Zeros

Ahhhh, shutouts.

Is there a greater achievement for a goaltender than getting a shutout in a men's league game, in a game generally devoid of any sort of defensive play?  (Well, truth be told, both of the teams that I play on are, for the most part, very solid defensively.)  Shutouts are generally few and far between, because, as it was once said, "Hockey is a slippery game, it's played on ice..."  the puck can take funny bounces, there are usually big hulking goons standing in front of me, attempting to obstruct my view, pucks deflect off of players, both friend and foe...  In fact, most goals don't go in clean, they go off something, or someone, because most goalies, if they can see it, they will stop it, myself included (most of the time).

I would have to say that this year I have been very fortunate, in twenty one games we have managed to shutout three teams.  A shutout is commonly thought of as a goaltending achievement, but it's not, it's a team achievement, no goalie could possibly ever shut another team down on his own.  You need your defense to be there to handle the occasional bad rebound, you need your forwards to back check...  In order to shut a team out, everything has to go just the right way, all the bounces, most of the calls, and you have to get away with some shit, or rather, you have to get lucky a few times.  (My father always used to tell me as a kid, "Goaltending is 90% skill, and 10% luck," but I tend to think that it might be more like 75/25)

For me, there has been a common thread linking all of the shutouts that I have been a part of this season.  In each of them I have played "big."  Now I don't mean that I was playing like an all-star, but rather "big" in the physical sense.  Also, I feel like on each of these particular nights, I have really been challenging shooters, which is easy to do when my defense is forcing them to take low percentage shots from the outside.  But again, when I play "big," when I challenge shooters and play the way I'm supposed to, the game slows down for me, it becomes easier.  I don't have to scramble, I don't have to put myself out of position to make saves...  I'm where I am supposed to be, and when I am playing like that it means that I am not leaving my opposition a lot to shoot at.  It's a good feeling...

Up until maybe a week ago, I was scuffling, three weeks of trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong, and as a goalie, that is a tough place to be in your head...  Self doubt and goaltending don't mix well.  So having last night go well, and feeling like I had a very solid chance for a shutout last wednesday night, I feel like I may have found a good grove again to be in.  The additional bonus of a shutout, aside from good mental heath for me, is that it says, very clearly, that the defense played collectively outstanding.  It picks everyone up and there is generally a carryover effect.  Hopefully it sticks with us a few games.

Anyway, here are the current stats  12-6-3, 2.43 GAA, 3 SO

A Little Off...

Being a goalie means being, well, a bit of a freak show.  A weirdo, an odd duck.  Nothing that a goalie could ever say could possibly get anyone to ever think otherwise.  And you know what, it's completely true.  

What kind of person volunteers to get in the way of six ounces of vulcanized rubber screaming at speeds somewhere between 50 and 80 miles an hour?  What kind of sick fucker does that?  

"Hey, you're going to fire that little black disc at my head?  Really?  WOW, that sounds like a great time, where do I sign up?"

It's just not normal.  Truth be told however, most kids (well, at least when I was a kid) didn't choose the position, it chose them.  For me, well, I didn't start playing hockey until I was twelve, although I had been on skates from the time that I was three.  Somewhere around that particular age it began to dawn on me that the kid that hid himself in the back of the classroom, sketching away, not paying particular attention to anything was never going to get a girl.  Period.  But the kids that were playing sports, yeah, the girls liked them...  

It seemed like a good idea to me, play hockey, get girls.  It started out simply enough, I wanted to be a defense man, I wanted the three "Gs,"  Girls, Goals, and Glory...  Hell of a plan, but my father was my first teams head coach, and as it goes with so many kids who end up being goalies, he didn't want to ask anyone else's kid to play goal, knowing full well that no other parent would go for that deal.  So I got the job, by default.  And I hated it, absolutely loathed it...  I was terrified the first couple of times, mortified that I was going to get hurt, end up a vegetable, eating my meals intravenously...  By the third time though I realized that it seemed virtually impossible for me to get hurt, with all of the classic (and borrowed) 1970's old school leather Cooper goalie gear on I was invincible...  (Clearly, this is when the "goalie psychosis" set in)

I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker...  The equipment, the opportunity to be out on the ice for the whole game, the ability to take a penalty but not have to serve it...  The occasional flashy glove save, and even the one "A" didn't seem to bother me, the ABUSE.  The timing must have been just right for me, and possibly the fact that I had no idea what the hell I was actually doing, but I was able to move quickly from the "In-House" program to the travel hockey program where I had the good fortune of skipping an entire age classification.  So at thirteen I was playing Bantams instead of PeeWees.  Talk about learning on the job.  We lost every single game that season except for out last one, we tied that one, and it has been the only tie of my life that has ever felt like a win.  That was hands down my favorite team.  We were the Bad News Bears of hockey, and you would have thought that after getting my ass handed to me every game that I would have come to the conclusion that this goaltending bullshit had to go...  Nope, not quite.

I got my first job that summer and saved all of my money to buy newer, fancier equipment.  Well, as fancy as my five dollars an hour could afford.  The first thing on my list was a new chest and arm protector, because the one that I had basically amounted to a quilt with sleeves, not a whole lot of protection there.  I bought a D&R CA, it was all white and offered light years more protection than the circa 1972 CA that I had been wearing to that point.  I also managed to scrape enough money together to buy a brand new Cooper GM9 blocker (all white, which was a big deal as goalie equipment had just begun the "color" trend, up until then you were stuck with the all brown leather classics...) because my previous blocker, which was used had several flaws, one, there was no palm whatsoever, and two, it reeked of cat piss.  The new GM9 was a huge improvement.  I managed to get my hands on a used pair of Vic leg pads (tan and black), the boxy ones like Tom Barasso used to wear, and a slightly used GM9 catching glove (tan and black).  

I started to get a little crazy at that point, pouring over hockey supply catalogs, checking out every single new piece of gear, dying to get my hands on it...  A couple of years after my first Bantam season I was facing much bigger guns at the high school level and needed to procure some equipment with an even higher standard of protection, so by my sophomore  year I had moved up the equipment ladder to the Vaughn Legacy series...  Holy crap, this was the stuff that guys like Andy Moog and Mike Richter were wearing...  I spent the entire summer saving to buy my first brand new pair of Vaughn Legacy 3000, 34" leg pads, (I had already bought the 1050 blocker, and had gotten the T2000 glove for christmas) and when they finally arrived I couldn't wait to get out on the ice with them.  They were black and white, and I can still remember how they smelled brand new out of the box.  They were perfect.  I was also one of the first goalies locally to get my hands on a "pro-style" goalie mask, which was HECC certified and allowable for use in youth and high school hockey.  It was made by Van Veldon...  It was a little ill fitting, and I wasn't thrilled with the HECC approved wire cage, but at least I had a cool looking mask...  

I could go on and on about what I bought or received as a gift, what color it was, when I got it, but I need to get back to my original point, goalies are freak shows...  And like I said, for a host of different reasons, but the primary reason that I am such a nut job, I have to match the team that I am playing with, so I have two sets of  Bauer Supreme SE 2 all white, and an all black set.  The sets are identical in every way, leg pads, gloves, blockers...  I have two identical ITECH 960 goalie masks, one all white, and one with a design on it in blue (my OMHL team wears blue and white).  I have two pairs of goalie pants that I use regularly, one royal blue pair of ITECH pants, and one black pair of Vaughn pants and a John Brown 2100 chest and arm protector.

Now, I have more gear than that, two more Bauer gloves (black/red, black/blue), another Bauer blocker (black/red), an additional pair of Vaughn leg pads (white), another pair of Vaughn pants (red), and two more helmets (all black, and mostly red with a design) a Brian's CA, and a Sher-Wood CA.  I mention all of this stuff to illustrate a particular sickness that infects most goalies, the want and desire to match everything, all of the time.  Now there are some players who feel the same way, my father was like that, but for the most part, the don't seem to give a shit one way or the other...  Shit, I paint my goalie sticks to match the teams I play on...

Now if I was married, had kids, shit like that, I probably wouldn't be out buying up goalie equipment everywhere I looked, I wouldn't be painting my sticks to match my team colors...  But I am not married and I don't have any kids, so that means I get to do whatever the hell I want to do.  Part of me spends a lot of time trying to convince myself that I buy all of this shit because I am a "team first" guy.  I think the truth is, well, I just love goalie equipment, hell, if I could, I would open my own store selling hockey gear.  Think about it, that might just be the most perfect job in the world...  Sitting around, talking about hockey, playing with new gear, testing out new sticks, sharpening skates all day...  I hope that is what heaven is like when I finally shit the bed.

Anyway, yeah, I'm a fucking wing nut, fine, I can live with that, I'm a goalie.  I'm supposed to be crazy and a little weird.

So here are the stats after 20 GP, 11-6-3, 2.55 GAA, 2 SO...

Overconfidence is a Killer

So lately, it seems as though something, collectively is off, way off, for both teams.  Strangely it almost seems like overconfidence.  Very concerning to me.  If there was on thing that I learned during my very short lived poker career, never, EVER, underestimate anyone at anytime.  It always leads to big, pathetic, wildly embarrassing loses (and sometimes ties).

Now, in the DHML, we've been pretty consistent with our lines over the last five to six weeks, everyone has been healthy...  We've been able to roll over some of the lesser teams, as we should, but now I feel like because of a few weeks of having a "soft" schedule that the boys seem to think that they can walk all over every other team in the league, which is NEVER the case when you have one defense man who is over 50, and another that just got back onto the ice this past spring after a ten year absence...  Defense is paramount to being successful, and without it, we are at best, average.  And that goes for both teams...  Average.  

Fuck average.  The thought of that, the idea of being average pisses me off to no end.  WHo the fuck wants to be average?  Ok, I get that it's just men's league, shit, we're paying to play, no one is getting paid, none of us are superstars, but come on, you never lose the want, that desire to win, to compete.  That's why we're out there, not for fun, not for exercise, to compete, to go out there and kick the shit out of the team that your playing, to win.  I cannot stand when someone says to me that it's just a game.  Go eat shit. I've been playing hockey for twenty years, and not for fun, I play because I have a desire and a need to compete.  People who know me even only peripherally know this about me.  I hate losing.  Only losers are ok with losing, I do not fall into that category.  The "loser" category.

Two games ago there was a play where an opposing player absolutely undressed everyone on my team, including myself, and after the play was over, and the goal was scored one of my defense men was laughing about it.  I wanted to kill him. Laughing really.  That guy just embarrassed you and you're laughing about it.  I don't have any desire to play with guys like that.  None.  I'll tell you what, there is a team in the league that has no wins, and probably won't win a game all year, go fucking play with them.  You want to laugh about getting your ass handed to you, well, you'll have plenty of opportunities to do so playing for those bums.  Yuck it up over there.  I don't need defense men like that in front of me, the game is hard enough as it is.

Again, this all goes back to my competitive nature...  Now some people have a hard time accepting that about me.  That's their problem.  Not mine.  Winning is fun, I smile when I win, the world is all rainbows and sunshine when I win, and when I lose, stay the fuck away from me.  There has never been a time that I have taken the ice and thought "We're fucked, there is no way we're going to win..."  I ALWAYS EXPECT TO WIN.  ALWAYS.  Don't show up if you don't think that you're going to win, seriously, do me a favor, stay at home sitting on your couch watching television eating junk.  OR, go play for the team that blows cock, hey, at least you had "fun" and there is always beer after.

I seem to have gotten slightly off track, but only slightly.  I was talking about both teams going into games being over confident, and you're probably thinking, "Didn't this asshole just say that he ALWAYS expects to win?"  Yes, I did, now, there is a difference between being overconfident, and just plain expecting to win...  I expect to win because I always leave it all out on the ice.  I will do whatever it takes for my team to win, giving them all I have to give and a little extra if I have to.  That is why I always expect to win, because I know that I am never out there dogging it, I can't, I'm the fucking goalie for fuck's sake.  I believe 100% in the old "A good goalie makes all the saves that he's supposed to make, and some of the ones that he has no business making..."  So in order to make the semi-impossible saves, I have to give every last ounce of whatever I've got in the tank that night.  And I always do.

So after 19 games, I am collectively 10-6-3, with a 2.53 GAA, and 2 SO.  

Back on track...

It's been roughly a month since I last made a blog entry so I thought that it might be time for an update. 

In the last month my combined record between the two teams that I play for has been less than sparkling...  3-3-2, with a robust 3.13 GAA, and 1 SO.  So yeah, I had a couple of absolutely terrible games, and I even made some attempt within the confines of my simple little brain to make an excuse for my poor performances in the early going of that stretch, like "I was sick, which screwed up my timing," or "My D was hanging me out to dry..."  Bullshit like that.  The fact of the matter is, as a goaltender, my job is to stop the puck.  Simple.  Make ALL of the saves that I am supposed to make, and some of the saves that I have no business making.  

Get that?  I am supposed to make saves, not excuses.

Now, aside from games, and poor play, and a boatload of excuses, I have actually managed to complete my second set of equipment...  I now have two completely identical sets of gear, one which is all black, and one which is all white.  This makes me happy, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, and died, I would die a happy guy for two reasons, one being the equipment, and the other being that my overall GAA is currently under 3.00 for the season after 17 games.  Anyway, back to the gear, identical...  This was not an easy task for several reasons, one, my absurdly anal nature which makes it impossible for me to settle for less than exactly what I want.  Also, I had to chase down gear that has been out of production for the last two years, and it had to be in near new condition.  I will say this though, it was worth the effort.  The Bauer SE2 line was, in my opinion, perfectly made for a goaltender who plays somewhere in between the current butterfly style and the mid-nineties butterfly style (Think Roy, Brodeur, and maybe even Moog).  The glove has the perfect break, and the blocker has the palm set back more toward the wrist and slightly off center, which aids in my ability to handle the puck.  Plus the shit is super light weight... 

So to date, my cumulative record is 9-5-3, 2.65 GAA, 2 SO.