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Tweaking the twigs Constant innovations take hockey sticks to new levelsPosted: Friday January 17, 2003 3:30 PMUpdated: Friday January 17, 2003 5:55 PM
What do the latest composite hockey sticks have in common with high-priced European luxury sedans? In addition to eye-popping prices, the engineering theories behind them are similar. Once upon a time, players would pick up any old heavy bit of lumber and head out to the pond to bat the puck around in a shinny game. But as technology has evolved, the art of stickmaking has, too. The latest composite one-piece sticks borrow the idea of a variable-rate spring from the European sport sedans of the 1980s. American cars back in the day were known for either a spongy ride (big, boatlike sedans) or for responsive, tight handling (sports cars). The Euro automakers used a variable-rate spring to make the first inch of travel soft, followed by a more rigid, stiff flex in the spring. This technology has been applied to hockey sticks by Easton, which now has more than half of the NHL using its sticks. I was never very good in physics, so we'll let Easton vice president of hockey Ned Goldsmith relate how the science behind the suspension of a two-ton automobile helped develop a 450-gram hockey stick. "It came together from the basic idea that you could make a variable-rate spring that was super easy in its first amount to load," Goldsmith said. "As you bend the stick, it becomes progressively more difficult to flex. It starts out actually quite easy to flex, so it doesn't take an enormous amount of inertia -- for example, a huge slap shot -- to load the stick. "So if you think about guys like Joe Sakic or Mike Modano and the trend of clutching and grabbing, these guys found that they could get a really big shot off without taking a big windup. I think that was probably the most attractive part of the product." Easton made a name for itself in the 1980s by producing aluminum baseball and softball bats, but didn't enter the hockey equipment game until the late 1980s at the urging of one of its engineers who played the game. Easton broke through when it signed Wayne Gretzky to use its new aluminum shaft in 1991, a product The Great One stuck with until the final year of his career, when he switched to Hespeler upon receiving a stake in the company. But despite the game's biggest star using a metallic-based shaft, most of the league was still using wood sticks even five years ago. It wasn't until Easton tested the Synergy in San Diego during the summer of 1999 with NHL stars Jeremy Roenick, Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic, Mike Modano and Paul Kariya that the idea of a one-piece composite stick took hold with players. Sakic, Modano and Kariya actually approached Easton and asked them to bond their blades and tapered shafts together, setting in motion a yearlong process which led to the test session. At first, the players panned the product, but a tweak in the formula of the carbon fiber, epoxy resin and kevlar ratios eventually yielded an impressive result. Peter Forsberg started using Sakic's Synergy sticks at the end of the 1999-2000 regular season, and from there it spread like wildfire. Unable to meet individual requests, players started buying retail version off the rack at their local pro shops, and Easton knew it had a hit on its hands. "The Synergy really turned everything on its head," Goldsmith said. "Once it was discovered, within six months we were at the 15 percent mark of the league and within 18 months we were probably at the 25 percent mark. Then after just two years we were nearing the 40-50 percent mark. And now it's still climbing." Now Easton has taken its one-piece technology even further by bringing out the neon-orange Si-Core (not on sale to the public until April -- and at a jaw-dropping $169.99 retail price), an updated version of the Synergy that has silicone injected into the blade to improve feel. NHL players like Roenick, Modano, Chris Drury, Nicklas Lidstrom and Mike Comrie were among the early converts, and about 30 players now use the Si-Core, including Dany Heatley, who netted his first career hat trick Monday at Philadelphia with the stick. One of the complaints with the first batch of one-piece sticks was that they sacrificed feel with a too-rigid blade, causing passes to bounce awry too frequently. To remedy that, Easton experimented with butyl rubbers and other elastomers before settling on silicone as the central core to the blade of the next-generation Synergy. "It's an amazing stick," Modano said of the Si-Core earlier this season. "It's light and it's consistent. You can shoot the puck a lot harder and quicker. They tried to soften the blade up a little bit, because the one big complaint about the Synergy was the real hard blade. The puck had a tendency to bounce off it, so this limits that puck from bouncing around on you." "Players have been raving about their ability to take shots off of hard passes," Easton Hockey product manager Holmes Ghassemi said. "Typically, these pucks would rebound off the stick blade because of the energy associated with them, but the Synergy Si-Core provides better feel and improved puck control to create more shot opportunities." That's not something that goaltenders are necessarily pleased with. Olaf Kolzig is among those who believes that mediocre players have improved their games "There are some guys who had average shots that are absolutely ripping them by your ears now," Kolzig said. "It’s a big enough increase in velocity that the average guy is going get his fair share of goals now, and the guys who had the hardest shots before are that much harder." Goaltenders agree that the most noticable difference is on wrist shots, and that mediocre players have gained velocity as a result. "As a goalie, I don't like them," Ducks backstop Jean-Sebastien Giguere said. "The shots are definitely harder, but they aren't as accurate so it's scarier for the goalie, too. "You used to be able to pick some guys on each team with a good shot and just focus on them. But now they all have good shots, so you have to be ready for everybody." Still, not all players are comfortable making the switch away from wood. Canucks captain and NHL goal-scoring leader Markus Naslund ditched his Mission one-piece stick and went back to a wood stick. Naslund, Sakic and Alexei Kovalev are commonly regarded as three of the best shooters in the league, and going back to wood obviously hasn't affected Naslund's game much. Sergei Fedorov used a two-piece graphite stick and shaft when he won the hardest shot competition at the SuperSkills competition during the 2002 All-Star weekend in Los Angeles. His blast of 101.5 mph topped anything the one-piece users could put up there. So a stick can only do so much. "I think these sticks have been radically misunderstood overall," Goldsmith said. "I think a lot of guys thought they make you shoot harder. I've heard amazing things like they make you shoot 10 or 15 miles an hour faster. And that's not really what's going on with the stick. If you watch the classic Synergy goal, it's a quick shot out of the crowd. "There is so little space out there for them and getting the hardest shot isn't what it's all about, necessarily. Where this has really been a great performance element is being able to transfer the energy quickly to the puck so that you can get quick shots off. It allows you to get a quick, accurate shot without having to take a huge windup." Others feel the evolution of technology isn't as much a factor as the improved health and increased size of the players. "The equipment is better, but the people wearing and using the equipment are twice as good," Mighty Ducks head coach Mike Babcock said. "Each generation is supposed to get better and that's what is happening. It's all just part of the progression of the game." But don't expect Easton to sit by idly and watch the game progress. In the mad scientist world of hockey products, the times are always a changin'. Jon A. Dolezar covers the NHL for CNNSI.com. Got a comment, question or scoop for Jon? Click here. |
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