For a five-day stretch in late March, the only players who put pucks past Brian Elliott were Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, who both scored in a shootout that gave the L.A. Kings a 1–0 win over Elliott’s St. Louis Blues. For 65 minutes, Elliott had gone save for save with Kings goalie Jonathan Quick as both masked men padded their season shutout totals. In the Blues’ next two games, Elliott ran his shutout streak to 185 minutes, blanking Phoenix and Nashville. Then he hit the bench and watched the other member of the NHL’s most functional goalie tandem get consecutive starts and lose them both.
Relegating a red-hot goalie to door-opener status flies in the face of the “if it ain’t broke” wisdom most coaches employ, but that’s what Blues bench boss Ken Hitchcock did all year to ensure that neither Elliott nor Jaroslav Halák felt like the understudy. On 13 occasions in situations that weren’t back-to-back games, Hitchcock started the goalie who had spent the previous contest watching the other guy win. When Darren Pang, a former NHL creaseman and current analyst for St. Louis games on FOX Sports Midwest, asked Hitchcock about the seemingly curious decision to start Halák when Elliott was racking up shutouts, Hitchcock had a simple reply: “I just want to see where [Halák] is mentally and physically.”
Hitchcock’s adroit handling of an inherently sticky situation allowed both Halák, who had starter status to begin the season, and Elliott, who arrived at training camp on a two-way contract with no goal other than staying in the league, to thrive in the type of whose-net-is-it? setting that has been known to cause strife in other cities—including Vancouver, which nudged St. Louis for top spot in the Western Conference. “He was magic in how he was able to keep both guys sharp and never let one guy not feel involved,” says Pang. That was punctuated early in the playoffs when, in game two of the Blues’ opening round series with San Jose, Elliott replaced an injured Halák and preserved a shutout to even the series. “You don’t expect something like this to happen, but it does and we’re lucky we’re in the situation we’re in… 1 and 1A, literally,” says Hitchcock.
Relying on two goalies might seem old-school, but teams have done it successfully in recent years. Before Halák landed in St. Louis he platooned in Montreal with Carey Price; the Habs used to routinely give Patrick Roy and Brian Hayward lots of starts in the late ’80s; around the same time, the Rangers leaned on both Mike Richter and John Vanbiesbrouck; and the Jacques Lemaire–coached Minnesota Wild were one of the stingiest teams in the league while using both Dwayne Roloson and Manny Fernandez in the first half of the 2000s. But even when a team gets results with a split, there’s usually the odd fit involved, and neither goalie in St. Louis was stoic all year. “I’ve seen Elliott snap sticks over the crossbar in practice because he wasn’t a happy camper,” says Pang. Halák, too, has a simmering intensity that’s been known to boil up in practice when things aren’t going his way. “You would see him battling pucks and getting angry,” Pang says.
Born just over a month apart in the spring of ’85, both Elliott and Halák were extreme NHL long shots. Ottawa drafted Elliott with the second-last pick of the 2003 draft, 291st, just a few minutes after Montreal had plucked Halák from Slovakian obscurity at No. 271. Both rose to prominence during the 2009–10 season, Elliott for establishing an Ottawa team record with nine consecutive victories en route to leading the Sens to a surprising playoff berth as a sophomore, Halák for an incredible post-season performance that was the driving force behind a thoroughly average Canadiens team advancing to the NHL’s final four. Halák’s reward was being shipped to St. Louis about five weeks after Montreal’s run died. Like most members of the 2010–11 Blues, last season wasn’t his finest. Elliott scuffled last year, too, getting traded to Colorado from Ottawa and ultimately signing a deal with St. Louis over the summer that many thought would see him start this season in the minors, until his fantastic September showing in training camp earned him a spot on the St. Louis team charter, where he sits one seat behind Halák.
The Blues’ dynamic is vastly different to the goalie glut in Vancouver, where No. 1 guy Roberto Luongo—despite having a decorated resumé that includes an Olympic gold medal—becomes a whipping boy at the first sign of trouble, thanks largely to a tortured history with the fans. In those tense times, there’s a predictable spike in the stock of backup Cory Schneider. Contrast that with St. Louis, where though Halák is the more accomplished goalie, he has still yet to play 60 games in a season. And as good as Halák’s numbers were this year, Elliott’s showing in 38 games was all-time. He set the modern-day mark with a goals-against average of 1.56, led the league with a .940 save percentage and contributed nine of the duo’s modern-era record-tying mark of 15 shutouts. The bottom line is neither Halák nor Elliott can get too chesty when staking his claim to the crease. And though their competitive streaks have led to some spirited practices, neither goalie is a rock-the-boat guy. “They have very quiet demeanours, so neither of these guys is going to divide the room,” says Pang.
With both goalies under contract through the next two seasons, how things will play out remains to be seen. Shortly after inking Elliott to an extension in January, the Blues moved well-regarded netminding prospect Ben Bishop to Ottawa, which seems to indicate that GM Doug Armstrong is happy with his current set-up. However, pro hockey teams are not unlike other workplaces—no matter how valued a company wants every employee to feel, things tend to work best when there’s a fixed hierarchy. Pang believes that, in a perfect world, a club has clear roles for its puck-stoppers. “Until you win the Stanley Cup with your system, there will always be questions going into the playoffs,” he says. “And questions can become a distraction.”
Everyone worked hard to make sure that wasn’t the case this year in St. Louis. Sure, there were some splintered sticks in practice, but that’s also an indication that both Halák and Elliott were worthy of all their playing time. “If you don’t see it, you’re disappointed as a coach,” says Pang. “You’re wondering, ‘Why would I give him the start?’”
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet Magazine.
NHL Playoffs: Shuffling the Deck, St. Louis Tale of Two Goalies
