The NHL’s goalie injury epidemic: identifying the causes and solutions

Steve Valiquette’s NHL playing career was over. But it didn’t feel that way. Not according to the pain shooting through his body one day nine years ago when he was walking down the stairs at his house. All that coaching was doing a number on his body. All because of one particular technique he had to demo again and again.

Maybe it was all Sergei Bobrovsky’s fault.

Just kidding. He did nothing wrong in the 2012-13 season. Quite the opposite. He was so incredibly good for the Columbus Blue Jackets that he won the Vezina Trophy. One of the primary techniques behind the .932 save percentage he posted that season: the reverse VH, which he added to his game with help from Blue Jackets goalie coach Ian Clark. Whereas the traditional ‘VH’ technique had the goalie’s short-side pad and skate vertical when pressed up against the post on side-door plays, the reverse VH had the pad closest to the post flat and horizontal along the ice. The reverse VH rose in popularity after Bobrovsky was credited with executing it to perfection. It became a teaching craze at every level.

So there Valiquette was, teaching the reverse VH over and over in practices when he was working as the goaltending coach for the AHL’s Bridgeport Sound Tigers.

“I’m coaching it, and I’m wearing knee pads under my track suit, and I’m getting into that move every day, and now I’m walking down the stairs in my house sideways,” said Valiquette, now a New York Rangers analyst for MSG. “Because walking down the natural way, I felt a real impingement under my kneecaps, like my patellas were on fire.”

It was then that he realized innovation sometimes brought sacrifice along with it. The modern goaltender, armed with more access to research and analytics and data than any other generation ever had, has found the most effective ways to stop pucks. Techniques like the reverse VH are among several necessary strategies goalies use to adapt to an ever-changing game, which is faster than ever. But it’s also more gruelling than ever, and every portion of a netminder’s daily workload, from the drills to the techniques to the games, is taking a toll.

Just look at the NHL infirmary this season alone. Robin Lehner, Carey Price and Chris Driedger are sitting out altogether. Matt Murray went down after a single game. Then his new Toronto Maple Leafs teammate Ilya Samsonov did. The New Jersey Devils lost their full tandem in Mackenzie Blackwood and (briefly) Vitek Vanecek while third-string Jonathan Bernier is still working his way back from hip surgery and hasn’t played since December 2021. The Ottawa Senators had to use a waiver claim on Magnus Hellberg at one point with Cam Talbot and Anton Forsberg both hurt.

Don’t forget about Jake Oettinger, too. Or Jeremy Swayman. Or Frederik Andersen. Oh, Elvis Merzlikins just got hurt while I was working on this story. Can’t put any weight on his leg. While reviewing the final draft for this story the next morning? News drops that Marc-Andre Fleury has an upper-body injury. You can’t make this stuff up.

The casualties continue to accumulate in the blue paint. And…it’s only November. The season is roughly a month old and we’ve seen 73 goaltenders log NHL action among 32 NHL teams already. Twenty years ago, the NHL’s 30 teams used 76 goalies for the entire season. Thirty years ago: 56 goalies all year for the NHL’s 24 teams.

What’s happening to our goaltenders? Injuries among them are seemingly becoming an epidemic. Is it the techniques? The speed of the game? Are they simply less tolerant of pain than generations past? We may have to combine several theories to explain what’s happening.

THEORY 1: Goalies aren’t getting hurt more often. They’re just playing hurt less often.

Hockey culture has changed as we know more about the human body and the long-term damage it can absorb if not allowed to properly heal from injuries. Nowhere is the shift more apparent than in how we view concussions today (“We” obviously not including the NHL itself, still turning a blind eye to CTE). Eric Lindros was painted as a diva by many two decades ago when he tried to take his brain injuries seriously. Today, given all we’ve learned about CTE, the hockey world has retroactively apologized to him and acknowledged him as somewhat of a pioneer.

Does the same philosophical change apply to netminders today? Are teams just more responsible with them? We know load management has changed the way teams play – and pay – their goalies. Spreading cap space across a tandem rather than signing one stud to start 70 games is en vogue. Just 10 completed seasons ago, in 2011-12, 22 goaltenders started at least 50 games. By 2021-22? Even with two additional franchises, just 16 goalies eclipsed 50 games. In 2011-12, 47 goalies started 20 or more games. Last season, 56 goalies hit that mark. The workloads are being spread out.

So are goalies actually getting hurt more today? Or is it simply that the prehistoric “suck it up” culture is going extinct, and goalies are more comfortable acknowledging and resting their injuries?

That’s a possibility. As former NHL goalie and current TSN analyst Jamie McLennan remembers it, during his career, which spanned from 1993-94 to 2006-07, it was commonplace for every goalie, all year, to be banged up from Day 1 of training camp on.

“I witnessed it with Roberto Luongo, Miikka Kiprusoff, Grant Fuhr – the guys that I backed up who played a ton of games, they were never healthy,” McLennan said. “They were healthy enough to play….but if you looked at their hands, their fingernails, a couple of them would be black from pucks on the ice and guys slashing at the glove or blocker hand. They had bruises everywhere because you get hit in soft spots. But unless something was seriously wrong, broken bones or pulled muscles, we were ingrained to live with a certain amount of pain and that was just tolerance. I’m not saying anyone told us to play hurt, but we were used to playing slightly uncomfortable.”

Goalies were playing hurt more often then – and in the mind of the Hall of Famer Grant Fuhr, who holds the NHL record for games played in a season by a goalie at a whopping 79, the game was as strenuous 20 or 30 years ago as it is today, albeit for different reasons.

“They’re hauling around less weight and you’re not seeing as many guys crash the net today,” Fuhr said. “That’s a big difference. You see the odd collision but you don’t see it every night like you used to. It used to be a position where guys fell on you pretty much every whistle. And now they frown on it and protect the goalies a little better. So that part’s gotten better.”

In Fuhr’s opinion, however, the types of injuries goalies get today are tougher to play through.

“We probably played through injuries, but it’s also different types of injuries – in today’s game you’re seeing more hips,” he said. “It’s a lot harder to play through a hip than anything else. It’s the center of your body. If you hurt a hip, it’s hard to rotate. A knee you can get around. You can get around shoulders. But you can’t get around hips.”

As for what’s causing the prevalence of hip problems? That ties to some other theories about the injury epidemic.

THEORY 2: The game has changed, and playing it wears the body down more.

Watch some footage of a goaltender in, say, 1985. Then watch a game from 2022. The difference in movement is mind-blowing. Instead of playing standup, watching the play, we see butterfly netminders everywhere, sliding from post to post, getting up and down over and over, under constant duress. We saw a particular paradigm shift starting in 2017-18, which is when the NHL tightened its enforcement of slashing. Per hockey-reference.com, NHL teams averaged 31.8 shots per game that season – the most since 1969-70. Between 1970-71 and 2016-17, no season averaged 31 shots per game. Today? The average has cleared 31.0 in five of the past six seasons.

The increase in rubber seen from netminders comes from the increased freedom on the ice for teams to execute east-west plays, spread out opposing defenses and set up clean scoring chances. According to Valiquette’s research, east-west plays in the NHL have spiked by more than 40 percent in the past five years.

“There’s so much more action even if you’re not facing the shot,” McLennan said. “The puck is moved side to side so quickly and in tight, and guys are making plays behind that net, so you’re constantly in motion. The wear and tear on the body is at an all-time high.”

If the game itself creates the fastest, busiest in-game workload goalies have ever seen, it must be replicated in practice to help them hone their skills. One day when he was working with Bridgeport, Valiquette used a counter to clock how many times his goalies got up and down. The average: 300. Per goalie. Per practice. Is that starting to paint a clearer picture on why all the soft tissue injuries are happening?

THEORY 3: A faster game inspires new save techniques that are extremely taxing on the body.

The butterfly is ubiquitous now. We can debate who the first true star NHLer to use it was – some say Glenn Hall, some say Tony Esposito – but we all know it was Patrick Roy and his mentor Francois Allaire who popularized it. Any kid who began playing the sport in the 1990s was pretty much born into the butterfly mentality. And there’s no secret that the movement it requires takes a lot more out of the body than standup goaltending ever did.

“If you look at what they’re teaching kids, to be down on their knees all the time in that position,” Fuhr said, “you’re six years old, you’re doing that all the time, you’re going to wear your hips out by the time you’re 22, 23.”

Back to the Bobrovsky anecdote. Butterfly is one thing, but reverse VH is the next evolution of it – and it puts a whole new level of strain on the body. With all the action happening around and behind the net, goalies are shifting rapidly from reverse VH at one side of the net to the other, bobbing, weaving, trying to find the puck through traffic. And the reverse VH requires a lot of leaning, putting some awkward stress on the knee, especially for bigger, taller goalies with more weight in their torsos.

“(When you go down), that’s three times your body weight of force that exits through your knees and out your hips on every butterfly,” Valiquette said. “That’s what sports science has shown us in recent years. Now if you combine the amount of times you’re going up and down with that force, combine that with the shape that you go into your post (in reverse VH), and the aggressive lean over your knee to be able to seal the ice and your body up against the post, that’s a lot of really bad positioning you’re putting your body in that’s really unnatural.

“The conversations we have with pitchers about not throwing a curveball when they’re 12 or 13, we don’t have that conversation with our goalies because we want saves and we want wins.”

THEORY 4: A faster game and new techniques breed new equipment that doesn’t protect the body as well.

To connect the dots here: the butterfly helps a goalie adapt to the speed of the game today. And the reverse VH is a technique that can sometimes be executed without a goaltender going down on every single shot… because of the equipment. It’s now being modified to suit modern techniques. Pads are contoured in a way that can help a goalie block a shot mid-transition, before fully going down. That grants goalies the option to be more patient in waiting out a shooter, letting the pad do some of the work before they go down. But it also puts the body in increasingly strenuous positions.

As Fuhr puts it: the gear is “built for butterfly guys.” They’re less about protection and more about technique. More saves? Sure. But also more punishment for the body.

IS THERE A SOLUTION?

Has hockey simply changed to the point we have to view the goaltender position through a different lens and accept all the elements causing injuries as necessary evils to adapt to the current state of the game?

Maybe. But there’s another school of thought in personal training culture suggesting injuries still should be preventable. We’ve never known more about the human body, right? We’ve never been able to customize our training more. That’s why, using the oft-injured Matt Murray as an example, Valiquette claims there’s no excuse anymore to keep getting soft tissue injuries and that it’s a sign of not taking care of one’s self. Valiquette learned about ice baths to reduce inflammation, for instance, early in his career and estimates he never suffered a soft-tissue injury between 23 and 35.

McLennan saw a remarkable shift in training even during the course of his career.

“I grew up and nobody wore seatbelts and people smoked on planes. Life changes, right? All of a sudden you get to know the body better and you’ve got athletic therapists and trainers that are training you sport-specific,” he said. “Late ’90s, I had a personal trainer and he would always go, ‘When we gettin’ to bench press?’ We’re not doing that anymore. It’s plyometrics and jumps and resistance. They’ve got ropes, they’ve got cables, they’ve got quick-feet drills.”

Knowledge is power, but it’s a double-edged sword for goaltenders today. They have never been better educated on how to take care of their bodies, but they have also never known more about the best techniques and equipment for stopping pucks. And sometimes, the latter two priorities work against our best efforts to keep the body healthy. Face it: being a goalie has never been harder work. The injury reports confirm it.

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