How does a goalie coach help your team? I don’t know, so I tried to find the answer.

Ron Tugnutt was drafted by the Quebec Nordiques in the 4th round of the 1986 NHL entry draft. He played in the NHL from 1988 to 2004 for Quebec, Edmonton, Anaheim, Montreal, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Dallas.

He also spent time in the AHL. He has had multiple goalie coaches in his career, he has been a goalie consultant for Hockey Canada and he’s been a goalie coach in the OHL.

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Tugnutt shed some light on what exactly a goalie coach does.

Gregor:

When you look at the success of a goalie, how much of it really comes down to

the goalie coach in your mind?

Tugnutt: I don’t think that there is a lot.

I think that the goaltending coach’s job is to prepare the goalie and be aware

of any weaknesses that might be creeping into his game. I think that if he’s

giving up certain goals that are becoming frequent or an issue then that’s

something that you (goalie coach) have to take a look at and say is there

something that we can do different. But overall, I can tell you that the most important

thing for a goalie is confidence. And if he’s confident then that will

show in his game and if he’s not, then that will show in his game also.



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Gregor: How do you maintain or instil confidence in the goalie as a coach?

Tugnutt: I know a lot of goalie coaches

that I’ve had and stuff that I’ve used is just positive feedback. You use

video, show the goalie making good saves, just basically at the end of the day

being positive.

It’s tough to get yourself up and off of

your feet when you don’t feel confident and you don’t feel you can make a save

and be difference maker for your team.

And so the idea is that you try to maybe fool them a little bit. You say

that you are one big save away from turning this whole thing around. And then

maybe you show some video, some of his big saves and things that he’s done.

Using not lucky saves, but saves that you say ‘that’s a great read, that’s what

we’re talking about’ and just keep pounding positive stuff in rather than ‘he

beat me here,’ ‘they keep doing this’ because once you keep banging bad goals

or bad saves, then it’s tough to overcome mentally.

Gregor:

So, you might make one little tweak in his game, but it’s not like when you meet

a new goalie and suddenly alter his entire game?

Tugnutt: No. When I was with the World

Junior program and I was getting everybody else’s goalies and it got to the

point where I knew after watching him for a couple of skates, I knew which goalie coach he worked with. I started

knowing who their goalie coach was from their style of play.

For me, you said it right off of the start

of the show, just stop the puck. And as the goalie coach, I was always that’s

it, stop the puck. And there’s the old saying there’s more than one way to skin

a cat. And the bottom line is that some goalies do things differently. You

can’t be so caught up in saying you have to do it this way all of the time. If

you’re a goalies coach that says it has to be this way all of the time, then I

think that you are making a mistake.

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Conversations are like this: ”You know something, that works for you, I’m not a

big advocate of that, I’m not really a big fan of it, but you want to know

something, if it works for you and

you’ve got to keep using it.”

You

have to be able to do that as a goalie coach instead of saying ‘I know you made

the save but that’s not the way that you’re supposed to do it’. No, the bottom

line is that it’s working, you use it. If it’s not working then you have to

look at something else to make a change to fix it.



NEW GOALIE COACH

Gregor: Ron, when you got traded what was the first

conversation you had with the goalie coach when you arrived to a new team?

Tugnutt: Well you know the hardest one for

me would have been going to Montreal, because

when I got traded to Montreal

I was more of your… I was more of like Mike Palmateer, kind of crazy, out of

control, two pad stacks, and that’s the way that I played.

I went to Montreal and of course Francois

Allaire was there and his protégé was Patrick Roy, who was the ultimate

fundamentally, get in the middle of the net and be big goalie. He tried to incorporate

some of that with me. Francois was a very open man and we had a great

conversation with him and I said, ‘Francois I’m not six foot two, I’m five ten

and I can’t just go down on my knees and expect to stop everything. They’ll

pick me apart upstairs.’ So he was great, he was open. He said, ‘Alright, well

this is what I want from you. When they shoot I want you in the middle of the

net.’ I said ‘no problem.’

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So my game changed to instead of sliding

out of the net all of the time, two pad stack, all I focused on was being in the middle of the net when they

shot which means they have to make good shots to beat [me]. That was a great

learning thing for me to get that from him because moving forward that was

probably my saving grace in my career, because the game has changed so much

from the goalie standpoint.

Gregor:

He didn’t try to change your style, in a sense, because he didn’t want you to

be a butterfly goalie, but you did have to be less active in goal, so there is still a

lot of onus on the goaltender to trust his new goalie coach and listen to what

he says?

Tugnutt: Yes and he said, ‘You can do what

you want. You can stop the puck however you want, but this is what I want from

you.’ So my goal was to do that and make my saves and by the end of it, it was

kind of like, yeah that’s pretty good.

At the end of the day you have to make more

saves than the guy at the other end of the ice and you know what the hard part

is – I know that they are going through it in Edmonton right now — it just seems that

nothing can go right for those poor guys. I was there in the early years with Quebec, fighting through

every game saying nothing’s ever going to go right and it’s hard to come out of

that. But as I keep saying, you’ve got to stay positive and I’m one big save

away. I’m one big save away from turning this thing around. And when that save

comes and the Oilers win the game and the reason why was that one big save, you

hope that that next day at practice you have a little air under your feet and

off you go.



ONE BIG SAVE

Gregor:

Did it turn that easy sometimes for you? You would make that one big save and

then the next day at practice you felt that much better?

Tugnutt: It does happen. It happens that

fast. It’s amazing, you win a game, you make the save, but the thing is that

you still have to win the game. So you make that save, you win the game,

everybody is excited, everybody is happy, you’re feeling good about yourself

again, you’re feeling you can make those saves and that’s the way it turns.

And the other thing too is whether you like

it or not, your team has to help you too. There has to be some help. Maybe

there’s an open net and your defenceman flies across and stops the open net,

maybe that’s what turns it. But you can’t solely just say the reason is just

strictly goaltending. You need help from your teammates as well.

Gregor: I want to go back to your original point about the confidence factor.

A lot of that will come from the goalie himself. When you have a guy who is struggling

handling the puck, do you then as a goalie coach do you say, ‘for now less is

more, just stay in the net’ or do you want the guy to stay aggressive and make

better puck handling decisions?

Tugnutt: Well, some guys build off of puck

handling. Some goalies, they’re game improves by making good plays with the

puck. Saying that, in today’s game there is so much video on other teams. OK

this is Ben Scrivens going behind the net, he always goes up the strong side so

the forecheck reads that and they prepare for that.

So to answer your question, if it’s

becoming an issue, the defense aren’t going to like it, but my poor teammates

in Dallas when I was in Dallas and Marty Turco was my partner, they knew when I

was playing it was going to be a different game. [Laughs] And so they knew they

were coming back for pucks, they knew they were going to get hit and maybe that’s

why they wanted me out of the game so quickly so they could get Marty back in. (laughs

again)

But no, at the end, if you’re not good at

it, there’s nothing worse than a goalie that thinks he’s good at it, and isn’t.

So sometimes maybe the easy play is you go back and you set the puck behind the

net and you get the heck out of the way. Maybe you simplify it. I’m not sure exactly

what the coaching staff in Edmonton

is saying. They likely are thinking: ‘Do we want our D to post in the corners, do

we want this do we want that?’ And then it’s just all about execution and making

the play. But if you’re (goalie) going to make the play, it’s got to be firm

though. You can’t be like ‘I hope, I hope.’ If you’re doing that you’re making

the wrong thing. It’s better to just say in the net.

Gregor:

How does the role of the goalie coach work in the NHL?

Tugnutt: Goaltending is so mental. It’s

nice to have somebody there that has maybe gone through it or can help from

that standpoint to realize what you need and to get you where you have to be.

But I think the goalie coach today in the National Hockey League is kind of the

middle guy between the coaches and the goalie.

Not a lot of coaches really want to

associate themselves with the goalies and talk to them, because they’re just

like what you said — ‘we just want you to stop the puck, that’s all we care

about’. So the guy in the middle becomes the goalie coach who has to either

defend or attack his own goalie based on how he is performing. So you might get

some situations where a goalie coach might say ‘he’s doing nothing wrong, he

had a good game today.’

[And the coach says] ‘Well we lost 5-4.’

‘He had a good game today. I have no issues

with the goals.’

And then he’s the guy arguing with the

coach rather than the goalie himself. So instead of the goalie hearing a coach

hating his game, hating the way that he’s playing, the goalie coach is taking

that and now he’s going to try and get

that guy going without him knowing that the coach basically has no confidence

in him.

Gregor:

Can you build a goalie’s confidence in practice or does it have to come in a game?

Tugnutt: It eventually comes through the

game, but what I like to do is when the confidence is struggling is to do high

percentage saves, saves that you would expect the goalie to make all of the

time. Do drills around that.

The two key areas that I look for with

goalies when I’m worried about confidence is do they know were the puck is all

of the time? And if they don’t know where the puck is all of the time that

tells me they’re not seeing it, that tells me they’re not seeing it come off of

the blade, and they’re not tracking it. And by tracking it I mean as it hits the

body, you see it hit you, you see it leave the body and I’m always looking to

see if my guys see the puck hit them and see it leave their body.

That’s the one area I always focused on is

make sure you always see the puck hit the body. And if

you do that sometimes you’re going to be slow, sometimes your eyes aren’t as

fast, but eventually you catch up to it and that’s where you have to get to.

So

to lead back to what you said, the longer shots, watch it into the body, watch

it go into the corner and then they move a little bit closer, same thing, same

thing, and the whole idea is all of a sudden they are taking fifteen foot shots

and you’re watching your goalie follow it right into his blocker, into the

corner and you go ‘OK he’s seeing it well now. ‘

WRAP UP…

It is difficult to get an exact read on how much of an impact, positively or negatively, a goalie coach is having on his goalies. I agree with Tugnutt, that ultimately it comes down to stopping pucks and over the past few seasons that hasn’t happened in Edmonton.

The funny thing is that Devan Dubnyk had a .920sv% in 2013 with Freddy Chabot, but last year he only had a .894sv% under Chabot. Did the goalie coach teach him different things? Nope, but Dubnyk did admit he lost confidence early in the season and he couldn’t regain it. Tugnutt mentioned the most important job of a goalie coach is to build that confidence.

This year in Arizona Dubnyk has a .926sv% and everyone says it is solely due to Sean Burke. Burke has helped him no doubt, but then why does Mike Smith have an ugly .893sv%? He is also working with Burke. Smith has lost his confidence this year and he’s struggling to find it.

The Oilers needed to make a goaltending change because they’d have horrible results from numerous goalies during the previous five seasons, but Chabot shouldn’t take all the blame. The goalies need to play better and the team needs to play better in front of them.

The biggest challenge for new goalie coach Dustin Schwartz will be trying to help Viktor Fasth and Ben Scrivens regain their confidence. And when they do, all three of them will try and maintain it. The team could help out as well, by not allowing point blank shots night after night.



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