Robin Lehner’s media session Monday after Blackhawks practice was the kind of wide-ranging, blunt and thought-provoking interview that could have only come from Lehner himself.
Two days removed from another disappointing shootout performance — which followed another fantastic game of goaltending, keeping his save percentage atop the NHL leaderboard — Lehner gave an in-depth breakdown of why shootouts confound him so much.
“My strength is reading what’s going to happen,” Lehner said. “I can determine, ‘I need to be set for a shot,’ or, ‘I need to be set for a deke.’ That’s what my good abilities are, in my opinion — I’m always ready, people don’t beat me clean on shots.”
“Breakaway comes in [during regulation play], I know by the hash marks if he’s shooting or if he’s deking — you can see the back pressure, you can see how fast he’s coming, you can see how he has his stick, you know what’s going to happen. You can’t in a shootout: they come in on a side angle and they come in slow and they brake and they stop, I can’t read it. It takes away the best part of me as a goalie.”
Lehner has been honest about his subpar track record in the skills competition for weeks, and even said Monday he’d support Jeremy Colliton subbing him for Corey Crawford — who has much better career shootout results — in the future. (Colliton later maintained that’s not an option he’d consider.)
“I came here to help this team win,” he said. “So if the coach feels that, he should definitely go for it. I definitely would not be mad. And I wouldn’t take it personally, because I know I’m a good hockey goalie. It has nothing to do with the shootout.”
The 28-year-old goalie even took to Twitter on Sunday to crowdsource feedback about his shootout approach.
All the experts in the media on what my new shootout strategy should be:) I’m all ears. The shootout is not hockey so I gotta learn this sport somehow and hopefully one of the experts can help me as all my goalie coaches haven’t been able to yet. Sabres fans would love to hear
— Robin Lehner (@RobinLehner) November 24, 2019
He said he received a lot of bad suggestions along with a few good ones, including an academic study on common paths that shooters take and the relative effectiveness of each.
But his heavy social media exposure this weekend prompted some frustration over the Hawks’ media coverage, as well, which he dished on for another portion of Monday’s interview. Lehner’s exasperation included narratives about both he and the team overall.
“We played a great game against one of the better teams [in Dallas]; we lost in the lottery,” he said. “And then it turns all negative.”
“I’m not a flashy goalie: I don’t make the super saves, I don’t flash my glove, I don’t flash my blocker,” he added. “But again, goalies that are not very good and flash their saves all the time are out of position, [but] they get a lot of love. It’s the same thing for shootout.”
For now, the Hawks must live with the existence of the shootout — which Lehner called an entirely “different game” than hockey — and their goaltender’s struggles in it.
Colliton spent a significant portion of practice Monday on a split-squad shootout competition, and Lehner unsurprisingly lost — even though he faced a far easier array of opposing shooters than did Crawford.
In the long run, Lehner would like to see the skills competition further de-emphasized. Its frequency was cut roughly in half when the league switched to 3-on-3 overtime in 2015-16; now, Lehner is among a growing group calling for overtime to be doubled in length.
“10 minutes [of] 3-on-3 would be nice, because 3-on-3 is a lot more entertaining than a shootout,” he said. “There’s always good chances, and we’re playing hockey. We’re letting hockey determine the fate of it.”
