Explaining Dominik Hasek

Popular View

The reason you probably clicked on this link is because the popular view of Dominik Hasek is that there is no explanation for the things that he did. His style was so unorthodox that it defied easy pattern recognition and left almost everyone who watched him scratching their heads. If you google "Dominik Hasek goalie style" you will get all sorts of explanations about how he was simply willing to stop the puck with any part of his body, or that he was extremely flexible (that he had a slinky for a spine), or that he was just really competitive or athletic, etc. See below for examples of these kinds of explanations from Wikipedia and Reddit. You may even believe one of these or have your own somewhat related theory.

Obviously, I disagree with all the conventional explanations and I hope to convince you by the end of this post that Hasek's style is as definable as the butterfly and you could even teach it!

Who Cares?

Before I get into a breakdown of Hasek's style I want to talk about why it matters. It matters because he was the greatest goaltender of all time (the G-GOAT?). You might think I'm exaggerating here but I'm not. I also grew up in the era of Roy, Brodeur and Hasek and when I was a child I thought Brodeur and Roy were better but I was a dumb kid and you probably were to! 

Also, the way people thought about goalie evaluations at that time are nowhere near where they are today. If you followed hockey like I did back then you would have actually cared and maybe even quoted how many wins a goalie had as some justification for how good they were. As if the team they played on wasn't a significant factor in that...if you look back now I think you'll find what I did when I looked a handful of years ago and realize that Hasek was the best ever and it's probably not close. I'm not going to get that deep into justifying this but my #1 argument for this is that he has the highest save percentage ever (https://www.hockey-reference.com/leaders/save_pct_career.html) and knowing what we know now about how your team impacts your save percentage (here's looking at you, anyone whose played for the Oilers) it's even more impressive because he played for some terrible Buffalo Sabres teams for a large part of his career. In fact, on his Wikipedia page it says: 

Hašek is the only goalie to face the most shots per 60 minutes and have the highest save percentage in one season. He did it twice while with the Sabres (1996 and 1998).

To put it another way, Dominik Hasek is the only goaltender to ever play on (probably) the worst team in the NHL during a season and record the highest save percentage (the best way of measuring goalie performance at that time) during that season. Oh and he did it twice. If we had Goals Saved Above Expected back then I am certain that there would have been no doubt he was the league's best and I probably wouldn't even have to try and explain it because we'd all just agree it's true.

Lastly, the real reason I care so much about this is because I find it absolutely insane that the greatest goaltender of all time played the game in a radically different way then everyone else and we all just shrugged and said "cool let's just keep playing the position the way these other guys do it". I literally can't think of another example where this has happened. I promise you that if someone invented a new baseball pitch and kept winning the Cy Young that we'd immediately have other pitchers trying to copy what he was doing. In the NFL when teams started winning with quarterbacks that threw the ball significantly more often the whole league changed gears and now it's the focus of the position. When Tiger Woods started winning Major golf tournaments by hitting the ball further than everyone else we started to see a lot more players trying to emulate him. You get the point. Ultimately, if someone does something new and has tremendous success people notice and try to copy it. It's why the phrase "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" exists. However, in this one strange case nothing changed.

The Snow Angel

Trigger Warning: This next part is going to get very technical.

From here on out I will not refer to Dominik Hasek's style as the "flop" or "scramble". Those terms come with too much baggage and I don't think they're an accurate description of what he actually did. Instead I would propose that we refer to the way Hasek played goal as "the Snow Angel".

After many hours of watching old Hasek highlights I believe the Snow Angel has two main approaches. One approach is what to do if a player is moving towards the goaltender's blocker side and the other is what to do if they are moving towards your glove side.

Blocker Side

When a player was starting to move towards Dominik Hasek's blocker side he would wait until that player got reasonably close and then he would move towards a split butterfly or paddle down position (as seen here with Mario Lemieux coming in on the breakaway). 

Most players seeing this will immediately spot the opportunity to simply deke around the goaltender who can no longer move his feet and score an easy goal. Hasek's answer to this however was part two of his approach: the sprawl. Basically, if a player tries to go to his backhand and around Hasek he pushes his paddle hand out and towards the shooter eventually lays down in a pad stack (please note that in this particular situation Lemieux simply opts to shoot but that won't work either as Hasek is well practiced at catching pucks while in this position and he makes a highlight reel glove save).

Although most goaltending styles will only have one primary position and then a couple secondary save approaches the Snow Angel actually has four unique positions on the blocker side. The 3rd in this progression is the one for which the position is named: the Snow Angel. What happens here is that from the pad stack if the shooter still has the puck and is still trying to beat the goaltender to the far post, Hasek will move from the pad stack to laying flat on his back and then reaching his glove hand back to that far post which of course prevents the shooter from tucking in a nice back hand deke.

Then in extreme cases if the player still has the puck and/or has found a way to backup in an attempt to elevate the puck over Hasek. Hasek will employ the final blocker side progression: the roll. This is extremely effective as while he lifts his legs to move them from his glove to blocker side he actually takes away a large portion of the upper part of the net as a bonus (and of course he's made numerous saves mid roll).

If you want to see all of this in sequence here is one of my favourite clips (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R1r4hvV3f4).

Glove Side

Thankfully the glove side progression is a little simpler with one primary move and one secondary. The primary glove side position is a half butterfly. Essentially Hasek takes away the bottom right part of the net with his pad but unlike traditional goalies he does not use his left pad in a similar way. Instead he keeps that pad directly under his body (we'll see why next).

If the player or the puck then makes its way back to the glove side Hasek simply takes away the bottom of the net on that side by moving into the snow angel position. 

Now you might be saying that these are cherry picked or only relate to a few specific saves but I think if you watch as many Hasek highlights as I have you will find that the core elements described above form the basis for how he played the position. If you want to do that for yourself here's a good place to get started (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBA_k1NSgnI&t=47s). I'll also note that there are some instances where the Snow Angel isn't as obvious or employed but that'll be true of any goaltender and any style. However, now that you know the basics of the Snow Angel I suspect that you will see those elements very frequently in Hasek clips.

Why It Works

Now that I have hopefully convinced you that Hasek did play a coherent style (the Snow Angel) I want to talk about why it works and why it would probably still work today.

The first reason I think it worked is that the primary focus of the Snow Angel and the Butterfly (the most common style today) was/is to take away the bottom portion of the net. Historically that is where most goals have been scored and it's still where most goals are scored today. So any style that doesn't focus on this (we're looking at you: Standup) simply won't measure up. Thankfully, the Snow Angel is absolutely focused on this.

The second reason is how it addresses one of the biggest challenges of being a goaltender: when the play goes "East-West" or side to side. Goaltenders want to make themselves appear larger by coming out of the net and closer to the shooters but the further we come out the harder it is to defend against the puck moving across the ice. The modern approach for small movements side to side is to stay in position and use the "shuffle" skating technique. If there's larger movements (like a pass) the approach is to use the skating technique known as the "t-push". In either case the idea is to stay on our feet and square to the puck until someone shoots it. The challenge however is that there are small moments when we are moving our feet that we aren't "set" and if a player shoots at the right time they can often score between our legs faster than we can get those legs onto the ice. Part of the genius with the Snow Angel is that after the shooter gets too close the goaltender stops moving his feet entirely and there is never a moment that the shooter can beat him along the ice.

While the Snow Angel addresses one of the core weaknesses of the Butterfly I know you're thinking that it does have weaknesses of its own and of course that's true. The most obvious of these is that once you go down (in either the split or half butterfly) the ultimate distance you can move through your flop, snow angel and roll progression is limited. If I'm still standing I can literally keep moving with the puck for any distance and I'm also well equipped to go the other way if that happens too! The other issue is that by going into the sprawl relatively early on the blocker side progression I start to give away the upper part of the net. In order to minimize issues with this anyone playing the Snow Angel needs to get the timing of this down and probably also needs to practice making glove saves while lying on their side.

The Best?

All together it's unfortunately impossible to conclude which goaltending style is better at this time. We have a large sample size of goaltenders who play a version of the butterfly and we could probably come up with some numbers about how that does on average but we've only ever had one Snow Angel. So while I hesitate to make sweeping conclusions with a sample size of one it is awfully interesting that the only one we've ever had just happens to be the best ever...