struckbyaparkedcar
Guilty of Being Right
This is a great take on Hasek I came across on this reddit thread.
OK.
Take, for example, the Hasek Roll. Laymen look at Hasek rolling across the net from one side to the other and say, "DAE he just flopping? lol" Anyone who knows anything about goaltending recognizes that as a method for moving laterally with superb low coverage without engaging the skate-blades; it's consistent, repeatable, and trainable. I teach it to every goalie I coach.
Does it require extremely strong proprioception, wicked core strength and flexibility? Sure it does, especially if you want to do it well. But it also helps to build those things.
If you look back over Brodeur's career, you can watch him learning the Hasek Roll. Any Brodeur top-10 will have a few. The one on Mike York is especially funny.
Then there's the infamous 'Scorpion Save' on Marian Gaborik: yet again, a Hasek innovation, this time drawn from soccer. The difference is that Brodeur can only go straight over his back, blind; Hasek was so flexible that he could scratch his ears with his feet, and there's footage of him with a prefect visual track on the puck, picking it off with a foot reaching over his back. It's an absolutely brilliant way to keep your feet engaged in the play from a prone position.
There's also evidence of Hasek performing early variants of the SMS (aka 'Reverse-VH among the unlearned) albeit without the backside blade engagement that we now see commonly. Hasek understood, in a way that was years ahead of his time, the puck's perspective when tight to the net.
Hasek was also the first guy to systematically train and use true butterfly 'shuffling': that is, lateral movement in the BF using simply the strength and reach of the groin, keeping the pads flush to the ice and the skate-blade disengaged.
edit: Oh, and he also completely changed the way goalies train off the ice. Ya know, just little things like that.
Ask Mitch Korn how important Hasek is to the position, if you've got an hour or ten to kill.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hockey/comments/4sc10j/dominik_hasek_career_highlights/d58mnh6