Quote:
Originally Posted by gianniniman
Everyone keeps on telling me that I need to play more aggressive. What exactly do they mean? The way I interpret to play aggressive is to knock down whoever comes near your net. Is this what they mean?
|
Essentially it means coming further out of your crease to challenge the shooter more. There are a couple of things this means you have to work on:
1. Angles. You need to have really good angles when you come out, or the shooter will burn you every time. The further you come out, the easier it will be to control the angles, but you need to practice this.
2. Lateral movement across the crease & recovery. As the poster above me said, if you come out and the shooter makes a pass instead of firing it, you need to be able to get across your crease fast. The farther out you come, the more net you're leaving open if he passes it across the rink. You need to work on the speed of your butterfly slide and recovery, t-pushes etc.
3. Do you play the puck much? An aggressive goalie is a goalie who isn't afraid to come out of their crease and puckhandle.
I've recently had to adapt my game a lot to play a more aggressive style. I used always be too deep in my crease, and as a very small goalie, this means I was really getting owned by snipers. I found that the most important thing for me to focus on was my awareness of my position - how far out I was, how good my angles were, how I'd need to move to cover the most net if the shooter passed it.