Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey By Knowing Where to Look

by Greg Wyshynski

Braden Holtby of the Washington Capitals is, for my money, the personification of this creepy goalie tradition. He’ll put his goalie stick to his mouth, blade up, and start rotating his head back and forth, eyes wide open. Then he’ll slip the blade over his eyes and move back and forth, almost wearing the stick like a blindfold. The routine continues during the game. During stoppages, you continue to see him dart his eyes around with his mask off. Occasionally, he’ll actually squirt his water bottle into the air and track the liquid with his vision, like he’s the dog from Duck Hunt tracking fowl. There is a (scientific) method to this madness. John Stevenson is an Alberta-based sports psychologist who helped train Holtby in the ways of visualization. That includes Kaizen, a Japanese concept for continuous improvement that Holtby adopted to the point of having two Japanese characters on his mask that represent it. What Stevenson found was that Holtby had a knack for mimicking other goalies just by watching them. Holtby said that process began when he watched Hall of Famer Patrick Roy as a young fan. “I haven’t seen that in any other goaltender ever. The way [Roy] competed, and not only competed but was able to raise his level once things got hard and once his back was against the wall in order to do something. He needed to step up and be a leader on his team,” Holtby told the Washington Times. “As a goalie it’s not always the easiest thing to be a leader on a team.…Whenever...