DETROIT -- On a Friday afternoon, over a plate of pasta after practice in the Detroit Red Wings' lunch room, goaltender Chris Osgood was talking about redemption and reinvention.
Redemption, because Osgood, after winning the Stanley Cup for the Red Wings in 1998, was cast aside for a time by an organization seeking sexier answers in goal. Reinvention, because after short exiles with the New York Islanders and St. Louis Blues, Osgood returned to the Red Wings, understanding at the same time that the old way - playing a standup style in a butterfly era - probably wasn't going to get it done for him any more.
So while the NHL took a year off in 2004-05, Osgood relearned the art of goaltending in the modern era. Inspiration came from his former partner with the Red Wings, Michael Vernon, who won the Stanley Cup for them in 1997 and shares many of the same physical and personality traits as Osgood: smallish goaltenders with the burning desire to compete and just a little bit of a chip on their shoulders.
"When we were younger, we were never taught how to play goal," Osgood said yesterday in a long-ranging interview. "We were just, more or less, good at it and they told us to go in there. I remember coming to my first two or three training camps in Detroit and they said, 'We don't care how you do it, just stop the puck.' That was pretty much it.
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"Now, these young kids are trained to be goalies since they're 10 or 12 years old. They have their specific coaches; they do all these specific moves. So everything's really defined; it's really gotten technical.
"It's good and bad. It's good because it makes them better, but at the same time, they're getting so scrutinized that if they don't look a certain way stopping the puck, then it's not the right thing to do. Stopping it isn't good enough any more. So I think it's tougher to be a goalie nowadays than it ever has been."
Detroit, of course, was a tough town on goaltenders for the better part of two decades. When the Red Wings started to get competitive in the early 1990s, the last piece of the puzzle was trying to find the right player between the pipes. A series of wrong choices - from Bob Essensa to Tim Chevaldae, all of them booed mercilessly during their stays in Motown - finally ended when they put the Vernon-Osgood tandem together for the back-to-back championship years. But Vernon left in a contract dispute after the 1997 Stanley Cup, and Osgood was eventually exiled in favour of Dominik Hasek - the winning goaltender in 2002, when the Red Wings last won a championship.
Now both are back, this time with Osgood as the lead horse.
It is hard to imagine, given Osgood's play at the moment, that Hasek's chance will come again any time soon. Osgood is a perfect 7-0 since the middle part of the first round and his goals-against average dropped to 1.45 on the heels of Detroit's easy 4-1 victory over the Dallas Stars in the opening game of the Western Conference final. the second game will be played here tonight.
Osgood's performance in the opener mirrors how the Red Wings' 2008 run unfolded. On a night when Detroit seized control early, Osgood was there when the Red Wings needed him. The shots were 19-6 in Detroit's favour early in the second period, when the Stars' Marty Turco made a potentially momentum-shifting save on a Henrik Zetterberg wrap-around attempt. Seconds later, Detroit's defensive coverage broke down, enabling Niklas Hagman to slip in, all alone.
Osgood stopped him cold. A goal there and the Stars would have narrowed the margin to one goal about 25 minutes in and, suddenly, they would have been back in the game.
Minutes after Osgood's save on Hagman, the Red Wings scored again, and after that, it was all about taking time off the clock.
"Something I've learned as I got older," Osgood said, "is I don't worry about things that are out of my control. I don't try to play the game before it's started. I rest my mind, so that when I get on the ice, I'm completely mentally ready. I've seen goalies who've tried to stop 100 shots before the game started. On the day of the game, they won't talk to anybody. Everybody has to be quiet around them at the pregame skate.
"By the time the game's started, mentally they're drained.
"After the lockout, I've tried to change that so I'm mentally fresh and ready to go when the game starts. I learned that from Dom - because Dom is so relaxed and keeps himself in a nice zone prior to the game. Then when the game starts, he's 100 per cent on."
Osgood understands that nowadays the goal isn't to have the best save percentage or the lowest goals-against average. The only thing that matters is wins. This is an epiphany that most athletes endure long enough eventually come to, some sooner than others.
