is butterfly style goaltending passe ..?

Forum Fan · Veteran Member

is butterfly style goaltending passe ..?

Traveling Hab · Veteran Member

Butterfly goalies are supposed to stay on their feet for high shots. Only lazy and/or bad butterfly goalies go down for every shot. But yeah, the guys who go down automatically instead of reacting to the shot are going to continually get burned.

In the old NHL, 90% of shots were in the lower half of the net. That's why the two pad stack was so popular for a long time. Then crashing the net for rebounds became the norm, and the two pad stack became completely useless. Still, most shots were in the lower half, so butterflying for everything was a decent way to get a 90% save percentage (and you could get up fast too). Good butterfly goalies always stood up when the shots were high. Those guys are still dominating right now. Just look at any Quebecois or most any Finnish guy in the league, as well as many others.

It is true that the butterfly style has been adapting constantly, but I don't think it is any more true now than before. Lazy and slow goalies are just getting burned more often in a more offensive league.

I also don't see how playing your angles and having a good glove hand are incompatible with being a butterfly goalie. In fact, more than any other style the Butterfly style has required playing your angles well since the butterfly DOES NOT WORK unless you are centred, square, and cutting down your angles.

keVin · Member

no. i disagree strongly. the statistics prove that 80% of the shots that go in are from 6" down (source: goalies world). when you are down on your knees, you can easily slide/shuffle around to get into position, or push in your outside skate to get to where you need to go. if you have solid depth-coverage and angles, you dont even need arms, literally speaking.

Traveling Hab · Veteran Member

Right, but if 90% of shots are taken low, and only 80% of shots that go in are taken low, that means that a high shot has a better chance of going in than a low shot.

Knee shuffles and power slides are great for scrambles in tight, but now that people are getting free for mid range shots (slot, faceoff dot) goalies who go down too soon will get burned more than they used to. I think on those goalies in particular, up to 20% of shots will be taken high, and then you would see a statistic of almost 40% of shots going in being taken high (on those particular goalies (I am thinking Thibault, Theodore).

Those goalies won't be out of the league, but they will be worse than they used to be.

Like I said before, proper butterfly technique is still the best around, but lazy butterfly technique is on it's way out.