With all due respect to the Hall of Fame goalie, Bernie Parent may have gotten this one wrong. At least that’s what John Stevenson thinks.

The Edmonton-based sports psychologist and goalie guru of Carter Hart since the Flyers netminder was playing youth hockey couldn’t help but laugh last season when he saw Parent quoted in stories talking up Hart’s anticipation of plays developing as “God-given talent.”

“It’s like…that’s the furthest from the truth,” Stevenson said by phone last week. “He’s really worked on that part of his game. It was kind of funny when I saw that because he does a lot of cognitive perceptual training and he’s done it for a long time.”

Stevenson has been working with the 21-year-old wunderkind for nearly half of Hart’s life. While he dislikes the term “vision training,” having his clients focus on what their eyes can do is part of Stevenson’s repertoire for the next advantage in goaltending.

Among the vision work this past offseason was Hart learning five-ball juggling.

Why five?

“Well, there’s five guys on the ice,” Stevenson explained. “Goalies, it’s multiple object processing and there’s a real neuroscience behind juggling.”

This past summer, Hart returned home to suburban Edmonton to work with Stevenson and his physical trainer to ensure his stellar rookie season was no one-hit wonder. When the Flyers visit the Oilers Wednesday, it will be Hart’s first stop back home and the first time Stevenson will see Hart play an NHL game live. Last season, Hart was recalled three days after the Flyers played in Edmonton.

“This might be a little bit nerve-wracking game for him because he’s got family and friends there but he’s just so good,” Stevenson said. “What he is so good at — and I really, really believe this — I have this little phrase that ‘You can have a thought and a feeling without that thought and feeling having you.’ He’s really, really good at stepping back, noticing what he’s thinking and feeling but not reacting and just being able to respond to that. He’s done a lot of work that way.”

That’s the explanation for why Hart never seems fazed by the goalie graveyard that Philadelphia has been, or expectations of having a career like Parent’s, or even carrying the Stanley Cup down Broad St. in a parade, which hasn’t been done since Parent raised the trophy in 1975.

While the mental game has been deeply rooted in Hart’s routine and maturity off the ice, he also worked this summer on other areas that Stevenson has identified like lifestyle, nutrition, hydration and sleep.

“I know when you’re playing almost every second day it can be a quick turnaround so some nights it was important to take care of your body and (James van Riemsdyk) helped me out a lot on that side of things,” Hart said last month. “I had a couple good chats with him, and it opened my eyes to a couple different things he does to stay fresh and ready to go every game and perform at his best.”

He also took up playing the guitar and finding a court for squash, which he started playing with New Jersey Devils goalie Mackenzie Blackwood when the two were teammates with Canada at the world championships in May.

There has not been much to dislike for the young goalie who is in his second year in the NHL, yet every time Flyers president and general manager Chuck Fletcher or new coach Alain Vigneault praises Hart, it seems to come with the qualifier that he’s still just a young player in the league.

There’s been a level of mindfulness that Hart has taken on, including when he missed nearly a month last season with a high ankle sprain, that has kept him grounded amid the outside expectations and throughout the highs and the lows of a long season.

“I think, through that, he was able to change the culture of the locker room,” Stevenson said. “He’s not doing it to impress guys. He’s doing it for himself. But if every time you look over, there he is on the ice, there he is in the gym doing ball drills, I think it just speaks volumes.

"I think he’s a quiet leader. He’s told me there’s times where he would have liked to have spoken up last year, but he just didn’t feel it was his place. It wasn’t the time. Maybe as he goes on in his career, I think that’s where, if he ever saw something he might say something. That might be the only other thing that might change over time.”

Otherwise, Stevenson said, Hart’s approach to the NHL and his game in and of itself hasn’t changed since last season.

It’s just a matter of keeping on the cutting edge and trying to out-prepare an opponent now that a book is out on him.

“I think teams now are scouting him,” Stevenson said. “They know who he is and where his weaknesses are. I said, ‘I think your decision making is going to be knowing where guys are, knowing which way their blades are, knowing their patterns.’ It’s the old famous Mitch Korn phrase: ‘Beer pong is a game of shots. Quarters is a game of a game of shots. But goaltending is not a game of shots.’ Goaltending is a game of situations and the best goalies in the world can read the situations and make the save selections accordingly. He’s doing a lot of that work. He’s doing the imagery. He’s doing the ball drills. He’s really working on that part of the game.”

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Dave Isaac joined the Courier-Post in April 2012 after covering the Flyers for three seasons elsewhere. Contact him on Twitter @davegisaac or by email at disaac@gannett.com.

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