If the crack of a hockey stick on a puck is a sweet sound to players, the snap of an expensive composite stick breaking is the complete opposite for fans. How many times have Canadiens supporters witnessed a prime scoring opportunity when it really matters...late in a game, on a PP, in overtime...disintegrate along with the shooter's stick? There was one game last fall in which Mike Matheson, Lane Hutson and Juraj Slafkovsky's composite corpses all littered the ice at the same time.
This is infuriating for fans. You see a player with a perfectly clear path to the net, the tying or winning goal on their stick and BOOM. The stick blows up and the scoring chance is gone. The players must find it even more frustrating, even though the equipment they use is by their own choice.
Of course, many of us learned to play the game using good old wooden sticks, which were sturdy, but pretty heavy, especially for younger players. Now the top-end sticks are made of carbon fiber and there's a lot of science that goes into their creation. Players want high performance, light sticks with good flex, but they want them durable as well. That's what manufacturers call the Holy Grail of stick building.
"As you get up into those elite level hockey sticks for the pros, you're going to want the weight as minimal as you possibly can, but it doesn't sacrifice performance," says Sherwood Hockey VP Brendon Arnold. "And that's where you get the conversation around durability. You have to strike a balance between pushing the limits of performance while also trying not to diminish the durability when you're using materials that in essence are less durable than the fiberglasses of the world. It's a delicate balance and it's a dance that that every brand is always trying to to manage when when building at the elite level."
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Hockey sticks take a lot of punishment, and from the first shot they start to break down internally. When you add battles in the corners and along the boards, faceoffs, shot blocking and slashing, (none of which the stick is actually designed to do...it's meant for shooting only) the stick absorbs more and more stress until it finally gives up the ghost.
The problem is, it's not just elite players who want the best sticks. Young players emulating their heroes and whose parents see pro potential in their kids want them too. And they're not cheap. In fact, some parents say their childrens' sticks are the most expensive part of their equipment. Gloves, pants, helmets and skates can be handed down to a younger kid, but a broken stick has to be replaced.
"Carbon fiber is the number one material that is used for the sticks," Arnold reiterates. "And when you think of what's going on in the world today with the increased demand for automobiles and aerospace, those are the two areas that are using an extreme amount of carbon fiber, which doesn't allow for a lot from a reserve standpoint to be readily available. So it's not just products getting a higher cost because the brands want to make more money. It's actually the physical material that is used in these products to continually innovate has increased over the years."
Colorado Avalanche alternate captain Nathan MacKinnon has said he goes through 400 sticks a year but they're paid for by his pro team and not all of them break. Brendon Arnold says for some elite players, it's just a superstition thing or they want the mental satisfaction of taking out a brand-new stick at certain times of the game. Other players have different sticks for different situations. For example, a defenceman may have one stick for killing penalties when durability is more important than shot performance and another with a different flex for power plays when they're shooting more. But for young players who are bankrolled by mom and dad, the cost can really add up, even to the point of preventing kids from playing higher-level hockey at all.
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That's why people like Rod Daigle are trying to find solutions. He's a hockey dad in Mississauga, Ontario and was tired of buying new sticks for his teen sons so he started a small repair business that's now taking off. He says it's been a lot of trial and error finding the right formula to make a strong repair.
"The race is to get lighter and lighter sticks," he explains. "So the kids embrace that philosophy and you know, it's not magic. You can't keep lowering the volume of material and expect it to last as long. I don't care how strong the carbon fiber is."
"You don't have a lot of material to work with. So yeah, you have to get creative as to how to repair the stick, but keep it feeling as close to the original as possible, because the players really, really want that. Absolutely, it's trial and error. And I've used my 15-year-old son as my guinea pig most of the times."
Daigle says he's only been in the stick repair business for a few months, but he's learned a few things, one being that a stick can only be repaired so often before the additional material starts to affect the weight. Still, if a fix can save a family $200-$400 dollars, parents think it's worth it. They hear about his repair company and especially as the season winds down, they'd rather pay to fix a used stick than spend hundreds on a new one.
In an era when the game is getting more expensive for youth to play and more parents are finding other sports fit into family budgets better, any cost reduction in equipment could keep a young person in the sport a year or two longer, allowing him or her to develop their skills and move up to more elite levels. That could eventually mean Team Canada having a deeper pool of talent to pick from for big tournaments.
And Daigle says some of the pro manufacturers have come to him too. He says 20 years ago, repairing sticks wasn't economically feasible for manufacturers but now the high cost of buying new is making companies consider offering repair services to customers and they've come to Daigle to ask for his advice.
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Alain Hache is a physicist and amateur goalie who's written a couple of books on the physics of hockey and the science of the slapshot. He's done a lot of research on the topic and he says if players insist on performance over durability, they're going to have have more breakages, no matter what. So, for that reason, he believes if cost is a factor in affording to play hockey, fancier sticks won't make a huge difference for most players who aren't elite.
"I remember not so long ago you could get a stick easily for less than 100," he says. "There's no real reason to work with an elite level stick. To me, it's just about developing skills and skating and shooting accurately. And for the few that will get far enough where equipment like that will make a difference, it would make sense for them. But for the majority of players, I think, you know, cheaper sticks would be probably the way to go."
Brendon Arnold at Sherwood says the ideal would be to never see Mike Matheson in the slot in OT with the puck on his stick and not get the shot because of breakage. But as long as he wants more flex and lighter weight, that's probably a Holy Grail as likely to find as King Arthur's.
That's fine for him, even if the fans pull their hair out when that stick snaps. However, for a game that needs its young players to develop more than it needs them to have the best equipment in the world, kids need less Holy Grail and more reliable affordability.
