01/19/23

[goaltender]

reached an emotional low this month when soobin's little message about changmin made me want to burst into tears even though i don't even care about this ship anymore. just truly a devastating thing to publicly share about a person and one that is especially heartbreaking in the known context of being exes who are now only friends but were once so compatible you circled back to being unknowable to yourselves

canucks draft possibilities
1. skip ahead in the lottery, everyone is losing it thinking they got bedard only for it to be #2 and draft fantilli instead → honestly still a fantastic outcome it would just be hilarious for those like 3 minutes on lottery day
2. drop to 5th overall and draft michkov only for him to not be available until 2026 when the team's core is completely unrecognizable and they continue to be shit
3. get hometown kid cristall at like 7th and people make a big deal of him being the Next Best van boy after bedard only for him to end up being a bust/performing vastly below his projected ceiling. for both their & my sake i hope this isn't true because i'm high on him but!
4. hmmm leo carlsson......... can it still be the vancouver swedes if they don't manage to build around petey. carlsson is tricky because there's no way they're getting to bottom 3 so i guess it's a question of IF they win #2 would they want him or fantilli
5. alternatively (would never happen) go the cats way and trade away your unprotected first in some insane deadline package deal only to improve slightly to 11th overall and somehow win bedard and watch him slip between your fingers. oh this reminds me of the funniest thing i read today LMFAO marino 1-for-1 made my soul hurt. ok actually many things about this that are blatantly just not realistic even in the satirical context of nux trade incompetence like obviously horvat to boston is looking highly likely and devastating but in the longterm projection boston has enough To-Be Captain guys that this isn't the role i'd expect him in. but i digress

(guy who can't escape self-imposed lh43 propaganda) i think i may be starting to unironically enjoy this loser. listened to his little appearance on the athletic and like it's literally just him in the car waiting for the interview to wrap up so he can go get his sushi but the insights were So. i lol'd at him being all like well i'm in college so i can't get a job but good thing i can afford to eat with my ae jeans sponsorship money! also when he's like... "i wouldn't say i like school but history is fun" "oh what history classes have you taken" "i took a class on college athletics and i LOVED it because i learned about ummmm title ix and nil and stuff" 😭 also i feel like he's probably being media-trained on a different pace than his brothers were at this age rn because he's the leftover non-nhl child so his dad finally has Full Access and influence over him... it's interesting though because luke really does care about quinn the most. 🥲 d-man solidarity... "quinny and jack"... ok i'm going to stop talking about the hughes siblings

pivoting to the stars i obsessively went through otter's midwestern lesbian off-season performance coach's ig page the other day for um. reasons. (@ her bjj practicing wife god i see what you've done for others) but it really was an interesting insight into how goalies hone mobility in a way that's both active/generative (increasing range of motion and flexibility to help them make saves) and passive/mitigative (instilling muscular control and autonomy so your body can be comfortable with being put into positions without risk of getting injured). i also think the like... Physical Construction of a goalie is just so interesting because despite the relatively stationary nature of the position i think it's very much a role that is often unfairly evaluated as only the sum of its parts? even though The Parts are so dissectible in a way that skaters' "tools" aren't necessarily, so it's like.... how do i explain this. several thoughts:

i think something that has been on my mind a lot is the idea of Adjustability and both the power and limitations of (self and/or external) reflection in a young player/prospect's developmental journey. one of the latest pdocast episodes i listened to was super insightful on this topic and i genuinely loved it and think it kind of got me going in tandem with a lot of general recent goalie analysis/interest. for example on the pdo they discussed habit formation at the junior level and how a highly-skilled prospect's game will often narrow there because there is a lack of (unstructured) challenge, which in turn creates environmental reliance on plays that Work In Juniors but won't necessarily let them score at the top level. and then they specifically bring up stankoven and how in his dy he was very much a goal-scorer first who knew he could have kept coasting by on objectively uncreative + "unlikely" scoring chances that were only being reflected on the scoresheet through skill and poor opposing defensive structure but in his d+1 he >MADE A CONSCIOUS DECISION TO DEVELOP AS A PLAYMAKER INSTEAD.

and what's interesting is that when we think about the defensive positioning of a team or whatever, it's kind of a trickledown reactionary effect of each layer introducing or supporting or stripping away a positional/executive option for the next layer. like i'd argue it's mostly a linear relationship of offense to defense to goaltending right, the downward flow toward the goalie as the Last Remaining layer down their side of the ice, and the defender forcibly exerts influence on goalie decision-making + action + outcome through things like blocking shots or unintentional screening or opening shooting lanes that introduce high-danger chances. you can argue that the goalie does "rebound" (both figuratively & literally) some of this impact and is therefore the first layer in the flow going back the other side, but what remains is that in the defensive structure their impact on upward layers does not exist so much actively as it does maybe in the more hypothetical, positional risk-management-weighing sense of say a defender in a 2-on-1 cutting off the pass and letting the shooter get a clean shot in knowing that there is nothing they can do but trust their goalie to make the save.

so in this kind of diagrammatic layering the idea of playmaking as a forward is highly LATERAL, vs. the goalie who is flattened down to his (circular) function as a singular endpoint. and like........ when we talk about the incremental quality of >physical conditioning< in skaters, this can be stratified into fairly discrete or countable measures like the value of perfecting One's Shot but also otherwise more ambiguous evaluations of say aerobic endurance and anaerobic activation and what have you. which are like... well i guess the point i'm making is that skater conditioning can still, you know, have specific muscular targets and everything but the end-product ends up being less about that minutiae when skaters function as an extension of these sums and the lateral/downward/upward influences they create through playmaking and on-ice movement ultimately means their impact >IS NOT PHYSICALLY SELF-CONTAINED. and i remember discussing with hailey how hockey is so fun because it is fairly uniquely positioned in that so much of it is about extending the body across different axes—i.e. not just horizontally from holding the stick and puck away from yourself but also vertically in the variability introduced from skating and the dynamics of being on ice—so obviously what separates goaltending here is that it's relatively Less extended. even if the main components and the gear and the goalie stick are still there, your positioning challenges, or perhaps i should say retranslates, the core tenets of that innovation. which is also interesting with stuff like skaters these days increasingly trying to intentionally angle and bank the puck off goalies' masks and how in the end scheme a goalie also very much inversely becomes an offensive extension of the skater's body as well.

so back to the sum of a goalie's parts. it's like..... when we talk about (the physical components of) bo horvat perfecting his shot. did he go to a performance coach who said okay, let's see how your hand flexes and examine all your joints and your full passive range of motion and how we can narrow that gap to give you better muscular control over your fingers? and it's like. well no. because improving one's shot is granular, sure, but not in that sense, and a lot of it exists once again more in the realm of physical extension. changing the curve of your blade, taking a page out of bedard's book and going low flex....... i think the aggregate sum and ensuing success metrics of conditioning just looks really different for a goalie. and there IS so much space to get absolutely granular on how you're targeting specific muscles and not just have the ability to ~move~, but also maintain control over that movement, or conversely increase control to have flexibility between rigidity and fluidity in movement. i wonder if that's a kind of dichotomy that has to inherently exist between the skater and goalie positions, too, that so much of physical conditioning for a forward is to be more rigid and compact but for a goalie you need to build up control incrementally in order to be able to introduce fluidity to your range of motion. hm

just been thinking about things. also from the otter interview i was listening to i thought it was sooo compelling that he said (before-last season) he found out the stars signed holtby on twitter and he was like "looking at it literally made my HEART SINK" because he knew in the exact moment that he was getting sent back to the ahl without any guarantee he'd even get a call-up opportunity, and then that even if he were to get it he'd have to make the most of it because the margin of error for goalies to avoid relegation is so slim. i mean goalies are of course interesting because past all the things that differentiate them the major component of their... organizational role...? hinges on the idea of scarcity, which is just a whole other thing to get into re: goalie mentality and developmental consistency/professional tenacity.... but that's for another time i think.

speaking of recent podcast episodes i got so annoyed because i was listening to i think puck soup and it was mostly a rundown of the nux situation which i enjoyed but then these MFS had to get into an entire provorov debate and i was just like jesus christ shut UPPP. like i'm essentially disillusioned to the point of feeling nothing of note about these events and as i told hailey i do believe that an overly liberal guy is always way more likely to disrupt the #lockerroomvibes (pld moment) than any kind of republican contingent but while i can search deep enough into my heart to engage my reserves of fandom sympathy and feel for like well-meaning fandom girlies who get their feelings hurt by these things and like yes i think the gay twitter teens should be allowed to complain about him and get mad etc. yes the sport sucks whatever i'm sorry kids...... to put on my sports podcast and be subjected to these random old men EARNESTLY DEBATE THE MORAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS INTO MY EARS ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON??? i can't do it. like literally just shut up about talk about the graphs. unrelated but the funniest part of the pride jersey is that they didn't even redesign the logo lmfao

life is hard guys. v'q qb nalguvat sbe guvf obql gb abg or zvar. but we already knew that

1.5 months until oscar debut 🥲 i'll stop here