This is one of the most often asked questions - is it ok to play down on the ice or not?

     There is no one right answer. A lot depends on the situation, goalies ability, style etc... My coaching philosophy is based on utilizing each goaltender's own special skills and physical abilities and developing his/her style based on that.

     Good examples were my 2 goalies at Jokerit last season (02-03). Kari Lehtonen and Markus Helanen were both very good goalies and hard workers, but there was no way to even try to make these 2 guys play with the same style. I had to start to design my workouts for them to be quite different based on their own individual skills and styles. To do that, I did not want to do it based on "a feeling" rather than using cold facts. This lead to a study of their styles and keeping exact stats of everything they did in actual game situations. This study helped me to design their training programs. In this article I will be mainly addressing the issue of playing up or down based on the facts from my study. In order to make it a little more comprehensive I also followed 6 other goalies at the World Championships in Helsinki and added their numbers to the study.

The study

     In this study you will see numbers based on 8 different goalies. From those, 3 were Finnish and others were from Austria, Belarus, Sweden (2) and Slovakia. Total number of games in the study was 26.

Up or down?

     Let's answer this question first. Goalies in the study made saves 87.9% down on the ice and 12.1% standing up. The definition of down was that the goalie had at least one knee on the ice when making the save. This study is not comprehensive enough that I could say that this is exactly how modern goalies play. There's a lot of variation between different goalies. For example, Kari Lehtonen makes his saves down on the ice 92.1% of the time while some had figures as low as 78%.

Other findings

     Naturally, I did very deep analysis on my own goalies and based their workouts on what they really did in the games. On top of that, the study gave me a lot of good information and we were able to change some things in their game to the better based on facts and stats.

     One of the findings was the fact that goalies use too much paddle down today. For example, Kari's save % dropped to 75% when he was at paddle down position. We got a big improvement when Kari converted from paddle down position to butterfly position where he could still react and also stop the high blocker shot much more effectively.

     Kari was actually most effective when making saves using his great butterfly. His save % in the butterfly position was 95.35%.