Goaltending 201: The Fine Art of Cheating
Jul 07 '04 (Updated Dec 13 '05)
The Bottom Line Why does the bottom line come first? Shouldn't it be at the BOTTOM!?!?
To commemorate my 150th review here it is - the promised third goaltending instructional article. Yes, here is the real meat and potatoes stuff that you’ve been thinking about since I sent you out there fully dressed a month ago. I have to write this one fast before you learn more about goaltending than I’ll ever know.
A quick review, in Goaltending 101: So you think you want to be a goalie, eh? we discussed the commitments financially, mentally and physically to being a goalie. We also looked at some of the basic styles of play. In Ice Hockey Goaltending 102: First Day Between the Pipes we took a look at the important things that you should do before hitting the ice for the first time and what to expect that day.
This installment is going to discuss the fine art of cheating in all of its glorious forms.
▪ A Good Day
There is one day that will always stand out in my mind as distinctly memorable for two events. The first was an outstanding day of hockey. I showed up for the advanced drop-in session at the YMCA on my lunch break. It was the first time that I had ever played this particular session and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sometimes advanced doesn’t really mean advanced, instead referring to less horrible than average. It is the YMCA after all.
This session was interesting, although to this day I doubt that anyone there will remember what sort of quality skate it was. Let me start in the locker room. I was strapping on my leg pads when three guys walked into the room together. The tall one in the middle looked familiar to me. I nodded in his direction figuring that I recognized him from playing hockey with him at some point. He nodded back without a word, an odd grin on his face.
The three sat down, talking amongst themselves while other players filtered in. When the room was close to capacity of ten or twelve skaters, one of the three stood up and announced, “We have a special guest today guys. This is Eric Messier of the Colorado Avalanche.” He indicated the guy I thought I recognized, his curious grin replaced by a nervous chuckle.
Hmm, he did bear a resemblance. I laughed figuring that these guys were just razzing their buddy who looked a little like Eric Messier. “Eric” gave a half wave and went back to dressing. He wasn’t exceptionally big; in fact I had a good twenty pounds on him and was about even for height. I was smiling at the joke as I continued dressing.
The guy who had introduced “Eric” to us was asking him, “You gonna light up the goalies today?” He turned to inform me, “Eric won the team competition for the hardest shot on the Avs in the skill competition last year.”
I had to consider the fact that this wasn’t some kind of joke. If this was a prank it had worn thin. I took another look at the supposed NHLer, those chicken legs certainly couldn’t belong to an NHL player. Could they?
“Eric” spoke for the first time with an obvious French Canadian accent. “Naw, It’s hard, but I never know where my shot is going to go.”
Well, joke or not, I needed to get loosened up before the game and headed rink-side to stretch a bit. When the ice was clear and we started warming up the truth of the matter was obvious. I recognized at least one ex-college player and a few of the more dominant skaters I knew on the ice. They looked like they were working twice as hard as Eric to skate at half the speed.
It really was Eric Messier!
Skating with an NHL pro made it obvious to me the disparity between levels of hockey. I had skated with an ex-IHL player on a regular basis in the previous months and he was head and shoulders above the skill level of the players around him.
But this was Eric Messier, a guy who had made it to the biggest show in hockey. For those who don’t follow hockey enough to know who Eric is, he wasn’t a marquee name on the Colorado squad. He is a hard working, gritty player who will go on the ice and do whatever the coach asks him to do. He is one of the silent heroes on his team, playing a third or fourth line winger or filling in on defense when the team needs a spare blueliner.
It was surprising to see the ease with which he was able to dominate a game with some of the better players that I have ever faced. I mean this is a guy who is a long way from being Mario Lemieux or Wayne Gretzky. It didn’t matter though. Eric looked like a guy that was giving about half effort on the ice that day. Even without breaking much of a sweat those “chicken legs” created two or three breakaways every shift!
As a goalie what amazed me was Eric’s patience with the puck and his ability to look off the pass. He came down ice to my stick side more times than I could count. He’d force me to the post and then make a blind pass to the tape of a teammates stick for easy goals one after another. Fortunately the guys he was passing to missed the open net on about half the chances.
The highlight of my day came when he picked up the puck behind my net and tried a quick wraparound. I got the pad down on his backhand attempt and poked the puck behind him before he could do anything with the rebound. I stuffed Eric Messier the only time he tired to score on me. (He took one shot on the other goalie and nailed him square in the head. Poor guy drools from the left side of his mouth ever since).
▪ A Bad Day
When I got home, still grinning with excitement from playing hockey with Eric Messier, there were several police cars and a couple fire-trucks in my neighborhood. I pulled slowly up toward my house to as one of the officers stepped out to stop me. “You’ll need to go around the other way.” He told me.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
He pointed to the house across the street from mine: the half-million-dollar-backing-up-to-the-golf-course-house where the two guys who never seemed to have to go to work lived. “There’s a Meth-lab in that house.” He informed me.
Suddenly the decision to move into a better neighborhood seemed to have backfired. Now that has nothing at all to do with hockey, but those two memories will be inexorably fused together in my mind. I figured you had to read the whole story.
▪ What’s the point of your story, Scott?
The subject is the art of cheating as a goalie and both of these stories bear strongly upon that subject. The first thing that we need to talk about is just what cheating is. In my usual fashion I will take the long way and tell you what cheating isn’t. Not because it’s more effective that way, but because it is more fun. Well for me anyway.
The guy who is sitting in jail with a huge debt to the bank for having a meth-lab in his basement is guilty of cheating. He broke the law and paid the price for it. Incidentally, his house was seized by the government and after several months of cleanup and several more on the market it was finally sold. When this poor schmuck gets out of jail he will be financially ruined (I don’t feel sorry for him).
If I were referring to the little cheating thing that goalies do in a game that might cause a penalty, Meth-lab-boy would be a good example. He broke the rules to benefit himself with no regard for the well-being of others, got caught, went to jail and will be worse off when he gets out. As a goalie if you take a penalty that can pretty much be the same situation.
Don’t misunderstand me. Goalies do need to protect their crease. I’m big enough that I physically move most players who think it’s a good idea to camp out in my line of sight. Once in a while a guy is big enough that he requires a little special deterring.
Now I know a number of goalies who swear by the upward thrust of the goal stick right between the opponent’s legs. This of course is a quick way to check the quality and fit of your opponents cup as well as his tolerance for pain. It is, however, not very polite. I generally prefer using my stick as an ankle hook to pull their feet while shoving forward as hard as possible on their back. Such a maneuver must be perfectly timed to avoid detection from the refs as well as any ill-timed shots on your net. It’s very difficult to make a save while knocking down an opposing player . . . trust me on that.
As a goalie, you do essentially have diplomatic immunity and won’t get sent to the box. (However, most adult leagues will send you packing for a game or two if you get in a fight or have an intent to injure penalty). So how does this type of play really relate to Meth-lab-fool? If you do get caught the ref is going to send one of your players to the penalty box for two minutes. At the very least, you have lessened your team’s chances of scoring. Even worse, the other team is more likely to score, then BOOM you’re worse off than you were before you so kindly adjusted that guy’s jock strap with your stick.
Essentially, what seemed like a quick and dirty way to keep your team ahead left you with a deficit when your teammate got out of the box. For the most part it’s better to just look around that wide-body who is obscuring your vision than to knock him down. It really depends on the situation, but I generally don’t acknowledge a player who is annoying me. The more you fight them, the more they will fight to be in your way.
Granted tripping people can be a fun part of the game and might seem like a good idea sometimes, but eventually you get caught and things end up worse than they might have been if you had just let the guy skate by. A quick note: trip people when the play is heading out of your zone and the refs will rarely notice. I have never been called for a penalty in all my years of playing. If you get lucky the guy will get mad and try to beat you up taking 5 minutes himself (insert evil goalie laughter here).
But I digress, this is not really the part of this article. Tripping players, shoving people around and even fighting can all be an integral part of the game. They aren’t exactly legal, but they aren’t really what I would call cheating either.
▪ What is cheatingreally?
The cheating that I am referring to is something that goalies tend to do when facing more than one shooter. Cheating is essentially a tendency to build coverage based on the position of the players rather than the position of the puck. This type of cheating is almost always a mistake.
For instance, the most common time that a goalie will cheat is when facing a two on none break. Proper play requires that the goalie stay square to the puck, i.e. play the man carrying the biscuit. A cheating goalie will anticipate the pass and lean that direction. Cheating puts the goalie at an in between position to attempt to be ready for either a shot or a pass. More commonly it leaves the keeper ready for neither. The shooter has a wide open net and won’t have any need to make the pass.
Learning goalies will have a tendency to guess in a two on none break. Guessing creates coverage based on what the goalie thinks will happen rather than what is actually happening at that moment. Essentially, cheating puts the goalie ahead of the play leaving the players who are still in the proper moment and actual situation, with options they shouldn’t have. Why pass the puck when the goalie just moved out of the way? Instead of guessing, a good goalie will need to analyze the possibilities, play in the moment and prepare to react to everything that can happen.
By playing in the proper position and forcing the pass goalies will always be more successful. First, solid coverage leaves no place for the puck carrier to shoot. Sometimes they will shoot anyway in which case you as the keeper have the advantage. More likely they will pass. By forcing the pass you have just increased the possibility of mistakes by your opposition. The pass might be off target, the recipient might fumble it, or the one time shot could go wide. Even in the NHL two on none rushes don’t always result in a shot. Force the pass to increase the possibility of a mistake.
The day that I played against Eric Messier, he had literally dozens of two on none and two on one chances. Not once did he shoot on me. Now you have to ask yourself why not? There are a couple possible answers to that question. First I’ll give you the one that I like and then I’ll give you the one that is more likely.
The answer I like is that I built solid positional goaltending that day. There was no way that I was going to play the pass off an NHL player who was coming down the ice to score on me. I had to respect his chance to score and there was no way I was cheating that day. Now had someone else been carrying the puck with Eric Messier coming down the off-wing, there is a strong chance that I would have been leaning his way. But with Eric carrying the puck, I played him strong and made him pass every time. He had to. I was looking as large as Patrick Roy that day. (In fact I am a little bigger than Patrick, but I doubt my net presence is even in the same universe as the esteemed Mr. Roy).
The answer that is more likely is that Eric didn’t want to demonstrate his prowess by making the drop-in goalie at the YMCA look like a total buffoon. He likely could have scored on me at will. But hey, where was the fun in that? It would have been about as fun beating a bunch of second graders in basketball. Besides, he got to set up everyone on the ice with sinkable one-timer passes that day.
But let’s ignore that thought and assume that I was in the right place and huge that day.
▪ How do you play the odd man rush?
Well, you might be wondering, if you cannot cheat, how do you stop the odd man. That’s why I titled this section “How do you play the odd man rush.” Clever, huh?
First let me mention that it is a good thing to know how to skate backwards reasonably well on any breakaway or odd man rush. With a single skater coming, you need to be as aggressive as your nerve allows you. With two or more, you will have to play a bit more conservative but the basics are the same.
As the odd man rush forms, you should come out to the top of the crease, maybe a few feet more. One thing to be careful of here is to not put too much distance between yourself and your goal line. If you get too far, a pass will make the angles work against you, requiring a greater distance to create the same amount of coverage.
Let’s try a simple demonstration at your seat. Hold your hand up in front of your monitor. Now, as you move your hand towards your face imagining that the monitor is the net and your hand the goalie, you can see that coming out of the net increases coverage. Now lean to one side without moving your hand and notice how far your hand needs to move to cover the angle of your new view. Try it with your hand closer to the monitor, the distance get shorter.
This brings us to the downside. On a breakaway, you can be aggressive and attack the shooter. Come out as far from your net as you want to. This gives your opponent little chance to shoot and forces him to try to get around you. However, on an odd man rush, or a two on none, you don’t have the same luxury. You need to play deeper in the net to keep a pass from creating an impossible angle for you to cover. Essentially you won’t be able to get out more than a couple feet from the top of your crease. You should still be able to force a pass with your coverage from this position though. The top of the crease will give pretty good net coverage almost to the blue line.
So the real question is what happens after you force the pass? The answer to that is the lateral push. There are a few different methods of the lateral push and which you use will depend upon your style and the situation. The most common pushes will be the butterfly slide.
To accomplish the butterfly slide across the net face, the keeper will drop to the leg on the side of the direction he wishes to move and push with the other leg. While sliding the push leg should drop to the ice and result in a full butterfly. The beauty of this move is that it keep the goalie upright, square to the puck as it travels across the net (if timed properly) and allows him to see what is happening in front of the net.
If the play ends up very close to the net, I often use a second technique – stacking the pads. This is a little quicker method in which you drop your far foot under and behind the foot to the side you are going. Then flop to your side and slide with your leg pads one atop the other toward the open side of the net. One point to work on early, keep your stick on the ice!
The two-pad slide is more of an emergency maneuver than a butterfly slide. It can effectively close down the bottom of the net, but leaves the top wide open. There is little control and the goalie will often lose sight of the puck. Recovery from stacking the pads also takes longer than it does from the butterfly slide.
▪ Play the puck!
Always position yourself to the puck, not the player. If you are square and in position to the player, he still has a reach of four or five feet. If you square up to his feet instead of the puck - guess what? You’re essentially cheating again.
Cheating can come in a number of varieties. Confidence can be a factor in cheating as well. One goalie I know well and have shot on numerous times always seems like he is leaving the glove side wide open. I’ve mentioned this to him, but at the same time I wonder if he shouldn’t just keep playing that way. His glove is lightning fast and it is a rare thing indeed when I sneak one past it.
I’ve noticed that sometimes when I’m struggling I tend to leave too much open on my blocker side. Just like my friend, the glove side is my strength (you will have to figure out my weakness yourself, sorry). When my confidence diminishes, I sometimes cheat towards my strong side which makes things worse as it opens up my less reliable blocker side for shooters.
The bottom line is to stay square to the puck without regard for the player’s positions. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to know where your opponents are on the ice. On the contrary, you should be aware of the position of all five players at all times. But playing in position to their strongest scoring player just doesn’t make sense if he doesn’t have the puck right between you and himself.
▪ Are there times when it is acceptable to Cheat?
Goalie coaches all over the world will probably cringe when they read this, but I’m going to say YES! Is it something to make a habit of? No way! When you are facing a player who knows you well and who you know well, sometimes a change of tactics is in order. I will often force a player to shoot towards my glove hand by cheating to the blocker side.
Why would I do this? Simple, it has to be a player who I know is very good in close and not as good with a long shot. If the guy is a sniper with a cannon for a shot, there is no way I am going to cheat on him. But a guy who has awesome hands and can make me look like a fool with his dangling ability, I might try to get him to shoot.
In a one on one situation, you as the goalie need to control the play. If you want to force a shot you can cheat a little toward your weak side while and attempt to make them shoot. As the player gets closer, you will have to close off the angle quickly though. The closer they get, the less room you have to cheat.
You will get burned by this tactic once in a while, but breakaways are low percentage saves and sometimes changing your tendencies is enough to confuse a player that knows you well. I tend to use a number of tactics on breakaways to keep my opponents off balance, cheating is just one of them.
▪ Summary
In goaltending some cheating is good, some cheating is bad, all cheating can be acceptable . . . if you get away with it.
Thanks for reading. Hopefully I will have something new to teach you in another 25 reviews or so.
Here are the previous installments:
Goaltending 101: So you think you want to be a goalie, eh?
Ice Hockey Goaltending 102: First Day Between the Pipes
Battram Custom Goalie Equipment
© 2005 Scott Noble – All rights reserved. Unauthorized use prohibited.
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