Thursday, October 28, 2010

Karlsson the natural


Came across a great read this morning when looking for info on who might start in net tonight for the Flames/Avs game. Basically, Henrik Karlsson never had a goalie coach until he turned 21, which means he never learned pretty basic things like proper recovery from the butterfly position etc until an extremely late age. Like, Carey Price is 23. Imagine if he never had anyone teaching him how to talk to the media until then (oops).

I am a fan of old videogames. For me, the last real NHL game made was EA Sports NHL 2004, with everyone's favorite all-star on the cover, Dany Heatley. That game was the first time you could build your own dynasty, and the first time NHL took a step in the direction it goes today, as you could somewhat dangle with the right stick and they got rid of the stupid gamebreaker option:

From Wikipedia:
NHL 2003 introduced a new feature, the GameBreaker. It is activated once a player performs enough "dekes" and it is used to help change the momentum of the game, such as scoring a big goal, delivering a big hit or winning a big fight.

The best part of NHL 2004, besides trading for Kovalchuk and him actually making your team a dynasty for twenty years, was anytime you traded for a goalie. They all had exactly the same mask, which was just a huge logo of the team right on the top/center of the mask. Nothing fancy or specific, just a big logo right on the front.

Boom. This is Karlsson's goalie mask. Whether he intended it to be or not, this is exactly what the goalie masks looked like from NHL 2004. I love it.

For those who are superstitious, it looks like Kiprusoff has a new mask this season as well, moving away from the white skulls he's been rockin' for the last couple years to something that looks almost identical to what he wore during the 2003-2004 season:

Blogger is a pretty fun guy and won't let me upload a zoomed in version to back up my point but you can see pretty clearly he's back to the old golden letters along the bottom as well as the fiery orange skulls along the sides.
Not a photoshop: the Flames did once make it past the first round of the playoffs

I think Karlsson will get the start tonight against Colorado, purely because I am betting Kipper is still hungover from his birthday bash.

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