“Boy, he had a long road ahead of him, let’s put it that way. “I asked what he has was looking for out of this, and his exact words were ‘I want you to tear my game apart and rebuild it,’ so that’s what we tried to do,” Matwijiw says, admitting he didn’t really know what that would entail until that eye-opening first session on the ice.
#Nhl 2004 rebuilt goalie free#
When Osgood, then a free agent living nearby in Detroit, left him a message on the eve of the lockout in 2004 after a recommendation Holland, Matwijiw wasn’t really sure what to expect. That’s how poor it was,” says Matwijiw, a former minor-pro goaltender who spent time as the goaltending coach at the University of Michigan while also running Bandits Goaltending School. “The first time we worked together we spent an hour and 20 minutes on movement, we didn’t shoot a puck. The result was this feature below, which seems appropriate to re-print after Osgood, who long-time friend and Red Wings General Manager Ken Holland once described as “an NHL goalie who had high school technical skills,” joined an impressive list of goaltenders in the NHL’s exclusive 400-win club:
InGoal Magazine did just that after Osgood went 14-4 with three shutouts, a 93.0 save percentage, and a 1.55 goals-against average for his last Cup victory, which set records both literally (for going 10 years since his last Cup) and figuratively (for redemption after doing so with the same team that dumped him in 2001, ironically for Dominik Hasek, who watched the last Cup as his backup). But to truly understand just how far Osgood came from there to Tuesday’s 40-save, 4-3 overtime win – and how much more than just the “butterfly” in his game needed work – you have to go back to that first session with Stan Matwijiw, the coach that helped him do it.
But that’s exactly where the now three-time Stanley Cup champion was six years ago, brought to his knees in frustration by less an hour of basic goaltending movements that, truth be told, most 12-year-old goalies today would probably breeze through and laugh off.ĭuring his run to a third Stanley Cup in 2008, Osgood made no secret of the fact he re-jigged his game during the NHL lockout in 2004-05, admitting to anyone who asked that he’d torn down his technique and rebuilt himself with a modern butterfly. Watching a triumphant Chris Osgood mobbed by his Detroit Red Wings teammates in Denver on Tuesday night after becoming just the 10th goaltender in NHL history to record 400 career wins, it was hard to imagine him on his knees, soaked with fatigue, staring face down at another sheet of ice, cursing out loud about being no better than a Mite goalie.
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