VANCOUVER -- Mike McKenna has been stopping pucks long enough to have played in pads stuffed with deer hair, so the Philadelphia Flyers goalie and admitted gear geek is well-qualified to rank the importance of equipment innovation.
Which made it interesting to hear McKenna identify a recent trend regarding goalie skates as the most important change since the invention of pads that rotate as the goalie drops and sit flat on the ice when he is in the butterfly position.
Those pads have evolved steadily ever since, with new materials and designs dropping the weight to near 4 pounds each, improving how fast they slide on the ice and even creating faster, longer rebounds that buy goalies more time to recover.
Despite all that, McKenna cited the removal of the cowling, a piece of hard white plastic that wrapped around a goalie skate for extra impact protection, as the biggest evolution.
"I think truly, in terms of technical innovation, the skates have been night and day from when we started," the 35-year-old said. "They are stiffer, they are more responsive, they have a better attack angle and I think it's allowed us to become so much more mobile, not just on our feet but on our knees, the way we power push, the way we integrate with our posts."
NHL goalies appear to strongly agree. That white cowling, which was largely there to protect feet in the era of kick saves and has long since stood out as an easy identifier for a goalie skate, has almost disappeared over the past four seasons.
"It looks weird to see a cowling now and three years ago everyone still had cowlings," McKenna said. "That's rapid. That's a really quick change."
At the end of the 2014-15 season, every goalie in the NHL had cowlings on their skates. At the start of the 2015-16 season, New York Rangers No. 1 goalie Henrik Lundqvist debuted a new Bauer goalie skate that looked like a traditional player skate, with a reinforced black plastic toe cap instead of the cowling and a holder on the bottom. At the same time, a handful of goalies were also trying a new custom-fit, one-piece, no-cowling skate from a small Winnipeg-based company called VH Footwear, which has since been purchased by True Hockey.
More than three years later, there are 10 goalies in the NHL with traditional cowlings, and most, including Carey Price of the Montreal Canadiens, have shaved the inside of that protective plastic down to make it easier to establish an edge from their knees.
The benefit of removing or decreasing the inside edge of the cowling is an improvement in what goalies call the attack angle, which is basically how tilted the skate can be on its side with the inside edge of the blade still on the ice. A better attack angle allows goalies to hold an edge from a deeper, wider stance and also reduces how high they must lift a knee in order to access that edge to make a lateral push while in the butterfly.
"If you sat down five, six years ago and said, 'We need to become quicker, what do we do,' most goalies would say go in the gym and work on your quads and work on your legs and get a better sliding pad," Vancouver Canucks No. 1 Jacob Markstrom said. "It's pretty cool someone said, 'You know what, we're going to make the skate smaller and get the angle down instead.' It's huge. So much changes when you do that because all the angles change and it doesn't take as much leg lifting to push or get the full edge. That means you get quicker."
Video: EDM@VAN: Markstrom raises skate to rob Nugent-Hopkins
In addition to removing the cowling, skate companies made the holder on the bottom of the skate taller, further improving the attack angle.
Not everyone is comfortable with the added height; it was one reason Price switched back to an old Graf cowling after trying a taller, no-cowling setup. But the benefits are obvious.
"It was a big adjustment because I used to be so low to the ice and it felt more stable," said Detroit Red Wings goalie Jonathan Bernier, who wears a True skate with the tallest holder. "But once you get used to it, you gain a few inches on height and your push, if you are in a butterfly, you don't have to get your leg as high because the clearance is so much better."
With the game getting quicker and players attacking more across the middle of the ice, goalies appreciate anything that improves their lateral mobility. Thus more goalies are adopting True's custom-fit boot, which is based on a monocoque (one-piece skin) design that started in speedskating. More than two-thirds of NHL goalies are wearing a True boot, whether it's with a nongoalie-style holder on the bottom, True's carbon-fiber, one-piece combination of boot and holder, or a traditional cowling, like Price uses.
Because of the feel of this boot, some goalies have even reduced how deep their blades are sharpened because they don't feel they need as much of an edge.
"Your foot is locked into the boot," said Red Wings No. 1 Jimmy Howard, who wore the Bauer no-cowling two-piece before switching to the True one-piece skate. "As soon as you took those old white cowlings off, it just felt like you were more connected to the ice. … Skates really are probably the biggest improvement we've made."
