Steel psychos and box guys: Inside the rapidly evolving world of NHL skate blades (2024)

The Westmount Recreation Centre squats at the foot of Montreal’s grandest neighbourhood, and on a sunny late-August afternoon an NHL veteran is at ice level, wrestling with a decision.

Derick Brassard has played on hockey’s biggest stage for 12 years, basically his entire adult life, but in his offseason workouts over the past few weeks he’s had an unsettling realization.

What if, after all this time, his skates were set up wrong?

Technological innovation is constant and rapid in the NHL, whether it relates to sticks, padding, training methods – even jerseys have tech now. But one facet of the game that continues to be weirdly underappreciated involves what’s happening between the skate boot and the ice.

Count professional players among those who could benefit from a deeper education.

Sessions like the one Brassard and several dozen other pros attended at the Westmount rink and elsewhere near Montreal this past summer are filling that knowledge gap. In them, players are outfitted with different models of blades with specific profiles – the shape in which the blade is milled – and varying sharpening depths. The goal: To unlock the combination that best suits each player.

There are different geometries for different positions (and skating strides, and weight classes, etc.); the range of options is only broadening as profiling precision improves, and for Brassard the results were eye-popping.

“The only thing is,” he said, “I really would have liked to get started on this sooner.”

A short time after he signed a free agent contract with the New York Islanders, the 32-year-old centre was havering between a blade configuration that provides more heel lift versus one that is flatter in the middle portion of the foot.

“I’m kind of stuck in a dilemma,” he said.

For Brassard, as for most NHL players, it boils down to a question of feel. But what if both feel good? Unlike a recreational player, Brassard can test as many options as he’d like and have different models couriered to him from places like Elite Blade Performance Technology, a specialized sharpening and profile shop on Montreal’s South Shore.

In fact, that’s a service more and more NHL players are using. Some buy multiple sets of ‘steel’ and rotate them. The used blades are shipped out to be freshly profiled and re-sharpened, then sent back.

It’s like Netflix 1.0, the old school mail-order version, except for NHL-grade blades.

Why go to all that trouble?

“It’s always the same, you always know exactly what to expect because there’s no possibility for human error. That’s really the magic of it,” said Islanders winger Anthony Beauvillier, who uses the long-distance blade-swap system. “You don’t need to think, you know your blades are good.”

Basically, it’s one less thing to worry about and that’s the sort of incremental gain players embrace.

“It’s such a tight league, if I can get a little advantage whether it’s equipment, ability – anything you can – you try to take advantage of it,” said the Sabres’ Jack Eichel, as smooth and fast a skater as there is in the NHL (non-McDavid division). “It’s no different with steel.”

Eichel may be only 22, but like his fellow youngster Beauvillier he has been experimenting with blades and configurations for several years.

“The more I got into it the more I started learning about it,” Eichel said. “I think the further you go in your career, the more changes you make. You just kind of want to educate yourself because sometimes it could just be a bit of an overlooked part of skating and so for me I try to pay attention to it.”

Having the right profile and correct sharpening depth (i.e. tailored to one’s skating style and stride) can also confer advantages in key game situations.

After a recent testing session, Buffalo defenceman Marco Scandella marvelled at how much easier it was wheeling away from forecheckers after switching profiles and cuts. Efficiency matters in the NHL, which is only getting faster.

Another way more contact is achieved: longer blades. The Canadiens’ Paul Byron, no slowpoke, recently added more length and said he’s felt smoother and more agile. Putting more steel on the ice also generally involves going to a “duller” cut. Eichel is another player who likes to have as much blade contact as possible.

The edges themselves are still chef’s knife sharp, but many players are moving away from having deep concave hollows on the bottom of their skates. Instead, they’re gravitating toward something that looks a lot more like a flat speedskating blade.

Sharpening cuts are expressed in fractions of an inch, the hollows are created using a convex wheel that grinds away the centre of the blade’s bottom. Take a vertical cross-section of a skate blade and imagine using a wheel with the approximate curve of a dime to cut away the bottom of it. Now think about the type of curve you’d get from a quarter. The higher the number, the flatter the cut.

Players used to regularly ask for a 3/8ths or half-inch cut (pointy, high); now it’s commonplace for them to use a much shallower hollow. Montreal’s Jesperi Kotkaniemi skates on 11/16ths. NHL refs, for whom glide is paramount, typically sharpen at around an inch. Winnipeg’s Blake Wheeler and Detroit forward Anthony Mantha, both substantial humans, are at an inch (or a little more in Mantha’s case) because they don’t need any help digging into the ice. Claude Giroux of the Flyers, not a hefty customer, still prefers an inch and a quarter.

“I used to like to have really sharp skates when I was a kid,” Beauvillier said, “and now they’re barely sharp at all; I feel like I don’t need to push as much because I’m not digging into the ice, there’s way more glide. I have a lot more gas at the end of my shifts than I used to.”

Another reason players are becoming increasingly finicky, according to Brassard, is because they can.

“When I started playing not everybody had the removable blades, now everyone does. It’s easy to swap them out on the bench. In the old days, a guy might miss a shift or two to fix a skate; not anymore,” he said. “It’s gotten a little bit mental, guys will be yelling ‘my blade feels a little off’ and they’re switching them constantly. The trainers are pretty amazing; it takes a lot of patience because there are players who are really picky about this kind of stuff.”

Ah yes, the people an NHL supplier affectionately calls “steel psychos.” They exist.

One NHL player, who shall remain nameless so he doesn’t get into trouble with his training staff, sent a pair of blades to Elite because they just felt off somehow. They were put on a light table and sure enough, one blade was off by a few hundredths of an inch. It had been sharpened by hand by a trainer who had noticed an imperfection. The player now handles his own steel.

The internal politics of handling blades can be a touchy subject. Beauvillier admitted that for his first two NHL seasons he didn’t want to alienate anyone by doing his own thing. It turned out the equipment staff was perfectly happy to have one less guy to worry about.

Another player told me privately about a teammate who has used a contouring shop for years to develop custom profiles – and basically refuses to talk about it.

“It’s a competitive league; if you found an edge would you want everyone else to be able to have it too?” the NHLer said.

Humans have been skating for 3,000 years or so, but the physics of sliding on ice aren’t easy to observe; much of what the scientific world knows about the phenomenon is inferred.

Much, but not all.

In the 1850s, the English scientist Michael Faraday, to whom the world owes the field of electromagnetics among a great many other things, theorized there was a thin layer of water on top of ice that makes it slippery.

It took some time for the scientific community to develop the equipment to actually see it, about 130 years in fact, but see it they did. Not surprisingly, it turns out it’s incredibly thin, about 1,000 times smaller than garden-variety bacteria.

Heat, friction and pressure also play a role, but they aren’t the key factors in how NHL players get around the ice. Here’s what is: The amount of contact between the steel blade underfoot and that microscopically thin layer of water.

Skating axiomatically comes down to a trade-off between biting into the ice (i.e. control, agility in turns) and gliding across it (i.e. speed, efficiency). In general terms, you boost one at the expense of the other.

But what if one were able to maximize both? That’s the Holy Grail NHL players, and the equipment managers who kit them out, are chasing. Relentlessly.

The search for the Next Thing has led down some esoteric, faddish paths; anyone remember the Thermablade, a battery-powered heating system intended to create more water under the blade, and which was briefly endorsed by Wayne Gretzky? What about the flat-bottom V edge cut? Or the single-use, super hard German-made T-Blades that Dennis Seidenberg and Christian Ehrhoff skated on? All were interesting ideas in theory that proved tricky to pull off in practice.

“It’s the same thing as golf,” Brassard explained, “a company comes out with something new and everybody wants to give it a try. A guy wins a couple tournaments and everybody wants that grip, that shaft.”

That’s not to say some inventions haven’t proven more reliable, at least anecdotally: Quick-release blades, steel that flexes while in the holder to propel the toe forward, carbon coatings to preserve edges longer, plastic shims between the holder and boot to raise the foot and create a steeper angle of attack. The Canadiens’ Saku Koivu, who had extremely wide feet, was an early adopter of shims; Beauvillier refuses to skate without them. Some blade manufacturers have started producing taller blades – typically, they’re cut out of flat sheets of stainless steel by a laser – to achieve the same effect.

Over the years there have been claimed sightings of the blade treatment Grail at production facilities in Sweden (home of Pro Sharp profiling and sharpening machines), Minnesota (Wissota), New England (Sparx), Ontario (Maximum Edge, Blackstone, Cag One, Dupliskate and Blademaster, the dominant market player and sharpening machine of choice in basically every NHL and minor pro equipment room).

More recently, some believe they have found it in Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, Que.

In the basem*nt of Denis Proulx’s house there is a table. About a decade ago, he lined up a pair of skate blades on its stone surface and decided to try and reinvent skate sharpening.

Proulx is a machining expert who spent much of his early working life figuring out how to automate the family sawmill business. He was good at it. So proficient, in fact, he was later hired to advise the New Brunswick-based Irving forestry empire on modernizing its North American operations.

By 2007, Proulx was back in Beloeil, about a 35-minute drive east of Montreal, and his son Gabriel was a hot-shot minor hockey player with a complaint: Why can’t I get a consistent edge on my skate blades?

“I had bought five or six sets of blades for him and one night, when I was watching TV I put a pair of them on the table and realized ‘hang on, they’re not the same.’ So I started thinking about it,” said Proulx, who has skated only a handful of times in his life. “There has to be a better way.”

The next season he decided to spend his spare time building a prototype at the metal shop where he was designing and building production line equipment for various clients including a picture frame maker.

“I thought it would be quick, that it wasn’t complicated,” he said.

It wasn’t quick. It was complicated.

Motorized sharpening came into vogue in the 19th century, around the time Faraday was puttering around in his lab. At that time, the contraptions tended to be hand or foot powered, and the grinding stone was adapted from other uses.

The basic idea didn’t change much for a century or so; sure, the motors became more powerful and the grinding wheels more sophisticated. At some point, designers decided it would be preferable to have a horizontal set-up, which is what most hockey arena pro shops have now.

Proulx approached it as an engineering challenge and as a manufacturing process.

Alignment is crucial in sharpening skates, so he eventually decided a vertically positioned wheel would be most effective. That a stainless steel wheel covered in synthetic industrial diamonds would be preferable to stone or resin (which is where the sparks come from when a skate is hand-sharpened). That a servo-controlled clamping and centering mechanism could create an even cut.

By 2009, he was able to sharpen his son’s skates; by October 2012 he had pros testing his blades and a second prototype that became so popular among local puckheads he repurposed his shop’s lunchroom and office and set up a sharpening room.

Profiling equipment has been around for decades; Gretzky’s skates were profiled in the 1980s, by which time the practice was already in wide use in Europe. So have automatic sharpeners, which have long been de rigeur in Europe. Proulx’s principal contribution to the field lies in making the process quicker and incredibly precise.

A skate’s profile is expressed in terms of turning radius. The average stock blade will describe a circle of 9.5 to 10.5 feet. A longer, flatter blade will increase that radius, a shorter blade with more curve at the toe and heel will shorten it.

What began as a way to incorporate both a flat section for speed and more rocker, or camber, to foster agility has reached a new stratosphere of sophistication. Some profiles contain four or more different radiuses. Shift your centre of gravity backward, you’ll get a different result than if you shift it forward. The physical differences in the blade are nearly imperceptible to the uninitiated.

Still, minute changes in heel or toe cutaways can mean the difference between standing up and being on your pants. Think about that the next time a player on your favourite team blows a tire or seems to fall over altogether too easily in a battle along the boards.

Lots of people break new ground in hockey. Few of them have their stars line up as neatly as Proulx’s.

As a 10-year-old, Gabriel Proulx had a coach named Pierre Allard, who today is the Canadiens’ Sports Science and Performance director. As Gabriel’s dad worked up his prototype, he asked Allard to check it out.

Allard, in turn, sent Pat Langlois, Montreal’s assistant equipment manager and a man widely acknowledged as one of the sport’s pre-eminent gear wizards, to have a look.

“It was during the lockout in 2012-13, I had a lot of time on my hands,” Langlois laughed.

Langlois told his boss Pierre Gervais, another legendary equipment man who happens to live just up the road from Proulx. Gervais and Langlois made design suggestions and offered advice on modifications. Proulx took their input and refined his approach, and one day in 2013 serendipitously ran into a hockey nut called Brian Baxter, with whom he shared a patent agent. Baxter, who had developed businesses in various sectors including aerospace and firefighting supply, was looking for a new project. Oh, and his cousin is Canadiens majority owner Geoff Molson.

The two men joined forces in Elite, expanded the operation by hiring more technical staff, and in 2016 the Canadiens bought Proulx’s profiler.

That same year, Gabriel Proulx played in his first game for the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles of the QMJHL (this year he’ll play for the Baie Comeau Drakkar as an over-ager; he remains his dad’s main guinea pig for new ideas).

In the late summer of 2017, the Canadiens moved all their old hand-sharpening equipment into storage and installed one of Elite’s fully automated systems to take care of the team’s steel.

Suppliers of NHL teams regularly develop their products in conjunction with players and club officials; this is a case of a team becoming directly involved in the conception stages of equipment from which it sees a direct benefit.

The Canadiens have regularly been among the league’s quickest teams over the past half-decade. Most of it has to do with the type of players they scout and bring in. That they’ve been at the forefront of profiling and sharpening technology isn’t a coincidence.

Walk through the nine-foot double doors at the back of the Canadiens’ dressing room in the team’s practice facility and you’ll find a wide hallway. Turn left to go out onto the ice, right to go to the showers, chow room and gym.

Dead ahead is Gervais’ inner sanctum, flanked by his office and the stick room (which is surely a story in itself).

It’s an oblong space, with a counter on all three walls and cabinets above and below, kitchen style. Near the door is the freezer-sized Elite ES4 on which Gervais and his staff sharpen up the 184 sets of blades the Canadiens will use this year – plus those belonging to the refs and linesmen who pass through town, club staff and a stable of former players (apparently one does not cease being a Canadien merely because one stops playing for the club).

The Colorado Avalanche recently purchased one just like it; to riff on the Henry Ford aphorism, you can have it any colour you like, as long as it’s Montreal bleu, blanc et rouge. Several teams are mulling over following suit. Nine NHL clubs, the Canadiens, Avalanche, Maple Leafs, Jets, Golden Knights, Flyers, Blackhawks, Red Wings and Sharks use the company’s profiler.

Several AHL teams, university programs and junior clubs have already gone the fully automatic route, but not every NHL equipment staff is so keen; for some cost is at least a small factor (modern automatic machines run in the tens of thousands of dollars); there are long-established routines to consider; there is the inherent conservatism of hockey culture. Presumably some people also take a great deal of pride in their skills and the idea of being replaced by a machine inspires fear and loathing.

It’s a position Gervais understands (he was a skeptic at first), but doesn’t share. He said as much at the annual Society of Professional Hockey Equipment Managers confab in Austin, Texas, this past June.

“You can’t do better than a machine. It’s hyper-centered, it’s the same speed, it doesn’t remove the profile,” Gervais said. “I told the guys at our latest convention: ‘In this room, we’re all pretty good at sharpening skates, but nobody is this good. Impossible.’”

Next to the sharpening machine is a cube-shaped packing case Gervais calls “the toaster,” into which he can slide the half-dozen slimmer CH-branded cases that contain the blades themselves; on the inside they’re akin to the velvet-lined box your grandparents kept their silverware in.

When the Canadiens go on the road, they’ll bring a portable machine to use in case of emergency and enough steel to have replacement blades for every game.

Gervais has been adapting his sharpening to humidity and ice conditions for decades – “for places like Madison Square Garden I always do the same thing, I don’t tell (the players) but I take 1/8th off because the ice is soft. There are a few places like that. In the old days in Edmonton, the ice was very, very hard, so we’d add a bit. Now it’s standard.”

And he can do it all ahead of time in Montreal rather than having to sharpen four dozen pairs between the morning skate and the game.

“I’ll give you an example: Carey Price. To do a goalie skate at half-an-inch, when you start grinding it down it takes a lot of time. Like, 15-20 minutes before you get to your contact (surface). With the new stuff, it takes 10 passes, so I just go do something else. I can have a shower, come back, skates are done.”

Gervais has handled skates for Stanley Cup winners and gold medal Team Canada teams. So what’s his view on the state of skate blade tech relative to when he sharpened his first pair in 1978?

“Different world,” he said. “I think profiling and sharpening has absolutely had an influence on the game. Naturally, we try to convince our guys to go with the shallowest cut possible … it’s less demanding on their knees, their hips, that’s pretty clear.”

Is that insight backed up by data? For that we turn to Allard, the Canadiens’ resident expert, who says … sort of.

“It’s certainly part of the equation. There’s a percentage due to (blades) for sure, that’s obvious. At the same time, it’s a function of how they train, how they warm up, there are a bunch of factors,” he said.

Back through the dressing room toward the exit, you’ll find the profiling room. It’s windowless, and noisy because of the grinding wheels and the vacuums attached to the equipment.

On this occasion, Langlois is profiling a series of blades. Tomas Tatar’s are on the machine, the runners are secured at the top, a metal guide with the profile shape is placed below them to guide the grinding arm across the bottom of the two blades to make them exactly the same size. It’s a lot like any other profiling machine, just with Proulx-level precision.

Langlois has been handling skates since he was a 15-year-old who was wrestling with the antiquated machines in the pro shop at the Palais des Sports in Sherbrooke, Que. He estimates he’s worked with pretty much every profiling and sharpening machine produced in his lifetime (he’s 47) and that the pace of change has accelerated in the past half-decade.

Part of it has to do with an incoming generation of increasingly receptive players.

“Guys are more interested in trying to understand what’s going on under their blades, they’re realizing it’s a very important part of their game,” he said.

Langlois said custom-tailored profiling and sharpening amounts to “huge differences that can seem subtle.”

“All these little things make it such that a player feels better, better balance, better push … guys will adapt to the problems under their foot, but mostly because they don’t know any better,” he said. “But once you start showing them the possibilities, it’s ‘Wow, why didn’t you say anything sooner?’”

There is no formula that says “This is your stride, this is your weight, here’s your best fit.” Blade matching is still trial, error and feel.

Some players are “box guys,” as in: Pull the skates out of the box, throw them on the sharpener and tally-ho. Brendan Gallagher is one. Well, after a fashion. He went to a custom profile a couple of seasons ago – the same year his edge-work made a leap forward and he scored 30 goals, although correlation does not imply causation. Anyway, he only needed to try the configuration for one lap of the ice before pronouncing it perfect and wearing the blades in a game that night.

At this year’s Canadiens camp, free agent signee Riley Barber didn’t even need to take a twirl to test his new steel; he just stood on the ice, shifted his weight around and flashed the thumbs up.

Occasionally there are unusual requests. In his playing days Steve Ott, now an assistant coach with the St. Louis Blues, preferred the so-called ‘ski boot fit’ – with a steep forward pitch to put his weight on his toes.

Brassard has also contemplated adding pitch, but as of this writing remains undecided.

Sometimes you have to sample a bunch of bowls of porridge to find the one that’s just right.

There are many players who simply don’t realize all that’s available to them.

Several teams, including Montreal, educate their prospects on the different equipment options as soon as they join the organization.

Langlois said the younger players tend to be more in tune with what’s happening on the cutting edge (sorry – not sorry).

The Canadiens’ Josh Brook did some blade testing in his first development camp two summers ago, then went back to the WHL and tore it to shreds in his draft plus one year.

This past June, winger Nick Suzuki got a new profile that he says has made him feel much more stable and in control of his pivots and pushes.

Then you have 2019 seventh-round draft choice Rafael Harvey-Pinard, a Memorial Cup winner who showed up to development camp on blades so gruesome they should carry a parental advisory.

“Sometimes guys turn up with blades, I mean … I don’t want to throw any stones here, but you know what I mean,” Langlois said.

With new blades, Harvey-Pinard showed well in rookie camp earlier this month. When he was returned to junior, he received a list of goals and expectations; oh, and Langlois’ number and some extra steel.

“We want to ensure a certain level of upkeep during the year. The guys we’ve drafted need blades? I send them some blades,” Langlois said. “It keeps our youngsters on a solid base, they don’t show up with stuff that looks like a banana. It’s important. You turn pro, where you can always produce and maintain equipment that is good as new, and guys have trouble adjusting because they’re used to the dregs. And once they get the feeling, wow. They don’t want anything else.”

(The Athletic’s Joe Yerdon contributed additional reporting to this story)

(Top photo: Brett Holmes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)