There are number of new challenges facing Braden Holtby this season. With no Philipp Grubauer as backup, Holtby will try to carry this team despite a lengthy postseason and short offseason. He will be trying to forget his struggles from last year and return to the consistent, dominant goalie he has been for much of his career.
For Pheonix Copley, he will be adjusting to his first season as a full-time NHL backup.
And both goalies will also have to overcome those challenges all while adjusting to new pads thanks to the NHL.
In the NHL’s constant search for more offense, the latest moves the league has made has been to make the pads for goalies smaller. In the 2016-17 season, the league streamlined new tighter, form-fitting goalie pants. This year, the target is the upper-body as chest and arm pads are being streamlined as well.
“It’s been a bit of a challenge,” Holtby told NBC Sports Washington. “Not so much the size, it’s just you use a certain model for years, you get used to it, used to the way it moves and the way that you sit in your stance with it. When you’re forced into something else, it’s different.”
“It was stiff and weird at first,” Copley said. “The arms sit a little bit higher I find so it kind of felt like my arms were riding up high and making the chest protector ride up higher.”
The new pads are smaller in the shoulders, elbows, biceps and forearms.
The first fear when making pads smaller is safety, but so far the Caps netminders have not found that to be an issue.
“Protection wise, it was better than my other one to be honest,” Copley. “So protection wise, it’s good. It was pretty stiff at first, but it was like any other new piece of equipment. It’s breaking in and starting to feel normal.”
Ironically for Holtby, however, while the pads are meant to be smaller, it did not turn out that way for him.
“Just the chest pad in general,” he said, “The one that they came up with, it’s one model for everyone and the shoulders are up way higher than my old ones were so I was having trouble with vision and those things, just moving my head. It got bigger on me instead of smaller.”
The difference in padding has been a major adjustment for Holtby.
One of Holtby’s major strengths has been rebound control. He is very good at positioning himself in a way that he can direct rebounds out of danger when he gives them up. He was able to do that in part because of the familiarity and comfort he had with his old chest protector.
That familiarity is now gone.
“The one I used before didn’t have much for padding or anything,” he said, “It was pretty soft and tried to just break it down as much as I could so that things didn’t bounce off me so now it’s, they tried to beef up the protection I guess by adjusting to the smaller size. That was one of the complaints from guys around the league so it’s kind of the opposite with me, not feeling the puck as much when it hits me and that’s a little different. It just comes with time breaking something in.”
Time Holtby has gotten in training camp and preseason.
Still, just how goalies are able to adjust at the start of the season is something that bears watching, though Holtby is skeptical it will have any real effect on the game at all.
“There’s not many technology saves anymore with gear,” he said. “You have to get some sort of your body behind it. Guys shoot too hard it goes right through if you just have equipment. I think us goalies know that. I think general managers of the league or whoever is dealing with that might not understand the position as much so I don’t think it’s going to create more goals.”
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