Martin Brodeur, the goalie who doesn't flinch: a classic SI story

Martin Brodeur, the goalie who doesn't flinch is a classic Sports Illustrated story by Michael Farber.

Author:
Michael Farber
Publish date:
Jan 27, 2015

This story originally appeared in the March 16, 2009, edition of Sports Illustrated.

There are connective threads that tie the generations and disparate styles of the NHL’s best goaltenders. The greats have played with masks on and without; they’ve faced shots that hugged the ice in the straight-bladed era and have parried today’s high-tech slappers; they’ve played stand-up and butterfly. But these goalies, with rare exceptions, share a checklist of attributes: flexibility, hockey sense, a wellspring of fearlessness and, well, eccentricity.

Martin Brodeur got a head start on greatness: a classic SI story

Whether facing 90-mph shots attracts or creates lunatics is a chicken-and-egg question, but the top goalies of the past six decades certainly are a rogue’s gallery of the maladjusted, a list as suited to

Psychology Today

as to

The Hockey News

. Jacques Plante, a seven-time Vezina Trophy winner and the backbone of the

Canadiens

’ 1950s dynasty, was a fretful man who liked to knit. It could never really be Happy Hour when

Red Wings

goalie Terry Sawchuk, who died in 1970 at age 40 from complications sustained in an alcohol-fueled fight with a teammate, walked into a bar. Glenn Hall, who played 502 consecutive games from 1955 to ’62 and had 407 career wins with three NHL teams, would feel better when he was physically ill and often threw up before the opening face-off. The tempestuous Patrick Roy, who has a league-record 151 playoff wins, famously asked the Canadiens president during a 1995 game to trade him, was shipped to Colorado four days later and three years after that smashed TVs and a video machine in a coach’s office after being yanked from a tie game and missing out on a win. The inscrutable Dominik Hasek, a two-time league MVP with Buffalo, barely knew some of his teammates’ names, and Ed Belfour, third in career wins, had such obsessive prepractice routines that the

Stars

had to move their practice schedule back by 30 minutes to accommodate him.

Then there is the goalie perhaps destined to go down as the Greatest of All Time. Three shy of Roy’s mark of 551 regular-season wins and three shutouts behind Sawchuk’s record of 103 through Sunday, the Devils’ Martin Brodeur, now in his 16th NHL season, is surely the most balanced of the men who rank among the elite. He is garrulous and engaging, his spirit roaming far beyond the 48 square feet of blue paint outside his goal. He appears more than, in hockey's favorite phrase, “normal ... for a goalie.” He actually seems normal for almost anybody.

“There's Marty after the second period, having his Sprite and half a bagel, working on a shutout, and he’s talking and joking with the guys in the room,” says Oilers defenseman Sheldon Souray, a former New Jersey teammate. “Then he'll go out and stop 10 shots in the third. There’s just this calmness about him. Maybe it’s because he still thinks of hockey as a game.”

As victories and shutouts add up, the issue is not whether a seemingly nice guy will finish first but how high on the top shelf Brodeur will store those career records. His contract takes him through 2011–12, when he will turn 40 during the playoffs. Assuming good health (and until a torn biceps tendon in his left elbow sustained on Nov. 1 shut him down for four months, Brodeur had played at least 70 games in every season since 1997–98), he is capable of creating a statistical case that will have enough weight to crush any challenger. While Brodeur does not have career-defining saves or moments like so many others in the pantheon—think of Roy and his 10 straight overtime playoff wins in 1993—in a sport in which 300 regular-season victories has been as much of a benchmark as it is for a pitcher in baseball, Brodeur, boosted by skilled and defensively responsible New Jersey and by the additional win-loss decisions that come from the postlockout shootout, could approach 700. Considering he has averaged one shutout for every 5.5 victories, he could finish with 125.

The renewed appreciation of Brodeur, who, incidentally, has kicked a habit of drinking soda between periods and is in the best physical condition of his life, comes less than six years after the elegies surrounding Roy’s retirement anointed him as the greatest. The blink of an eye in which Roy ruled the top of the goaltending world is indecent given his playoff successes and his role in establishing the modern norm—the butterfly—for the position. But as Devils president Lou Lamoriello says, “Greatest is a very difficult word. Tomorrow comes along awfully quick.”

Brodeur returned from his tendon tear on Feb. 26 with a 4–0 victory over Colorado and then won his next three games, including another by shutout, stopping 96 of 100 shots in the four matches and relaunching his career as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Despite all his shutouts, Brodeur says he never wakes up thinking he has to blank an opponent that night, just beat it. Roy’s victory record is a brighter beacon because, as Brodeur says, “when you win, everybody’s happy.” He is guarded enough not to add that he also especially wants this record because it belongs to Roy.

Brodeur could have a chance to tie Roy’s mark—and certainly to move to the precipice of it—on Saturday in Montreal, Brodeur’s hometown and St. Patrick’s domain for two of his four Stanley Cups. Says New Jersey captain Jamie Langenbrunner, “A little ironic.” With Roy's freshly retired number 33 jersey hanging above him, Brodeur might add another episode in the soap-operatic psychodrama between these goaltending titans.

“A rivalry between two French guys,’ one former NHL goalie says of the relationship between Brodeur and Roy, and while that assessment contains an element of truth, it barely hints at the complexity. To posit that they dislike each other is no more illuminating because they really don’t, at least not in an easily digestible Carolina–Duke kind of way. “My relationship with Patrick is good,” Brodeur says. “If we see each other anywhere, we’ll take the time to go out of our way to say hi. But I don’t have his number and he doesn't have mine.”

Textbook Case A in the Brodeur–Roy Passive-Aggressive Handbook: When Roy was asked after his 2003 retirement to name the next great goalies, he mentioned Anaheim’s Jean-Sébastien Giguère and Florida’s Roberto Luongo but not Brodeur. “The reason,” Roy says now, “is I thought Marty was already there.” Brodeur claims not to recall the incident, but a former Devils teammate insists the goalie was stung by the perceived slight.

Textbook Case B: Brodeur never hesitates to express his disdain for the butterfly, a percentage-based technique that allows a splay-legged goalie to cover the lower part of the net. Brodeur is the antibutterflyer, tracking the puck and standing up, dropping to one knee or even stacking his pads to stop it, an amalgam so old-fashioned that Devils TV commentator Glenn Resch, a former Stanley Cup-winning goalie, likens it to a tennis player winning a Grand Slam with a wooden racket. Of course, whenever Brodeur, who as a teenager bolted the goalie school run by Roy’s guru, goaltending instructor François Allaire, dismisses the butterfly style, he is also prodding its progenitor, Roy. “Actually Marty butterflies more than he lets on,” says New Jersey backup Kevin Weekes. “We laugh about it. At a stoppage or when we come in the [dressing] room, I’ll say, ‘Nice butterfly.’ He'll kinda giggle and say, ‘You saw that? It wasn't really a full butterfly.’”

The precise origins of the distant relationship are not clear, but it probably dates to their time as teammates during the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Brodeur says that on the flight to Japan, Team Canada coach Marc Crawford, who was also Roy’s coach in Colorado at the time, told Brodeur that he would not play at all in the tournament. “I’ll never do that to another guy,” says Brodeur, who won Olympic gold in 2002 and approaches next year's Vancouver Games as co-No. 1 with Luongo. He is referring to Roy, not Crawford. “I don’t know if he said it or his coach or whatever, but the decision was made before we even skated.”

Three years later at a Team Canada camp, Brodeur, so adept a puckhandler that his style spurred the NHL to restrict the area where goalies could play the puck, remembers spending an entire practice giving Roy, clumsy with the puck, some tips.

“You know it's hard not to appreciate Patrick,” Brodeur says. “The guy was unbelievable. I played against him in the playoffs. [The Avalanche’s four-games-to-three win over the Devils in the 2001 Cup finals can also be read: Roy 1, Brodeur 0.] For me, he’s the top goalie, the guy I looked up to all my life. I don’t hide that ... We’re just two competitors. He was there first. I was just the one trying to push him off some of the records.”

Before the arm injury delayed Brodeur’s chase, Roy—who insists he could have extended his 19-season NHL career “two or three more years to make it tougher for him to get it ... but that’s not the way I am”—said he hoped that his schedule would permit him to attend the potential record-breaker. Serendipitously, the junior team that Roy coaches, the Quebec Remparts, is off this Saturday, and Roy has said that he might attend that night’s Devils–Canadiens game at the Bell Centre if Brodeur is in position to tie the wins record. “The Sawchuk family was great when I broke his record [of 447 career wins] and set a good example for how to deal with it,” Roy says. “Whatever I can do that will be great for Marty, I will.”

Roy and Brodeur—or should it be Brodeur and Roy?—will converge at 551, possibly in the wintry city so important to them. If the record is not matched then, it will be soon. And then Brodeur will wave goodbye, taking goaltending numbers to places over the horizon.

GALLERY: Martin Brodeur Through The Years

Martin Brodeur Through the Years

Goaltending came naturally to Brodeur, whose father, Denis, played the position on the Canadian Olympic team that won the bronze medal in 1956. Raised in Montreal, Martin played forward as a kid—sewing the seeds of the stickhandling skills that would serve him so well in the NHL—before switching to goal at age seven. Though he idolized butterfly master Patrick Roy, Brodeur chose a standup style and developed superb mobility, instincts, positioning and puck-handling ability.

Drafted out of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League by the Devils with the 20th pick in the 1990 draft, Brodeur made his NHL debut on March 26, 1992, with 24 saves in a 4-2 win over Boston.

After a full season in the AHL, Brodeur was added to the Devils' opening night roster for the 1993-94 season and went on to win the Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year with a 27-11-8 record, 2.40 GAA and three shutouts, the first of his career coming on Oct. 20, 1993 vs. Anaheim.

As the Devils' new starting goalie, Brodeur played in 40 of their 48 games during the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season, going 19-11-6 with a 2.44 GAA. He was brilliant in the playoffs, holding Detroit to only seven goals in four finals games as the Devils won their first Stanley Cup.

During the 1995-96 season, Brodeur went 34-30-12 with a 2.34 GAA and .911 save percentage, beginning a record streak of 12 consecutive seasons of 30 or more wins, a run that included seven with 40 or more.

Blessed with a stifling defense in front of him, Brodeur led the NHL with a 1.88 GAA in 1996-97—becoming the first goaltender with a sub-1.90 since Bernie Parent of the Flyers in 1973-74. He also became the first since Montreal's Ken Dryden in 1976-77 to record 10 shutouts in a season.

In Game 1 of the 1997 Eastern quarterfinals vs. Montreal, Brodeur joined Philadelphia's Ron Hextall as the only goaltenders to score in the postseason by shooting the puck into the net. Brodeur's prowess with the stick and fondness for roaming from his crease to play the puck led to the current "Brodeur Rule" that confines such activity by goalies to a trapezoid that is eight feet out from each goal post and 28 feet wide at the boards behind the net.

In 1997-98, Brodeur led the NHL with 43 wins and posted 10 shutouts for the second straight season. He also became only the third goaltender (along with Hall of Famers Terry Sawchuk and Harry Lumley) to have back-to-back sub-2.00 GAA campaigns.

Again leading the NHL with 43 wins in 1999-2000 and tying Bernie Parent's combined mark of 59 combined regular- and postseason victories, Brodeur backstopped the Devils to their second Stanley Cup, which they won by beating the Dallas Stars in six games.

Seeking a repeat, Brodeur faced his childhood hero Patrick Roy in a memorable 2001 Stanley Cup Final, won by Colorado in seven games after the Avalanche rose from a three-games-to-two deficit. Roy denied the Devils a chance to win the Cup on home ice with a 4-0 win in Game 6, then completed the comeback with a 3-1 win in Colorado.

Leading the NHL with 73 appearances in 2001-02, Brodeur became the third-fastest goaltender to reach 300 career wins when he beat Ottawa 2-0 on Dec. 15, 2001.

Like his father, Martin has represented Canada in international play, most notably winning the gold medal at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City after posting a 4-0-1 mark with a 1.80 GAA in the tournament. It was the second of his four Olympic stints (he did not see action in 1998). He was also a member of Canada's 1996 and 2005 World Championship teams and '97 and '05 World Cup teams.

2003-Martin-Brodeur-sons-Jeremie-Anthony-William-Stanley-Cup-Vezina.jpg — Kevin Frayer/AP

Brodeur, seen here with sons Jeremy, Anthony and William, won his first Vezina Trophy for a 2002-03 campaign in which he became the first NHL netminder to have four 40-win seasons (surpassing Sawchuk and Jacques Plante). He was a complete miser in the postseason, setting an NHL mark of seven shutouts, including three vs. Anaheim in the finals, as the Devils won their third Stanley Cup.

Al Bello/Getty Images

Setting a single-season record of 48 wins in 2006-07, Brodeur won his third Vezina while also posting 12 shutouts.

On Nov. 17, 2007, Brodeur beat Philadelphia 6-2 to join Patrick Roy as the only members of the NHL's 500-wins club. His overall mark of 44-27-0-6, 2.17 GAA and four shutouts earned him his fourth Vezina in five seasons.

Jeff Zelevansky/Icon SMI; Bill Kostroun/AP

Again playing a role in the creation of a rule, Brodeur saw his rivalry with Sean Avery bubble over in Game 3 of the 2008 Eastern quarterfinal when the Rangers agitator stood waving his stick in the goaltender's face—this after Avery's two interference penalties in the series. The NHL was moved to instantly invoke an "Avery Rule" prohibiting such antics. After the Rangers eliminated the Devils in five games, Brodeur snubbed Avery in the handshake line, leading Avery to famously remark "I guess fatso forgot to shake my hand."

With anticipation building for his assault on Roy's career wins mark, Brodeur suffered a tear of the biceps tendon in his left elbow on Nov. 1, 2008, ending his streak of 70-plus-game seasons at 10. Returning to action on Feb. 26, 2009, he picked up where he left off with a 4-0 shutout of Colorado in which he made 24 saves.

2009-Martin-Brodeur-father-Denis-Patrick-Roy-551st-win.jpg — Andre Ringuette/NHLI via Getty Images; Paul Chiasson/AP

Brodeur joined Patrick Roy atop the NHL's victories list with a 3-1 win over the Canadiens on March 14, 2009. The night was made even sweeter because it came in Montreal, with his father (pictured w/camera) and Roy looking on, the banner bearing the former Canadien's recently-retired number (33) hanging over him, and the sell-out crowd chanting Brodeur's name.

Brodeur broke Patrick Roy's career record for goaltending victories, picking up his 552nd by turning back 30 shots in a 3-2 win over the Chicago Blackhawks on March 17, 2009. The victory came in Brodeur's 987th game of a 22-year career he played almost entirely with the Devils. In the spirit of March Madness, Brodeur took out a pair of scissors and cut the net. ''It's definitely harder than I thought,'' he quipped. ''These basketball players, it's only a little net. This was a big net. I had help from a couple of my teammates.''

On December 12, 2009 Brodeur reached yet another milestone when he shuts out Penguins 4-0, breaking Terry Sawchuk’s career NHL shutout record of 103. Nine days later the Devils legend blanked the Pens yet again to shatter George Hainsworth’s pro record of 104 pails of whitewash.

By blanking the Thrashers 3-0 at the Philips Center in Atlanta on April 6, 2010, Brodeur became the first NHL goalie to reach the 600-wins mark. The victory, his league-leading 43rd of the season, also extended his career shutout mark to 110.

Coming off his 14th and final 30-win regular season, Brodeur blanked the Florida Panthers, 4-0, in Game 4 the 2012 Eastern Conference quarterfinals on April 19 to break Patrick Roy's career postseason shutout mark (23) and become only the second goaltender to reach 100 playoff wins.

2012-Martin-Brodeur-Anton-Volchenkov-Ryan-Carter-Johan-Hedberg.jpg — Rich Kane/Icon SMI

On May 25, 2012, the Devils beat the Rangers 3–2 thanks to Adam Henrique's goal in overtime, sending Brodeur to his fifth Stanley Cup finals appearance. New Jersey lost to the Los Angeles Kings in six games in what would turn out to be the 17th and final postseason of his career.

After missing a month of action due to a nerve injury in his back, Brodeur returned to the net on March 21, 2013 with some of his old stick magic, scoring a power play goal against the Carolina Hurricanes that made him the only NHL goalie to record three career tallies, and the second after Evgeni Nabokov of the Sharks to light the lamp with the man advantage.

After defeating Blue Jackets goalkeeper Sergei Bobrovsky in an online vote in June 2013, Brodeur won the honor of being the cover athlete on EA's NHL 14 video game.

After the Devils acquired the 208th pick in the 2013 NHL Draft from the Kings, Brodeur was given the very special privilege of making the announcement that New Jersey had selected his son, Anthony, 18, a goalie out of Minnesota's Shattuck-St. Mary's prep school, in the seventh and final round.

Unsigned as a free agent, Brodeur inked a one-year, $700,000 deal with the injury-plagued St. Louis Blues on Dec. 2, 2014. He concluded his legendary career with seven appearances, a 3-3-0 record, .899 save percentage and 2.87 GAA. On Jan. 29, 2015, he announced his retirement as the NHL's all-time leader in games played by a goalie (1,266), saves (28,928), wins (691), shutouts (125), and playoff shutouts (24).