just for a trial, the highlight being Tim Thomas moving into the Rituals just before the 2012 playoffs, capitalising on a working relationship with Smith that goes back to the 1990s.

During the LP17 prototyping, Dr. Smith realised two things. First, that eliminating bindings along the medial surface of the pad - the part the slides on the ice in the butterfly, and gets the highest friction of any part of the pad during transition to and from the stance - would essentially eliminate the classic wear-spots on all pads, ancient and modern. As he once said in an interview, the process of external binding pinched together several layers of material — sometimes eight or ten sheets around the boot — into a single hard edge, which was then scraped back and forth across the roughest patch of the ice countless times in the course of a single skate. Under these conditions, the polyester bindings used everywhere (except the edges of the boot and the top of the thigh) will fray, shred, and eventually evaporate altogether; the heavier synthetic leather bindings covering the edge of the boot fare little better. Just look at any well-built, conventionally constructed pad after a few months of even close to daily use: compare the leather boot bindings to the leather binding that caps the top of the pad, and any polyester binding on the medial (inside) edge of the pad to the bindings anywhere else, and it’s clear that something isn’t working as it should.

Second, the bindingless design offered the potential not only to reduce the time that went into constructing each pad, but possibility that the quality of a pad would be less dependent on being assembled by someone who knows how goalie pads work. This last point is a bit peculiar. Bindings on goalie equipment (as elsewhere) serve two primary function: to finish an edge of connected fabrics (which the inside-out bindingless construction does as well), and to give a final opportunity to tighten up and correctly align the fabrics. To do this, you add an additional step to the building process: the binding. What it means is that you get a second crack at sewing the main pieces in the way you want, and you don’t have to be quite so precise in cutting and arranging the constituent pieces the first time; you can essentially build the entire pad (or blocker board, or glove cuff, etc.), get a feel for it, and then bind accordingly to straighten the edges. When you go bindingless, you eliminate a step from your process, but you have to get everything right the first time to get the same clean edges as a product that has been bound. Conversely, if someone who doesn’t know goalie equipment intimately adds a binding, it’s in effect a second chance for something to do wrong — for a purely visual focus on ‘tight seams’ and ‘clean lines’ to accidentally cripple the function of the piece. Thus, if your design is absolutely spot-on, and your sewing techs are very precise but not knowledgable about hockey, the bindingless design offers (at least in theory) the best of both worlds. The situation I’m describing is, of course, that of the ubiquitous off-shoring of construction, and the Ritual Pros are built in China — which is what allows Warrior to price them so competitively, a full 1/3 less than their Montreal-built pads coming out of Dr. Smith’s new shop. It’s also important to note that young Pete, when he worked for Vic(toriaville) Hockey in the early 1990s, was one of the first people in the goalie business to seriously investigate offshore building. The issue of how to design goalie gear that can be reliably and consistently produced by skilled non-specialist craftsmen is something he’s been working on for quite a long time.

I will say that I’m expecting a certain adjustment period, a degree of required adaptation to the bindingless design. Eliminating the bindings, especially along the medial (inside) edge of the boot, should dramatically reduce resistance during butterfly transitions: undoubtedly a good thing overall, but something that will require some adjustment. These are the most streamlined pads ever built. I imagine it’ll be like moving from flying a Lear jet to a fighter jet: suddenly you’ve gone from something fairly aerodynamic to something with absolutely minimal drag, that’s flying right on the edge of the envelope. Like anything else fundamentally radical, Smith’s design will provoke (and has already provoked) a lot of different reactions. That’s why I really want to give these a serious, long-term MSH treatment — so I can give a coherent account of how they work and what they demand, and how that changes over time. In many respects, I’m a VERY traditional goalie: I was probably in the last generation of goalies who were drilled in pure stand-up by ignorant coaches, and though butterfly play is now predominant in my game, I’ll regularly throw a leg-drag, a Hasek-roll, or a full-out head-first dive instead of a cool, controlled butterfly slide. Because of this, I suspect my adjustment to the Rituals will be trickier than most, but all the more revealing for it.

My 21.5” FTK (floor-to-knee) measurement put me into the largest retail size, 36+1.5 (a 36” ‘base’ pad size with a 1.5” relative thigh-rise extension, aka ‘plus size’); 34+1.5 and 32+1.5 are the other senior sizes available. (This goes to show that the approximate overall heights listed on pad sizing charts are not relevant: get properly sized…) The total 37.5” pad height is about 3/4” bigger than the NHL’s LDS formula would allow me to wear, though the pads are fully Whitmore-approved in every other respect. Just so everyone is aware, the combination of the ‘table-top boot’ (the shallowest, widest boot channel legal or possible) and the relatively straight, single knee-break profile of the pads has intimidated a lot of people off the shelf and out of the box: they look and feel *enormous*. Part of this is just visual, but they really do feel big on a lot of people. Again, this is something that I’m confident can be worked around, which is why it’s important to realise that these pads are, technically speaking, bigger than I should be wearing. For reference, I’ve been using a roughly 35+1 custom Reebok pad for a while now, and they are just a touch small with my gargantuan knee-pads; if I ordered new ones from the Lefebvres (whatever Reebok branding is on them) I’d probably go closer to a 35.5+1.5 — but that’s custom, which is a whole different ballgame. Warrior’s relatively wide 2” gaps between senior retail sizes is a logistical blessing, but a mixed blessing from the point of view of a goalie caught between sizes. (I happen to fit the Ritual 36+1.5 just about perfectly, for what it’s worth.)

Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of thing for which Pete Smith always has a solution that’s elegant from both function and production points of view. One of the things he noticed with his custom-built, strictly direct-order SP6000 pads was that the (re)movable boot-strap setup — the ingenious tabs of strap leather sewn into the underside of the boot that remain on the Ritual pads — effectively allowed the pads to ‘change size.’ This does not mean, of course, that the actual dimensions of the pad change when you move the boot-strap, but that the effective size - the way the pad fits - can be changed depending on how the boot sits on top of the skate. When people unwittingly ordered pads a little big or small, or when they sold them to slightly bigger or smaller people, Dr. Smith’s prescription was simple: change the position of the boot-strap. The tighter the boot-strap, the higher the boot sits on top of the skate, and thus the higher the knee of the pad will sit on the leg. This lets goalies who don’t fall smack in the sweet-spot of one of the retail sizes makes the pads fit and play almost as if they were custom made. To get the ‘tallest’ fit out of a pad that’s too short, put the boot-strap in the most forward position and loop it all the way behind the Achilles’ tendon, like Lundqvist does with his Bauers — almost like a low ankle strap. From there, moving the strap into the rear hole and then the middle holes in the cowling let the boot come a little further forward; likewise, moving through the same three positions relative to the skate (Achilles, rear hole, and middle hole) on each of the other tabs on the boot AND doing the traditional play with the tightness of the strap really lets the goalie really dial the fit in. (And if you still can’t quite work it out, you can always order a 1/2” pair of Sara Marschand’s boot-risers from PAW (Protective Athletic Wear), which fit the bill admirably, though they are technically illegal for professional and high-level amateur goalies, and do take away the positive feel of a centred pad in the stance by effectively erasing what little remains of a boot-channel on the Rituals.)

In addition, the strap leather tabs allow for an easy switch to one of my favourite tweaks on any pads: the angled boot-strap. Because of the way the foot rotates behind the pad in transitioning to the butterfly, the heel of the skate (and thus the rear hole of the cowling) moves diagonally towards the lateral gusset. Angling the boot-strap allows you to have a much tighter boot-strap and a more responsive pad without inhibiting butterfly transitions. More on this in the first icetime entry…At 5.3-5.4lbs per pad in the 34+1.5 sizing (per IceWarehouse and The Goalie Crease) the Ritual Pros are neither the lightest nor the heaviest pads on the market. (For reference, my 36+1.5 Ritual Pros weigh in under 6lbs each out of the box.) There are ways to drop the weight of any pair of pads by a couple of pounds — moving to nylon or polypropylene straps and quick-release buckles exclusively, eliminating punched leather and metal buckles, replacing most of the synthetic leather *not* on a sliding surface with Cordura or another lighter textile — but these are generally taken (for whatever reason) as the sign of a ‘lower quality’ product, and will generally be less durable in high-wear, on-ice use. It’s something that you could use for in ordering Custom Pros — Eddie Belfour, for one, famously insisted on having his thigh-rises done in Cordura — but it’s generally not advisable in a retail pad for those reasons. Moreover, adding ~6lbs along the entire length of each leg is really not much in the grand scheme of things. The balance and movement of a pad are *far* more important than the weight.

This is where the Ritual pads clearly excel the moment you touch them: even in my brief moments handling the demos, they are among the best balanced pads I’ve seen. I say ‘best’ rather than ‘most’ because the balance of a pad is, of course, an extension of the body’s balance, so it’s not a question of of absolute or relative degree, but of personal comfort. That said, there are things about the way the Rituals are balanced that immediately suggest they’ll play well on the ice for a lot of goalies. I love that they aren’t boot-heavy: boot-heavy pads can tend to feel ‘sluggish’, as though they’re lagging behind or actually dragging the goalie’s leg — and, in fact, adding weight at an extremity (fingers and toes, for example) will slow you down more than weight added closer to the core. By streamlining the toe attachments down to a single plastic disc, a length of slotted plastic, a strip of strap leather, a fold of Weave Jenpro and three small ‘sex bolts’ (ask your parents…), the Rituals leave out the big, bulky chunks of a classic toe-bridge that weigh down the toes of traditionally constructed pads: the huge 3/8” T-nuts, the heavy rivets, the hunks of thick strap leather. The Rituals’ weight sits right at the lower knee-break, between the top of the calf and the bottom of the knee, and I suspect they’re going to feel very responsive and ‘play lighter’ as a result.

To be clear, the Ritual gloves are *not* a Smith design. They are branded “Warrior by Smith” just like the pads, and he certainly had some influence in the final tweaks and approval (and, by my reckoning, his fingerprints are all over the T5500-esque Custom Pro SE model), but we won’t see true Smith-designed Warrior gloves until 2014. (We will, however, be seeing in 2013 the most important step forward in C/A design, and specifically in arm construction, since John Brown made his enduring breakthroughs in the early 1980s: coming from Pete Smith, I believe it.) The Ritual Pro gloves are a substantial evolution of the 2011 Fortress model. I gave the Messiah gloves a decently thorough but non-LTR review, but I only got to play around with the Fortress gloves for a few minutes. Still, I liked what I felt and heard good things — chiefly in the areas that one would expect Warrior gloves of any kind to excel: materials, balance, cuff design, movement and feel. Best of all, the Ritual catching glove features a new open, ‘active glove’ setup that was not only not present but almost impossible in the Messiahs, and not as well engineered in the Fortress. I’m really looking forward to the Ritual glove for this reason in particular. My expectations for the blocker, after crediting the Messiah as one of the best all-around designs and THE best paddle-down blocker ever made, are sky-high. Likewise, I’m excited to try the Ritual stick largely because of Warrior’s tremendous success with sticks generally, but also because of the potential for the vibration-dampening ‘ShockaTech’ polymer sleeve above the paddle to eliminate one of the few remaining performance disadvantages of composite goalie sticks in comparison with wood. My understanding is that it’s basically an internalised Tackimac grip (with a little external strip for extra grip) right where the blocker hand sits in the stance, and I *love* the feel of Tackimac grips at the top of all my player and goalie sticks.

Thus far the prelude: next up, an out-of-box review, including a photographic walkthrough of the Warrior Rituals’ key features, once I’ve had a chance to take all the necessary pictures…