Goalie Skate Sharpening
Flat Bottom V - Hockey Skate Sharpening
Starting with the bottom, the skates are key to the quickness that has always been key to Thomas’s success. As much as he has added proper leg recoveries and backside butterfly pushes to his arsenal during the last five years (more on that in the above-mentioned article on technique), Thomas recovers to his skates more than anyone in the game not named Brodeur before moving after a save – and usually quicker.
Generating the precision behind these movements – and the power behind pushes that follow, whether into a sprawling headfirst dive like the Save of the Year candidate that earned him this week’s 3 Star nod, or a smooth butterfly slide – are the skates, which Thomas says are custom profiled to a 28-foot radius.
“My hollow is 5/16,” Thomas wrote in an email to InGoal shortly after the game in Toronto on Saturday night. “That’s pretty deep but a lot of NHL goalies are using deeper hollows nowadays. We need it for the big pushes cross crease. I get them sharpened when I have to. I lose edges when hitting the post or sometimes from the sticks of the other team or occasionally my own teammates. Carbon sticks can take an edge off a skate pretty easily. If it’s just an outside edge I usually don’t get them sharpened.”
That’s because even Thomas, for all his wild scrambling, is just like all other goalies in that he only needs that inside edge to push around the ice. And just like all other goalies, he needs to see where he’s going, even if nobody else can sometimes figure out how he’s going to get there. But unlike most other goalies, Thomas played an active role in making sure he can see.
Add that to some pretty impressive feet with some incredibly sharp edges, and there are two more reasons why Thomas is once again the best goaltender in the NHL, and poised to add another Vezina Trophy to the one he won two years ago.
Goalie Skate Sharpening
Flat Bottom V - Hockey Skate Sharpening
