Tag: goalie

What's a goalie? Why are they so crazy?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people say goalies are crazy? What’s a goalie anyway?

Thanks,
Jean

Dear Jean,

When I was in middle school, I discovered ice hockey. I remember lying on my bed and watching games on a little square television at my Dad’s house. Even back then, I felt compelled to jot down interesting things I heard, as if I was preparing to write a blog, despite this being years before blogs existed and decades before I started Dear Sports Fan. I still have some of the quotes I wrote down. One of them was about goalies:

Some people say 90% of goaltending is mental. I say 90% of goaltenders are mental!

I’m not positive who said that but it’s a safe bet that it was John Davidson, a former NHL goalie who was then the color commentator for the New York Rangers. He and partner Sam Rosen were definitely the most common hockey voices in my early memories of the sport. Goaltenders or goalies are frequently described as being a little bit crazy. It’s unclear whether the position attracts players who are a little bit… different or whether the position takes normal people and twists them. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both. In order to appreciate the colorful nature of goalies, it’s important to understand what the position entails.

The position of goaltender exists in many sports: soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, team handball, and water polo. In each sport, the goalie is the most specialized position. She exists solely to do whatever she can to prevent the other team from scoring. Usually the goalie is granted special privileges in order to help them in their task. The most dramatic of those is in soccer where the goalie is the only player who can use his hands. In ice hockey, the goalie gets to wear thick leg pads, a large chest protector, a catching glove on one hand and a blocker and wide stick in the other. An ice hockey goalie also has special rules which apply only to her, including protection against being hit. Lacrosse goalies are allowed to have sticks with much larger heads than other players to make it easier to block shots with them. Water polo goalies are allowed to touch the ball with two hands and even touch the bottom of the pool.

You might think all those extra privileges make goalie the easiest position to play. Not true! The extra privileges of the goalie in most sports are a recognition of how difficult their job is. The margin of error for goalies in lower scoring sports (which is most goalies because, not coincidentally, there’s a strong correlation between having a goalie and having a low-scoring sport) is tiny and the consequences for error are enormous. Take poor Robert Green, for instance. In 2010 he was one of the best 40 people in the entire world at his profession yet all he will be remembered for (literally, it’s going to be the first line of his obituary one day) will be this momentary lapse against the United States in the World Cup. Hockey goalies who save 90% of the shots they face are probably not going to last long in the NHL where the best goalies save over 92.5% of the shots they face. Compare that to a non-goalie who scores on 20% of the shots he takes and is celebrated as an extraordinary goal-scorer. Even in a relatively high scoring sport like team handball, where, according to the New York Times, a goalie “can allow as many as 30 goals and still be thought to have had a good game” being a goalie comes with its down-side. Goalies are so frequently injured by shots that the international federation in charge of the sport is considering changing its rules to reduce injuries.

The challenges and pressure that goalies face seems to attract or create two types of people: those who compensate through obsessive behavior and those who compensate through aberrant behavior. Almost all goalies are one of the two types, some are both. Hockeygrrl lists some of the more well-known obsessive behavior in her post about hockey goalies, including Patrick Roy’s refusal to let anything, even ice shavings into his net, Henrik Lundqvist’s ritual of tapping the wall the same number of periods he’s played so far in the game, and my new favorite, Jocelyn Thibault’s tradition of pouring “water over his head precisely six-and-a-half minutes before a game began.” For the more far-out their behavior on the other side of the spectrum, see Colombian soccer goalie Rene Higuita, who was literally nicknamed “the lunatic” and hockey goalie Ilya Bryzgalov who once responded to a question about the offensive threats on an opposing team by saying that he was “only afraid of [a] bear.”

No matter how you cut it, goalies are some of the most important and most colorful people in sports.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is pulling the goalie in hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is pulling the goalie in hockey? When and why would a team pull their goalie? Pull him where?

Thanks,
Wayne

Dear Wayne,

A hockey team is said to be pulling their goalie when they substitute their goalie for a regular player. It’s the ultimate move of desperation. It’s a last gasp attempt to win a game. It’s a high-stakes maneuver that can end in disaster or triumph. It takes advantage of what feels like a loophole in the rules of hockey. Here’s what it means and how it works.

How does pulling a goalie work?

Here’s the thing about hockey. Teams aren’t ever actually required to have a goalie on the ice. They could, if they choose to do it, have six regular players on the ice and no goalie the whole time. They’d probably lose 600 to four but they wouldn’t be doing anything illegal. Tradition and sense suggest that teams should have five regular skaters on the ice and one extra player who specializes in preventing the opposing team’s shots from reaching the net. That player is called the goalie and he or she is allowed to wear specialized equipment including a face-mask and super-sized pads. In hockey, substitutions can and do happen any time during the game. Teams don’t have to wait for stoppages in the game to make substitutions like they do in other sports. When a hockey player is tired, he signals to his bench and skates over to it. He climbs onto the bench as another player leaps over the boards and onto the ice to replace him. When a team decides to substitute a regular player for a goalie, it works the same way. The goalie skates to the bench and a regular player replaces him. As with all substitutions, but even more so, the team making the substitution tries to do it at a safe time — when they have possession of the puck and are either in the other team’s end of the rink or headed that way.

Why do teams pull their goalies? And when?

Removing your goalie from the rink seems like a completely crazy thing to do. Good goalies save around 90% of shots on goal, so playing without a goalie makes the opposing team’s shots something like ten times more likely to go into your goal. Offsetting that advantage you’re giving to the other team voluntarily is the advantage you get from having one extra attacking player on the ice. How can we quantify that advantage? Well, playing six vs. five is not so different from playing five vs. four which happens a handful of times each game when a team has a power play. (A power play happens when a player on one team is assessed a penalty and has to sit out for two minutes while her team plays with only four players.) The very best power plays score around 20% of the time. Six vs. five is slightly less effective than five vs. four, so let’s say that teams that pull their goalies increase their likelihood of scoring by 15% per every two minutes they play that way.

Teams usually pull their goalie only if they are down by one or two goals. There’s no reason to pull a goalie if the game is tied or your team is winning and a deficit larger than two goals is too big to make it worthwhile. (One exception to this would be in the playoffs if a team is going to be eliminated by losing the game. In that case, they might pull their goalie down by more than two because… why the heck not?) The exact timing is dependent on where the puck is and who has it but is also up to the coach and may vary quite a bit depending on his or her strategy. Most frequently teams down one goal like to pull their goalies with about a minute and fifteen seconds left while teams down two goals might do it ten or fifteen seconds earlier. On rare occasions, a team might pull their goalie even when it’s not close to the end of the game. There’s an interesting but fairly unusual idea that if you have a five on three power play (the opponent had two players take penalties within a couple of minutes of each other,) pulling the goalie to make it a six on three power play increases the team’s chance of scoring without a significant risk of giving up a goal because the three defenders are so outnumbered.

Does it ever work?

Yes! It does! It’s hard to find statistics about these situations but a 2013 Boston Globe article by John Powers claims that 30% of the goals scored when a net is empty are scored by the team with the empty net. That may not seem like a lot but if the alternative is almost sure defeat, it’s worth a chance. If you scratch a hockey fan, you’ll probably find a triumphant goalie pulling memory not too far below the surface. Mine is Max Talbot scoring in game five of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. The Penguins were facing elimination and down a goal, so they pulled their goalie. I was alone, in my living room, fidgeting uncontrollably and quietly freaking out. Here’s what happened:

The Penguins went on to lose the cup that year but I’ll never forget the unlikely triumph of that moment.

Pulling the goalie in non-sports contexts

As with many sports terms, pulling the goalie has been appropriated in popular culture and used in non-sports contexts. In one non-sports context in particular. As confirmed by Urban Dictionary, people use the phrase “pulling the goalie” to refer to the decision to stop using contraception. This is a light-hearted, funny analogy to use when the decision is taken by a couple with consent on both sides, but it has a darker meaning too. Some people use the phrase to refer to one partner making the decision to stop using contraceptives without telling the other person involved, particularly if getting pregnant is part of a strategy to keep a relationship alive. This is obviously despicable in all ways but it is a remarkably well build analogy to hockey.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer