Show Stopper
Henrik Lundqvist is almost perfect-now all he needs is the Stanley Cup
By Dan Robson in Ottawa
*The article below was in a May 21st, 2012 issue
Henrik Lundqvist hunches over the inverted V of his white pads, blocker and catcher resting on the crux. He stares down at the red Wendy's logo beneath his skates, surrounded by empty seats lined with white towels at Ottawa's Scotiabank Place. It's eight hours to game time, the third in the first round of the playoffs. Eight hours until those towels twirl wildly in the hands of 20,182 opposing fans, bellowing in unison: "Lu-u-u-nd-qvist, Lu-u-u-nd-qvist, Lu-u-u-nd-qvist." He drops into a flurry of imaginary saves-left pad, right pad, butterfly...left pad, right pad, butterfly. It's a machine gun of memorized movement. He jumps up to his skates and hunches forward again, his shoulders held a little higher than before. He has, it seems, secured and imaginary shutout as the New York Rangers' morning skate whirls on around him.
"King Henrik" has long been considered hockey royalty, but this season marks his first opportunity to reign supreme. The 30-year-old was arguably the best goalie in the NHL during the regular season. His career best 1.97 goals against average and .930 save percentage led the Rangers to the top of the Eastern Conference. In a recent poll, 38 percent of NHL players said that Lundqvist was the most difficult goalie in the league to score on. Nashville's Pekka Rinne was the distant runner-up, at 19 percent.
Lundqvist will likely win the Vezina trophy and has been nominated for the Hart, as the league's most valuable player, an honor not typically bestowed on goalies. But the only shine on his mind these days is the silver glint of the Stanley Cup. He took a step closer to it as the hero in a tight series in Ottawa, which he topped off by fiercely defending a 2-1 lead against a blitz by the Sens in the last minutes of game seven, sending the Rangers to the Eastern Conference semifinal against Washington.
In the locker room a few days before those late-game heroics, Lundqvist is asked what goes through his mind before he plays. Does he worry about the hype? The Sports Illustrated cover story, the New York Times profile, #Lundsanity trending on Twitter? Does he worry about the weight of Gotham on his shoulders? That he's the Rangers' only hope to win the Stanley Cup? Well, he's almost asked those things. "Henrik, what goes through your..." The question stops abruptly when a short man in a black suit suddenly appears, shoving his arm in front of Lundqvist. "No more questions," he says, prickly as the wise-guy stubble on his chin. The King's guard means business, and the scolded scribes scatter like cockroaches. Lundqvist fiddles with his skates, and hands them to a trainer with strict instructions. He gives his equipment a once-over and leaves the room in sweaty long underwear. Minutes later, he walked by the door in a suit that was surely hand-stiched by the finest tailors at Hugo Boss, his hair coiffed like he's heading to a fashion shoot.
It's more likely that he's going back to his hotel room to perform an intense pre-game routine that is mostly unknowable, because, as a goalie, it exists almost entirely in his mind. Even his goaltending understudy with the Rangers, Martin Biron, can't describe Lundqvist's pre-game world. "I sit next to him all the time," Biron says. "But I'm not in his room, I don't know what he's doing. Whatever he does, he's always extremely prepared."
But bottling up perfection is not advisable. Lundqvist's uber-suave, impenetrable persona-like a James Bond in goalie pads-has sometimes come undone. His frustration was on full display after game six of the Ottawa series, when he told reporters he thought the ref's call on a late Sens goal was a "joke" and said "someone wanted them in the game for sure." Lundqvist reserves his harshest criticism for himself, as is evident after games in which he feels he's failed to live up to his own impossible standards. More than one reporter has witnessed his ivory-white smile and Nordic-blue eyes contorting into a face of rage while he abuses equipment and swears into TV cameras in the dressing room. "I f---in' sucked tonight." It's the mark of a genius, of course. The internal torment of brilliance.
It was there in young Lundqvist as he skated on the frozen lakes of Åre, a small village of 800 in northwestern Sweden. He and his identical twin, Joel, started playing hockey when they were four. If they weren't on one of the lakes, they were in the sandbox they flooded near their home to serve as a mini-rink. In kindergarten, if the Lundqvist brothers lost a schoolyard game of pretty much anything, they would run off to the nearby woods crying inconsolably. "Our parents would have to come and look for us," says Joel, who played 134 games for the Dallas Stars and is not a center in the Swedish Elite League (SEL). As children, the twins always played on the same team, because if one beat the other: "Oh, it was a mess," he says.
With maturity, both brothers have managed to put a cap on the debilitating competitiveness. Neither has run crying into the woods in years. But the urge lingers. "He still gets really upset after bad games," Joel says, noting that sometimes he won't hear from his brother for days after a loss.
Lundqvist had the luxury of being relatively unknown when he was drafted in the seventh round, 205th overall, by the Rangers in 2000. For the next few years, Lundqvist developed his game in the comparatively dim spotlight if the SEL. He worked with Swedish goalie coach Michael Lehner, whose background was in a style of karate called Kyokushin. Lehner applied the principles of martial arts to training Lundqvist. Lundqvist led Frölunda HC to the SEL championship and was named the league's top goalie. By the time the NHL lockout brought established goalies over to Sweden in 2004, Lundqvist was ready to outshine them. He reached the NHL in 2005, and was a finalist for the Vezina trophy that season, and the next two. He's never wavered. Lundqvist has earned more than 30 wins in each of his seven seasons, even when the Rangers were far inferior to the team they are today. His save percentage and goals-against-average move by mere fractions in the hundredths column. For several years, Steve Valiquette had the unfortunate task of playing behind Lundqvist. Off the ice, Lundqvist, was always affable, charming and charitable. But on the ice, even in practice, he was untouchable. "It's just hard work that never stops," says Valiquette. "I only saw him have a few bad practices in four years. He always seemed to be on." Valiquette recalls a breakaway competition at the end of practice, in which he stopped every shot, about 12 in all. He looked up, satisfied that he'd outdone Lundqvist. Except he hadn't. Lundqvist blanked his shooters too. Valiquette let in two in the second round. Lundqvist remained unbeatable. "He stopped our entire team," says Valiquette. "That was common on a day-to-day basis."
In New York, Lundqvist started working with acclaimed goalie coach Benoit Allaire. Under his guidance, Lundqvist worked on specific scoring scenarios for 30 minuted before every practice. It was always the same answer, depending on where the shooter came from: a low shot from the an angle is always a pad save, a pass across the crease is always a butterfly slide. The position becomes one of repetition and reaction, says Valiquette, so he doesn't have to over think his movements during the came. Allaire worked on simplifying Lundqvist's general approach to the game, too. In goaltending, every mistake can cost your team the game. Instead of dwelling on that grim reality, Allaire reviews only the effective things his goalies have done. Watching game tape, he skips over the mistakes and focuses on the positive positioning and saves made. "With Henrik, that positive influence had been a contributing factor to his success," Valiquette says.
Despite Lundqvist's steadfast net-minding, the Rangers have never made it past the second round of the playoffs with him in goal*. He averaged 70.6 regular season games his previous five seasons, a workhorse load for a goalie. This season, he played in 62- and won 39, a personal record.
Now, rested and ready, Lundqvist is fighting for the game's ultimate measure of success. In the Rangers' locker room, he is asked how he stays focused under all the pressure. "It's a challenge. You're emotional," he says. "But I try to stay cool." He turns to his locker to continue fiddling with his equipment, his back dripping with sweat. "All right," he says, ending the questions. "That's it." There;s another game just days away, and King Henrik's court is closed until then.
