NHL analyst exposes Canada for lack of goaltending development amid Four Nations tournament
NHL analyst Dan Robson went off today talking about how Canada has fallen behind the rest of the hockey world in developing goaltenders.
For the past decade or so, Canada has failed to produce the same quantity of quality goaltenders we have seen come from Europe.
Goalies like Igor Shesterkin, Ilya Sorokin, Jacob Markstrom, Jusse Saros, and Filip Gustavsson have taken the league by storm while Canadian goaltending stalls out.
As a result, the country does not exactly have a ton of great options in net for international tournaments.
Even then, the team left their best goalie at home for the Four Nations tournament due to personal bias.
Yes, Logan Thompson, who currently leads all Canadian goalies in basically every important statistic, was left off the roster because of personal drama between him and the coaching staff.
Its not like Jordan Binnington and Adin Hill are great options instead. Both have been rather mediocre this season.
This highlights the big problem for Canada as they just can't seem to develop All-Star goalies on a consistent basis anymore.
As NHL analyst Dan Robson points out, European and Russian goalies have well surpassed Canadians at this point and now even the Americans are starting to produce more quality netminders.
"Today, however, Europeans are twice as prevalent as Canadians, and the Americans are on the verge of passing Canada.
But their (Europe's) systems, especially in Sweden and Finland, are much more sort of top-down, focused on being able to have that implemented system. So they moved towards a more holistic approach to training and they managed to sort of look at what Canada was doing and adapt in their own way
At the same time, as you hit on, at the grassroots level, coming up, we had this sort of heavy focus on very specific goaltending movements; being almost a perfectionist, dictated prescriptive goaltending that made kids look incredible in the net because they can move around so fluidly. What we're lacking was sort of the ability to have the best athletes get into that position."
But their (Europe's) systems, especially in Sweden and Finland, are much more sort of top-down, focused on being able to have that implemented system. So they moved towards a more holistic approach to training and they managed to sort of look at what Canada was doing and adapt in their own way
At the same time, as you hit on, at the grassroots level, coming up, we had this sort of heavy focus on very specific goaltending movements; being almost a perfectionist, dictated prescriptive goaltending that made kids look incredible in the net because they can move around so fluidly. What we're lacking was sort of the ability to have the best athletes get into that position."
This could become a very serious problem for Canada in upcoming international tournaments if it is not solved soon.
After all, Canadians would not want to see their country fail to take home the gold medal time and time again just because of goaltending, especially if the rest of the team's roster is much better than the other countries.
It may only take one quality netminder to solve this problem, but then again, they actually have to select that goalie for the team in order for him to perform.
| POLL | ||
Do you think Team Canada will struggle at the Four Nations tournament specifically because of their goaltending? | ||
| Yes | 166 | 63.4 % |
| No | 96 | 36.6 % |
| List of polls | ||
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