What made Hasek so good in his prime?

[SeanMoneyHands]

Prime would be his Sabres days. Was it his althetism? His ability to read plays before they happened? Getting into players heads?

From watching him in his prime, the guy did not have a single weakness. Was impossible to score on five hole and in the bottom half of the net. Even top half of the net, so many of his highlight reel saves he would stack the pads or do his vintage Hasek "down but not out" saves.

He was great laterally moving post to post. He was never beat on wrap arounds. Glove hand seemed really good but not on Patrick Roy's or Marty Broduers level.

 

[Albatros]

His methods were his own and as such tough to figure out. In Buffalo the goalie coach was there just to work on his weaknesses like initially the glove, and didn't touch his goaltending beyond that.

 

[VanIslander]

He could stop any shot he saw coming.

He loathed screened shots, shouting at his dmen to check a guy or gtfootw. No blocked shots, no deflections ŵere wanted.

Notice how he stops a record 70 consecutive playoff shots in his first postseason in Buffalo:



This is during the first of 6 consecutive NHL leading save % seasons, before all his Vezinas (after his multiple stonings of Lemieux the postseason before), at age 29 getting his first full year start in Buffalo in the year 1994,... the great 1980's Czechoslovakian goalie of 1984 and 1987 Canada Cups.

Those 70 shots show you a lot of his reflexes, his ability to anticipate. It is not wild, it's educated reflexive. He is the Gretzky of goalies in term of reading the play.

He is a top-10 all-time hockey player unless you overvalue NHL dynasty player contributions.

 

[Matsun]

Pure speculation here- as fans we can just see things like size, strength, skating and skill so maybe Hasek had the best vision among goalies or something like that. Dr. Bill Harrison has tested vision among baseball players since the 70s and he tested Barry Bonds way back in 86 and Bonds preformed the best on his tests. The Baseball Vision Of Barry Bonds

They do a bunch of tests on NFL prospects and Justin Jefferson scored insane on those and he became a superstar.

How biometric data proved Vikings’ Justin Jefferson was a unicorn: ‘Holy … he is off the charts’

Jefferson was the fifth receiver taken in the 2020 draft, but his former LSU trainer had a hunch — and a bunch of numbers to back it up.

www.nytimes.com

Gretzky also had some insane results in things that we as fans can't really make out.


I think since Hasek is so unique- both in dominance and playstyle, that maybe he had a hidden off the chart athletic skill? Maybe he has great vision that makes it really easy for him to track the puck?

As I said, pure speculation.

 

[VanIslander]

Why the heck did he rush the breakaway shooter?

Because he could react quicker in a tight window and he knew it.

Billy the Kid had nothing on him.

I was watching LIVE:

 

[NyQuil]

He only played a single season in Ottawa but you can make the case that he was Ottawa’s best goalie in their history.

Fearless, always challenging the shooter, not intimidated by high shot counts, surprisingly physical and able to stand his ground in his crease.

Excellent on breakaways.

Ottawa played high event hockey that year because they could - Hasek would make the saves.

Obviously the groin injury at the Olympics ended his run, and it certainly makes you wonder if they’d have made it further than with Emery in net.

Emery was like a Stolarz - big and good at making the first stop but then the team had to clear the rebounds.

Hasek could make that 2nd, 3rd or even 4th save because he was like an acrobat in the crease and he never gave up on a scoring chance no matter how out of position he appeared.

He was likely past his prime with Ottawa but still incredibly good.

 

[Overrated]

He was a natural prodigy.

In a documentary about him he said:
"As a tiny kid it never came across my mind to take a ball and kick it to score a goal or even a tennis ball or a puck and shoot it. I would always go up to my grandpa and tell him here you've got a ball grandpa shoot at me! The same with my dad. It didn't come across my mind to score goals but I always wanted to go stand in the goal and catch something."

 

[JackSlater]

It's hard to analyze goaltending. From goaltenders I've seen, Hasek was the smartest. Very flexible, great instincts, and brave enough to follow his instincts or stick to his process even though it was unorthodox. There is no goaltender I'd rather have on a breakaway. Like everyone else, the team in front of him impacted his effectiveness. Buffalo by the late 90s built its style of play around giving Hasek what he wanted, which as noted already was to keep him unscreened and clean up any rebounds that might escape. He rewarded them for that.

The OP says that Hasek didn't have a weakness and that's not totally true. Not a good puck handler, and there were goalies who handled traffic in front of the net better than Hasek did. His strengths compensated though to the point where he was the best ever.

 

[The Macho Man]

Insane reflexes and great intuitive grasp at what the puck was looking at.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

His methods were his own and as such tough to figure out. In Buffalo the goalie coach was there just to work on his weaknesses like initially the glove, and didn't touch his goaltending beyond that.

Mitch Korn did more than this as the Sabres’ goalie coach. He didn’t try to mold Hasek to be like other huskies, but he did more than ameliorate weaknesses.

 

[VanIslander]

What made him so good in his prime?

He holds the NHL record for career-long best save percentage average.

That was a wall-to-wall solid 16 year NHL career into his forties cuz he was a Czechoslovakian star for nine years beforehand.

Imagine if now 26-year-old Cale Makar didn't get a chance to start his NHL career until next September (the age of Hasek's NHL debut).

Hasek could have been carved on the Mount Rushmore of hockey.

 

[Hanji]

His knowledge of angles was off the charts, as was his Gretzky-like vision and anticipation.
This, coupled with insane athleticism, allowed him to cheat/overcommit while still having the ability to recover.
Everything was calculated.

 

[tabness]

not gonna be a popular take but i think some of it was sheer luck

(and yes he was lucky for a long time)

 

[Albatros]

not gonna be a popular take but i think some of it was sheer luck

(and yes he was lucky for a long time)

Maybe initially it was, but once he learned to read his opponents in North America right it became all calculated. The adjustment period was at most three seasons.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

It’s not an unpopular opinion to say that Hasek was lucky - you used to hear it all the time.

It’s just a bad - and mathematically impossible - opinion.

If your two options are “Hasek understood something about goaltending that was ahead of its time and had the athletic ability to pull it off” and “Hasek was lucky for the course of a long professional career”, you’re really taking the latter?

 

[Hanji]

not gonna be a popular take but i think some of it was sheer luck

(and yes he was lucky for a long time)

A handful of crazy youtube highlight saves could be attributed to luck, but 6 Vezinas and 2 Harts? As previously stated, it’s mathematically impossible for his sustained dominance to be credited to luck.

 

[tabness]

It’s not an unpopular opinion to say that Hasek was lucky - you used to hear it all the time.

It’s just a bad - and mathematically impossible - opinion.

If your two options are “Hasek understood something about goaltending that was ahead of its time and had the athletic ability to pull it off” and “Hasek was lucky for the course of a long professional career”, you’re really taking the latter?

yeah, it was a common refrain early on that understandably quieted down as Hasek sustained great stats and play, so it's become unpopular, but I still happen to think a significant part of his success is just luck, and he just continued to have it for a long time

not to say anything against his athleticism which was demonstrably top notch, nor his smarts or compete, which are fairly easily inferred, you gotta be good to be lucky for a long time

also, if we gonna be technical, it's just mathematically improbable

 

[Bear of Bad News]

It’s also technically “improbable” that two fairly shuffled decks of cards have been shuffled identically over the course of history. It’s never happened.

I’m using “impossible” in common parlance - Hasek was not chronically lucky.

 

[Plural]

I don't really see how one could be consistently so lucky, for 16 years, that you not only carve a great pro-athlete career out if it but are one if not the best ever in your position.

Hasek might have been the luckiest goalie ever. No way of knowing. But even if he was, he is still one of the absolute best goalies in hockey history. He also would be the same even if he was the unluckiest goalie in the history of the game (excluding injuries obviously).

There has never been a professional player, in any major sports, ever, who turned from mid-level amateur to high end pro (in hockey's case, NHL level) by luck. Let alone an all-time great who owes his career to luck. That's like saying Roger Federer was a good player, but his status as top-3 player all-time is largely due to him getting lucky bounces.

 

[Albatros]

There has never been a professional player, in any major sports, ever, who turned from mid-level amateur to high end pro (in hockey's case, NHL level) by luck.

Not that I disagree but that reminded me of Steve Penney.

 

[The Panther]

As a kid, I saw Hašek at the 1987 Canada Cup and I suppose a lot of older folks saw him at the 1984 Canada Cup and otherwise.

I recall him doing well in his game vs. Canada in '87 (and taking a sucker punch to the head from Claude Lemieux for his efforts), but I never heard the narrative of him being "the best goalie in Europe" or whatever. Most of this I chalk up the still-infancy period of North American hockey's awareness of European-based players (outside of the Soviet stars), but I also wonder: How big was Hašek's rep to those who followed European hockey during the 1980s?

Hašek was beaten at best-on-best / NHL level for goals by both Mike Bossy and Patrick Kane... I wonder how many goalies that applies to....?

 

[VanIslander]

There has never been a professional player, in any major sports, ever, who turned from mid-level amateur to high end pro (in hockey's case, NHL level) by luck. Let alone an all-time great who owes his career to luck.

That's like saying Roger Federer was a good player, but his status as top-3 player all-time is largely due to him getting lucky bounces.

I was a young man in the 1990s and thought Hasek lucky and Federer good, but not great. I didn't identify any known typical skill that either player had.

But game after game after game, their ability to win at the margins was incredible. "Luck" is often our response to play we don't understand.

 

[tabness]

It’s also technically “improbable” that two fairly shuffled decks of cards have been shuffled identically over the course of history. It’s never happened.

I’m using “impossible” in common parlance - Hasek was not chronically lucky.

I don't know if you really want to start going into anecdotes of unlikely occurrences much (let's put aside philosophy of probability stuff for a second as I'm with fate/destiny on a metaphysical level anyway).

Plenty of quite improbable things have happened, including in sports, perhaps even more improbable than luck playing a significant factor in the career of a guy, who otherwise many would have figured wouldn't be as successful due to certain weaknesses in his game. There have been other goalies with incredible reflexes and flexibility and great compete and so on. None of them seem to have had the success that Hasek did, and interestingly, as far as I'm aware, Hasek is not taken as a reference model for goalies holistically, or at the very least not as much as some of his contemporaries.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

I coached under Mitch Korn and I’ve successfully coached key elements of Hasek’s technique to many goaltenders including myself.

It’s not luck.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

I don’t often make strong opinions in this subforum because I know I’ve got more to learn than to offer in most cases here.

This is my wheelhouse.