By Adam Cancryn
As Martin Brodeur enters his 20th, and possibly last, season in the NHL, a look back at how the goalie's unparalleled dominance changed the game of hockey forever.
When Martin Brodeur took to the ice Oct. 8, it marked what will likely be an 82-game farewell tour for one of hockey’s legends.
The word “legend” (and its adjective offshoot, “legendary”) is thrown around a lot nowadays, especially in sports. It’s used as a sort of single word hype machine to elevate someone or something above the hordes of “great” players making “great plays.”
Albert Pujols isn’t just a great power hitter, for example, he’s a legend among power hitters (lest someone conflate his abilities with the mere power hitting greatness of a Gary Sheffield or Josh Hamilton). There are a bunch of speedy running backs in the NFL, but Chris Johnson? His speed is legendary, if only by an extra 0.1 second.
Blake Griffin’s dunks? Legendary. Sidney Crosby’s stick-handling? Legendary. Some random center fielder’s diving catch during that random July game? Legendary.
Even the ads for this year’s MLB playoffs breathlessly report that “Legends are born in October.” Since the World Series is routinely clinched in early November, I can only imagine what brilliant slogan they have ready for next month. “Legends go through their angsty teenage stage in November?”
The bottom line is that, like “unbelievable,” “awesome,” “impossible” and a host of similar terms, the word rarely fits the action. A complete game two-hitter in the playoffs doesn’t make you a legend any more than spray painting a cow blue and carrying around an axe for Halloween makes you Paul Bunyan. It takes something more, something that vaults a player above the rest of his team, above the rest of his generation and above the rest of his era and plants him firmly within the annals of his chosen sport.
Martin Brodeur has that something more. That’s the easy part.
Much more difficult is figuring out why he has that something more, why he will be placed among the Howes, Gretzkys, Roys, etc. as a member of that sliver of the NHL population that occupies a higher plane, looking down on decades worth of hockey’s proletariat.
The statistics are certainly there: first in career wins, shutouts, saves and games played. Nine-time all star, three-time Cup winner. Four Vezinas and five Jennings trophies. Two Olympic gold medals and another World Cup gold. By any category you can measure a goaltender, Brodeur is up there with the greatest ever. And he’s done so while routinely starting 70+ games a year, a feat that in today’s mix-and-match league takes a combination of durability, high-level consistency and determination.
But stats, as we climb the ladder toward hockey’s legends, provide diminishing returns. Stats won’t tell us why Martin Brodeur is on another plane compared with, say, Curtis Joseph, who for many seasons matched Brodeur’s statistical accomplishments. No, there has to be something more.
That something more in Brodeur’s case, I think, is this: Beyond the gaudy numbers and numerous accomplishments, he changed the way the very game is played.
***
When Brodeur first took over as the Devils’ goaltender as a 21-year-old, he was already something of a dying breed. He was the rare non-butterfly goalie among the millions of hockey youth that had risen through the ranks during the reign of Patrick Roy.
Brodeur came up in the midst of this era. But he took little from Roy’s on-ice style. Instead, he chose to take some small lessons and meld them into a style of his own.
"One thing I was scared of growing up was being predictable.” Brodeur told the New York Post in 2009. “I didn't want to be a guy who played the same way over and over, wanted to make sure it was a challenge to shoot on me. And physically, I thought I would get tired, having to go down on every single shot."
Brodeur eschewed acrobatics, opting instead for proper angles. He became an expert in geometry rather than interpretive dance. His peers relied on the organized chaos of flopping and flailing that is the staple of the butterfly. Brodeur opted for a calmer hybrid of stand-up and butterfly, an approach that cut down on difficult saves through perfect positioning.
"It's nothing about style really, but about fundamentals, how I get myself in position to make the save that's important to me," Brodeur said in that same 2009 Post article. "We give up 8-10 fewer shots a game here than other places because of the way I control rebounds."
It wasn’t as exciting, but it was effective. The hybrid style caught on. A generation after Roy made the butterfly the only philosophy worth teaching, Brodeur had forced coaches to think again. Watch any hockey game now, from pee wee to the pros, and you’ll almost certainly be watching a descendant of the Martin Brodeur School of Goaltending.
***
There are a number of explanations for why the Devils’ defense was so dominant throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s.
They had great defenders, led by Hall of Famer Scott Stevens and speedy linemate Scott Niedermayer. Brian Rafalski put in some of his best years as a New Jersey blueliner, and Ken Daneyko provided enough muscle to settle the score when the gloves came off. In time, that old guard seamlessly handed off to a new crop of highly skilled defenders, led by Paul Martin and Colin White.
New Jersey also pioneered the neutral zone trap, which clogged up offensive passing lanes and made skating down the middle of the ice a treacherous venture indeed (just ask Paul Kariya or Eric Lindros). In effect, it became the equivalent of a soccer team continually holding the ball in the far corner. The strategy frustrated opponents, limited offensive rushes and killed time. It was dull, uninspiring and brutally effective.
Brodeur was the constant, the crux of the team around him. He oversaw the transition from old guard to new, and coordinated the in-game swirl of skaters around him.
In addition to acting as goalie and quarterback, he was a third defender, handling all of the pucks that the trap forced opponents to dump into the zone. Just as he had done in goal, Brodeur outside the crease mastered all of the angles of the ice. He could clear the zone with a simple flick off the boards, or hit a streaking forward 40 feet up the ice with ease.
That ability meant defenders could aggressively pressure opponents without fear of getting caught too far forward. It meant Stevens and Daneyko and White could patrol the middle, searching for skaters with their heads down. It meant the Devils could take chances, and turn its suffocating defense into a fast-break offense at a moments’ notice. Brodeur’s exceptional vision and passing ability were the keys to the Devils’ effectiveness. He was (and still is) quite simply, the greatest stick-handling goalie ever.
But don’t take it from me. Take it from the 29 other teams in the league. After years of watching their offenses neutered by Brodeur’s defensive play outside of the crease, the NHL in 2005 instituted a rule preventing goalies from handling the puck behind the goal line, except for a small trapezoid-shaped area behind the net. The change, a result of a campaign led not coincidentally by the former general manager of the rival Philadelphia Flyers, soon became known as the Brodeur rule:
Previously, a goaltender could play the puck anywhere in his own end of the ice. A goaltender like Brodeur, with his ability to pass the puck up-ice, in effect became a third defenseman.
''If they had 30 Martin Brodeurs out there, that rule wouldn't be there; nobody would have voted for it,'' Brodeur said. ''Or Rick DiPietro. There are just too many teams that didn't have these goalies that were ready to make sure the guys that were affecting the games weren't able to do it anymore.''
Martin Brodeur, just by playing goalie to the best of his abilities, had forced a fundamental change in the rules and strategy of hockey.
The NHL’s free-range goalie, now confined to a 28-foot trapezoidal pen designed especially for him, matched a career high with 43 wins that year.
***
The route that players take to their designation as legendary is not defined. Some attain that status just by showing up (Cal Ripken, Jr.). Some come up big when it counts (Joe Montana). Some forcing the game to adapt to them (Wilt Chamberlain, Brodeur), or meet any number of other qualifiers. It would, quite literally, be impossible to put satisfactory parameters on what makes a player legendary.
But let me submit one broad criterion that can at least serve as a starting point: An athletic legend is a person that leaves an indelible mark on his or her respective game, a mark that alters the way the game is perceived and forever weaves that person into the fabric of the game’s history.
Martin Brodeur was not the first hybrid goalie. He was not the only one to routinely handle the puck. But he was the best at both, so good that the game was compelled to catch up to him. And once it finally did adapt? He just went out and played even better.
Banner image via thehockeynews.com
Second image via daylife.com, third image via the New York Daily News
2 comments:
this is a pretty good article, but as someone who literally idolized patrick roy as a kid and was way too much into hockey goaltenders (starting to get back into it again), I don't think this is a particularly accurate description of the differences between roy's butterfly and brodeur's hybrid style. Firstly, Marty Brodeur did not, by any stretch of the imagination "eschew acrobatics"- and nor is 'acrobatics' the hallmark of the butterfly style. The key difference is that butterfly goaltenders go down and STAY down by default, in anticipation of the shot, automatically covering the bottom 3rd of the net and relying upon a very fast glove hand and blocker reflexes to cover the upper portion; Brodeur definitely did this to a great extent, but the major difference is that his positioning allowed him to tailor his reaction more to the shot, not going down by default as roy would and standing upright for higher shots.
Cheers- Shuman (one of Joe's bestest friends whom he loves dearly, though he will likely deny this)
"and nor" is improper grammar, shuman.
Adam, I don't like hockey, but really liked the article.
Post a Comment