Three square inches

AMARILLO, Texas –– To the casual fan who comes to the arena to sip a brew, inhale a hot dog and enjoy a splendid brouhaha, it’s the goaltenders fault his team won’t earn a point in the standings tonight. Of course, we self-proclaimed hockey aficianados know the key to stopping goals lies in great defensemen and relentless back checking. It is up to the defensemen to insure that a “no parking sign” is placed in front of the net . . . it is the defenseman’s duty to see that the large-butted screen does not occur. It is their duty to insure that the sneaky forward doesn’t charge the net to flip a quick one-timer behind the goalie. Visualize this. The standard ice hockey puck is 1 inch thick (25.4 mm) and 3 inches in diameter (76.2 mm)… a small hole –– just slightly larger than 1 inch by 3 inches –– is all that is needed to slip a score past any netminder. Considering the hockey net is 48 inches by 60 inches, that is 20 rows of pucks stacked 48 high! For those of you who are slow to access your calculator on your smartphone, that comes 960 possible holes that a goalie has to cover.
Of course, few forwards seem to have the patience needed to stack 960 pucks in front of the net, so they tend to rely upon the speed and power of their 100 mph slapshot to forcefully pierce that one tiny, uncovered hole. According Ken Dryden, perhaps one of the greatest goalies to play the game, covering the hole is sometimes simply not a physical reality. “Hull’s slapshot has been clocked at just under one hundred twenty miles per hour,” says Dryden. “If he blasts at my upper left-hand corner from our blueline and my glove is two feet below the point of entry, it is quite impossible to stop it. Why? It takes less than half a second for the puck to travel from stick to nets, which is less time than is required for my brain computer to decide what to do, to tell my glove hand to lift and to have the glove lift.” And this does not even take into account the clever little twists of a well placed wrister or the surprise of a deviously-flipped backhand. The task of a hockey goalie is definitely a daunting one. Amarillo’s netminder, Mike Brown, a former Boston Bruins draft pick,  stands third overall in the CHL with 916 saves! Yet he also leads the CHL with 16 losses. In anyone’s stats file that converts into way too many shots being fired on goal. Forecheck, backcheck… some element is missing in the Gorillas defensive play. Finnish netminder Tuomas Lohtander, has seen a hot glove in early January turn limp with the last five games counted as losses, and his save percentage dropping below .900. Outside the net, half of Gorilla defensemen are sporting double digit negative plus/minus ratings and four of the forwards fare no better. Amarillo’s penalty kill record is a hefty 50 PPGA… worst in the league. With only a dozen games left in the regular season, the Gorillas playoff hopes look as promising as a penlight in a coal mine, and the winning streak that never came again after a stellar start in October has reduced the Jungle to a sea of empty blue seats. In fact, Amarillo could well be considered the Heartbreak Kids of the CHL. Twenty five of their 33 losses have come by one point, with 8 of those in overtime. They are an exciting team to watch, a dangerous team to play against and usually in the mix until the very end. But it all boils down to those three square inches.
Contact Rushe.Hudsopn@prohockeynews.com