Los Angeles Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick contributed to Derek Jeter’s blog, The Players’ Tribune, on Wednesday and tried to explain why some of the NHL’s best goal scorers are just so dang hard to stop. Naturally he brought up five-time Rocket Richard trophy winner Alex Ovechkin.
Quick On Ovechkin:
Obviously, he’s got a heavy, heavy shot. But I’ll go back to the theme of unpredictability again with Ovi. We played them in L.A. this season and he came down on a two-on-one rush. Ovi didn’t have the puck — he was the passing threat on my right side. He’s a right-handed shot, so he was in the perfect position for a one-timer. So I see him open up his hips, and I’m thinking, Okay, obviously he’s a huge threat right now. But he kept drifting backward to the point where he was so far wide that my brain was naturally like, There’s no way. And the guy still made the pass over to him. He must have been two feet from the wall. I took his position for granted because he was so far out, and somehow he wired it so hard that I didn’t even have a chance. Look at the leverage he was able to get on his shot while floating away from the net.
Guys like Ovi shoot it so hard that it’s almost like you’re a batter in baseball. You see the blur of the puck coming at you in frames. One frame, two frames … by the third frame it’s already hitting you. If you’re trying to make a reaction save against Ovi, you’re already beat. You better already be at the top of the crease cutting off the angle.
Quick also explained why new Caps forward TJ Oshie is so dangerous in the shootout.
To piggyback on that idea a little bit, when you look at the best guys in the league at the shootout, they all have three or four really good moves, but they all start out exactly the same way. Look at T.J. Oshie. He’ll pick the puck up and take a similar route toward the net every time. He’ll stick handle it in a similar way every time. And then when he gets to a certain spot, he has four moves that branch off from there. You don’t really know what he’s going to do until he does it. So it forces the goalie to make a reactionary save, which is much more difficult.
The whole article is fascinating, so make sure to check it out if you haven’t already.
Thanks to @hpikappkaz for tweeting us the story.
