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Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots
- ojbyrne 18y agoSmart idea. Since hockey is generally trying to increase scoring, I bet it gets banned.
- evilneanderthal 18y agoit would be close to impossible to prove that it makes any difference whatsoever. and i'd imagine skill players would take offense at the idea that they look to see where the goalie's pads are.
- ojbyrne 18y agoI think that's pre-Bill James thinking about sports, especially the part about taking offense. If half the goalies in the NHL suddenly adopted this, it wouldn't take very long at all to measure statistical differences.
- evilneanderthal 18y agonot good enough; you have to measure improvement. but since no goalie is consistent enough for that to be possible to do, you'll never have proof.
- tokenadult 18y agoThe proper experimental design would show whether or not the pads make a difference. http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
- evilneanderthal 18y agoI agree, but there's no way to achieve the required rigor. How can you get a double-blind study when everyone can see the pads? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
- ojbyrne 18y agoThere are plenty of experimental designs other than double-blind that have been demonstrated to prove causality. Or actually "quasi-experimental" but still. I had this book inflicted upon me in a past life: http://www.amazon.com/Experimental-Quasi-Experimental-Designs-Generalized-Inference/dp/0395615569 http://www.amazon.com/Experimental-Quasi-Experimental-Design...
- evilneanderthal 18y agoI know we're just arguing on an internet forum, but in all seriousness, how can you possibly achieve control? At this point I'm more interested in whether such a thing is even possible and less interested in being right on the internet =]
- Retric 18y agoDouble blind is setup so you can see low order effects. If your testing is 1 pound of cyanide is lethal it does not take a lot of scientific rigor to find out. If the pads are 1% better it would be next to impossible to find out. But if they are 1/5 or 5 times as good it would be obvious.
- scott_s 18y agoDouble-blind is needed when the prejudices of the experimenter and the subject may influence the outcome. In this case, it's safe to assume that the subjects care more about winning than they do about the study itself. Further, what you're testing is their reaction to this new thing. It's inherently impossible to not let the subjects know if they're in the control or experimental group. Good experimental design is not synonymous with double-blind.
- mrtron 18y agoGenerally I aim for just inside the post...so I don't look at the goalie. The puck definitely does go where I look though - so it could make a bit of a difference.
- a-priori 18y agoWhat about pads with a fake goalpost on the outer edges?
- mrtron 18y agoI don't think that would be nearly as effective as the netting - the orientation of the pads would make it only be somewhat upright a small percentage of the time.
- teuobk 18y agoDo you aim there even if the goalie is hugging the post? What if you're in the slot and he's showing a huge 5-hole? Obviously, you're not going to try to hit the goalie, so that implies some awareness of the goalie's current location and a reaction to that information. [Actually, I'm just trying to learn your shooting habits so I can inform my goalie brethren. What's your name, and where do you play? :-) ]
- mrtron 18y agoIf the goalie is hugging one post, I am going for the opposite side. That is my patented wrap-around move since I am not as quick as I once was...the goalie always makes it to the same side so I come out a bit and go opposite top corner. Huge 5-hole I think I look at where his pads are and then try to shoot in between...maybe that is why I am rarely successful there! [I play in Toronto, and I have an unusually large amount of penalty minutes and not many goals because I play defense]
- wallflower 18y agoThis reminded me of an 'experiment' with a morbidly obese goalie. "The only way to fully test this theory was to get an NHL team to shoot against the faux fatso..." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119143109983647814.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119143109983647814.html
- ojbyrne 18y agoThat's a great article. One of the counter-arguments "Knowing we were going to play against him, we would take some extra practice and make sure we could hit those holes." is fallacious, because it ignores the fact that the five guys on the other team are also going to practice to ensure that you can't hit those holes. I. e. there's going to be a defenseman on each side of him filling the (very small) gaps.
- latortuga 18y agoFantastic read, my favorite part: "This led me to believe that real science was occurring, because it didn't seem like anyone was having fun."
- teuobk 18y agoAs a goalie, I'm skeptical about claims that those pads will fool players. In fact, one school of thought says that pads should be dark so that the goalie appears as large and imposing as possible. Regardless of their effectiveness, I think they look cool.
- thorax 18y agoIt only needs to confuse them for a split second once in a while to be a net gain (no pun intended). Even if it's just misjuding where they begin and end, their motion, distance, etc. They're not going to be like an invisibility cloak, but any legal performance gain would be cool.
- keltecp11 18y agoGive this kid a job. He's more than a Hockey Player... He's an Entrepreneurial-athlete in the making.
- eru 18y agoDoesn't need a job, then. Will make his own.
- Allocator2008 18y agoLast time I was in Vegas watching a fight a hockey game broke out. Hate it when that happens.
- mrtron 18y agoI don't know why you are getting massively downvoted other than being a bit off topic. Anyways, fighting is an important part of hockey. Hockey is a very physical sport, and fighting keeps things clean. Players enforce a whole set of rules themselves through fighting. For example, even in a non-contact hockey league, you don't do anything stupid like cross-checking someone to the head because they will get their ass kicked.
- tdavis 18y agoI downvoted him because (a) it is a worn out cliche of a joke and (b) I played hockey for over 10 years and only got in a couple fights and did not see many more than that. The game is not about fighting. That isn't why it's played and it isn't why it should be watched. Only the ignorant seem to think otherwise.
- dfranke 18y agoIs this site crashing Firefox for anyone else?
- VinzO 18y agoI use firefox 3 and it is not crashing with this site
- daveambrose 18y agoAnyone have pictures of the pads?
- gravitycop 18y agoAnyone have pictures of the pads? Besides the pic at the article, that is also here?: http://news.google.com/news?q=hockey+goalie+pads http://news.google.com/news?q=hockey+goalie+pads
- daveambrose 18y agoOh, I read the article on my BlackBerry so I didn't see the pic. Thanks for pointing this out.
- newy 18y agoNeat concept, but I'm pretty impressed by how the design turned out. Credit should go to Stomp in this case, looks like they executed the concept quite well. Goalies are a special bunch -- I suppose spending more than half your time standing alone leaves you plenty of time to explore your artistic side (see the great masks out there) and think up ways to gain an edge on your opponent.
- mmc 18y agoFirst time I've seen a blocker design for visual confusion, but some existing leg pad designs do incorporate this kind of visual trick to attempt to make the 5-hole look bigger. Here's a long list of thumbnails of pads: http://www.hockeyworld.com/catHome.ihtml?catID=30&shop=0&snum=1&enum=84&p=0&sortBy=new http://www.hockeyworld.com/catHome.ihtml?catID=30&shop=0... Note that while some just try to look cool, there is a common pattern of diagonal stripes from the inside of the knee to the outside of the foot - when you go down into a butterfly, the idea is that this makes it look like your knees are bent more than they are, and the five-hole is bigger than it is, because the insides of the foot and shin are white like the inside of the crease. The Vaughan VPG 6* look the most like they're trying to fool the eye. Interestingly, others come close but ruin it by letting a dark pattern repeat right at the inside of the toe. I thought that this was a Patrick Roy innovation, but couldn't remember where I read about it first.