From the Front Office: Steve Briere

Wanted to start first with your playing career. You played all over the world, and we talked about, for skaters, how the European or the other side of the world's game can change based on the US game. Did that influence what you learned about goaltending?

I wouldn't say that I was influenced by Europe too much when I was playing I was more focused on North American hockey. Patrick Roy was my idol growing up, so I just watched him every day. I didn't really know much about Europe until I went and played there. I focused more on NHL goalies when I was a kid…Eddie Belfour and the Patrick Roy’s of the world. I was a huge goalie nerd.

Have you ever talked with Patrick Roy?

(Smiles) I have not. He’s one of the guys I haven't spoken to yet. I've gotten to meet some of the most amazing people in the world, like Johnny Bauer when he was still alive. He actually called me at the house one day and asked me if he could come to watch a game with me when I was coaching in Toronto, and I got to spend three hours up in the booth, just me and him. That was probably the coolest thing I've ever gotten to do. I’ve gotten to work with Jacques Caron, who played in the NHL back in the ’60s, and he’s just an amazing human being. I've gotten to meet a lot of great guys: Scotty Bowman, Jacques Lemaire, plus all the coaches that I've worked with have been just amazing. I’m a very fortunate person.

Not every player can become a coach. Take us through your path from finishing your playing career and then getting behind the bench or maybe inside the net.

It's an interesting journey. I was fully focused on just being a player for the longest time, but with a growing family and needing to make some money, I started goalie schools and teaching kids all around my neighborhood in Winnipeg. (Coaching) just kind of expanded to all the different locations that I had played, and my passion grew from seeing a kid that you helped when he was nine, and he goes on to play juniors or get a scholarship and change his life. I've got some goalies who are still playing professional hockey over in Europe that I coached when they were six and nine years old, and they send me pictures with their babies and their kids playing. And that is just the greatest thing ever. Taking a kid from San Antonio, Texas, to go on and play Division I college hockey is such a cool feeling to be able to help people.

You get such a good feeling. Like all of us, when we help somebody, and it goes well, you get this big rush of joy. It's almost like a drug. You just get addicted to wanting to help people achieve their dreams. When I retired from playing, I went back to school to do my master's degree, and I started teaching university, and I was building companies for the university, so I was teaching there, and then I was teaching the Division I hockey program. And that just led from one thing to the other, and you know, kind of went from there, got my chance. Mike Babcock gave me my chance in Toronto, and I'm forever grateful. And it's been a long journey. It's been a great journey.

I talked with both Joey (Daccord) and Grubi (Philipp Grubauer) about you for this interview, and one of the things they said that's a challenge for coaches, but a big strength of yours is that if you're a goaltending coach, you have just two players under your purview, and you really have to build strong relationships with two guys who might be very different depending on the team. How do you do that? How do you flex that muscle and become effective in managing and building those relationships?

It's a different process for everybody. Obviously, with Grubi being from his background, and he's a lot different than Joey being from his background, Joey's been around the goaltending environment his whole life. His dad was my coach when I played in the American Hockey League, and then he worked with me in Toronto, so we had developed a goalie union in Toronto…his dad myself and Piero Greco. So, I was familiar with his dad. And his dad's been in the goalie coaching industry for a long time. So, I was familiar with that. There's a lot of lingo and a lot of similarities that you can connect to. And Joey has a very gregarious personality as it is.

With Grubi, he's a little bit more quiet, a little bit more reserved, but maybe the kindest person I've ever met. He's just a wonderful person. It sometimes takes a little bit more to peel back the layers to get to know Grubi and so, I've developed these things over years…whether it's the Myers Briggs or the DISC personality test, to understand the baseline of where a player is and what kind of personality they are. I always do a questionnaire every year just asking where they're at and what their thoughts are and so on, so you get to know them a little bit more that way.

We try to have a goalie dinner once every couple of months and go out for dinner just the three of us. I text them all the time, whether it's a good book or a paragraph from a book or a chapter. Sometimes, it’s a funny video or an old-school video of goalies making skate saves. And I'll send it to the goalies and we'll say it's old school day tomorrow. But it's just constantly letting them know that you care about them and that you're thinking about them. I think that I heard an expression from a friend of mine, Gordon McFarland, a long time ago: “people don't care what you know until they know that you care.” So I've always kept that in the back of my mind that unless you really truly care about them, they're really not listening because they want to know that you have their best intentions at heart first. So, I always try to keep that in the back of my mind.

And it's difficult, because sometimes you have to have difficult conversations with them, but you love them so much. It's like your kids, right? You know you have to discipline them, and most of the time we discipline our kids, we feel worse after, right? I go have a cry in my room after I yell at my son or something, right? Well, the (goalies) are very similar. You care about them so much that sometimes it's harder on you than it is on them. They just brush it off and move on and meanwhile, you spent four hours before thinking about it and four hours after thinking about it. So sometimes those things can be difficult, but that's my process that I've adapted. I think that learning (the goalies) is probably the number one key, whether it's off the ice or on the ice, and just understanding their game so in-depth that you understand it better than they do. Then they'll be willing to listen.

Your goalies also said your job is such a challenge for you because you really have to coach the mind. And you were just talking about that. How would you describe the balance of your work, of coaching tactical versus what's happening in the mind?

I've heard all kinds of things of (goaltending being) 90-percent mental and all that kind of stuff. I don't know that I have a percentage on it. I think that that percentage varies. I think when goalies are rolling, and they're playing well, you stay out of the way, and it's more technical. I think if they're struggling with something, then it becomes more mental than technical at the moment. I think it's in ebbs and flows. Sometimes it's more mental, sometimes it's more technical.

Obviously, we all know that in it's not just sports it's life (too), it's mostly mental, right? It's how we look at things and how we frame things. A lot of times, framing is the big thing, right? If you get a negative mindset, you frame it in one way. You get in a positive mindset, you frame it in another way. So, having the ability to always frame it in a positive outlook takes practice.

Our minds are no different than any other muscle in our body. If we don't work at it every day, then you're going to get weak at it, right? So, I try to work at it every day with the goalies, whether it's gratitude, whether it's a positive way of looking at every situation, whether it's doing an act of kindness for somebody, those little tiny exercises. Even in practice, you're not allowed to say, ‘I could have been better,’ because then it implies that you weren't good enough, and now that's a negative mindset, right? So little exercises like that you're constantly trying to do. I think the amount that you do varies depending on where they're at, if they're playing really well, or are they struggling?

Let's get into the position. There's that old cliché that “goalies are voodoo.” What do people not understand about the position?

I've heard that. I've had my hockey schools for years, and if you asked any parent if their son wants to be a goalie right away, their first answer is, “Oh no! And (a) this can cost me a lot of money, and (b) is my kid weird?”

I would say that it's the exact opposite. I think being a goalie is the greatest blessing you could ever ask for. I think they're the smartest guys; they're the hardest-working guys. The position is misunderstood because not very many people do it, and it's a very introverted position, right? You're by yourself. You don't have anybody to talk to. You're constantly having to process things on your own.

As a skater, if you miss a pass and you get back to the bench, 20 guys on the bench understand exactly what you just went through because they've had it happen to them 100 times. As a goalie, you have nobody. (a), you can't come to the bench, and (b), not a single player is going to understand except the other goaltender, and when you're young, the other goaltender wants to steal your job. So you really are on an island.

That's where I come in. You become their ability to talk to somebody and evaluate and flow through. I don't think goalies are weird at all. I think they are very intellectual. They are very thoughtful, and I think that they are forced to think about things in a different way because of the position. A lot of them end up being amazing people outside of the rink because of the way they think; it's just that the way they think is different than all the players think. Players might have 10 different things happen in one shift. They have to just let it go and move on. They have so many things going on, and they're also playing with other people and relying on other people, whereas when you're a goaltender, you're really just relying on yourself. And we try to encourage that as well, that, “Hey, it's up to me” (mindset). But sometimes, that could be overwhelming and very hard.

Grubi shared with me that you go in the room between periods, working with your goaltenders and almost serving as a translator, if you will, if maybe something needs to change in front of the goaltender, or maybe the goaltender isn't seeing something. Walk us through that part of your job. Because we see the coaches behind the bench, but we don't get to see you working with your players in game.

I think that goes to what I talked about earlier, about what's going on in the game, right? I don't talk to the goalies very often during the game. I would say very minimally. But when I do, let's say it’s about puck touches. Puck touches are something where the defense and the goalie have to be in sync. Maybe in a particular game, because of the forecheck, we have to adjust the way we come back, right? So between periods, I might go and talk to the defense and say, “Hey, let's adjust; let's do this.” Then I have to go to the goaltender and say, “Hey, we're going to adjust and do this. Let's look for this out.”

Every once in a while, we'll talk about something technically, but most of the time, I don't want the goalies thinking during the game. They have to be just reacting. And so, very rarely do I ever talk to the goaltenders or talk to them about stuff like that. I might say, “Hey, you're getting a little deep, or they're looking to the backside on the power play or something like that. But not very often, probably three or four times. Most of the time, when I go in the dressing room, it's more to address the goalie and the players working together on the same page.

We see practices, and they seem so geared toward the skaters. A goaltender can't go all out in a practice because you don’t want to risk injury. How do you make practices beneficial for goaltenders?

As a staff, we work on that a lot. The coaching staff is very, very good about being open to suggestions. Maybe we're doing too many rushes, and we need to dial it back a little bit because if our goalie is going east-west the whole practice, we're risking injury. That would be a conversation that we might have. Or, we're playing such and such team, and they really like to do a certain play. (We talk about) “Can we adjust our drill to include that play?”

A lot of times, my work comes before practice. Every day, I get half an hour with the goalies, and that's when we really hammer on the technical side, the reads of the game, how we're going to attack the team we're playing, and then the practice side is how the team's going to attack our play. Most of the time (in a team practice) I want the goalies to just play and practice right and just stop pucks. Have fun stopping pucks. We work on our stuff before practice. If we need to, we might work out a little after practice, but most of the time during practice, it's just battle, compete and have fun.

One of the biggest cliches that we always ask players are, “What are your goals for the season?” Or “What are you looking to accomplish?” Do you strategize with your players going into a season for adjustments or things they want to accomplish across the season?

100%. With my business and entrepreneurship background and my master's degree experience, my whole life is based around goals and preparing for goals and shooting for goals. We do that a lot. We have segment goals, monthly goals, season goals.

We try to set a season goal, but the reality is, with a season goal, you never get a sense of happiness of achieving the goal till the end of the season. So, how do you keep that excitement? How do you keep that positivity of achieving little goals along the way? So, we try to set smaller goals, and sometimes they're not always number-related, and sometimes they're not team-related. And the reason I say that is, let's just take a play. A player shoots the puck from the blue line. Our guy goes out to try to block it, it happens to hit a skate and go in. Well, that player didn't mean to do that, and we didn't know it was going to happen. It's sort of a tough save, right?

If we said, “Well, we're not going to let in any shots from the blue line,” well, that's a pretty silly goal, right? We try to set goals that we can achieve with no outside influence. So, no matter how the team plays, no matter how anybody else does, you can achieve the goals if they are attainable, achievable goals. Control what you can control. Most of the time during the season, we'll use those kinds of goals.

Obviously, every goalie wants to win the Stanley Cup; every goalie wants to win the Conn Smythe; every goalie wants to win the Vezina and every goal he wants to win the Jennings. Everybody wants to make the All-Star game. Everybody has those types of goals, and we shoot for them, but sometimes those are so far ahead that it's hard to live in the present moment. And you (don’t want to) let the present moment ups and downs affect you, as opposed to just focusing on one step, let it go, move on, take another step. So, we try to focus more on being in the present and goals that we can achieve that aren't influenced by outside.

Let's talk about your players. What do you appreciate about each one’s game and what are maybe steps each can continue to take as a goaltender?

Well, I'll attack what I appreciate about them more than the other one. Grubi is, like I said, the kindest person I've ever met. He is such a good human being. He's a hard worker. He's very dedicated to his craft. Everything he does is thinking about the game and goaltending, and I really appreciate his willingness to work, his openness to criticism, and to praise; I'd say he's more open to criticism than he is to praise. Areas that he needs to improve on. I'd rather just stay away from that. But I mean, they all know their areas, and we work on them, and we come together on coming up with the solutions, but I have nothing but appreciation for him.

Joey just brings a smile. You know, he's very enthusiastic, and I'm like that as well. So, that's something that we really click on. And he's such a student of the game. He's so dedicated, it makes your job easier. You know, I don't have to poke and prod him. I have to pull back the reins because he is the hardest worker. He is so dedicated. He’s nutrition and working out and everything…flexibility and strength, taking care of his body. He's very, very easy to work with. They both are. They're very low maintenance, for sure.

I think the biggest thing I appreciate is their willingness to learn, their willingness to improve, and their kindness. I think that those three things are the first three things that jump off the page to me.

I think it's a strength of our team that we have two goaltenders who play different styles. And there's different styles coming up across the league. So, for a newer fan, if they're watching a goaltender, what are some things to study or start to appreciate, to really understand what a goaltender is doing when they're out there?

That's a tough question. Let's start with styles. I agree; there are a bunch of different styles, and I am more of a let them play their style coach. Some coaches want the goalie to play this way, and that's all there is to it. “This is the way you make the save.”

I always tell the story like this. My son, when he was growing up, used to play hockey at this one rink, same rink, every day. Every single day, I would drive to that rink the exact same route. My wife would go to that rink 20 times, and she would drive there 20 different ways. We're getting to the same spot. We see it in different ways. If it was a math equation, you and I would see a math equation. I would solve it one way. You might solve it in a totally different way. We're still getting to the same result. So, I always try to say, ‘Okay, that's the way they play. How can we maximize what they already do? And how can we improve on a couple of things?’

So, on the style side of things, I enjoy that both (of our goalies) play differently. I think that what you see in the NHL is they start off at the beginning of the year with completely separate goalies, and by the end of the year, they kind of morph into similar because they see things that work for the other goalie and say, ‘oh, I'm going to give that a try.” Grubi has been playing the puck really, really well lately. While Joey obviously plays the puck a lot, Grubi sees where he can add some of that into his game, and he does an amazing job. He doesn't play the puck nearly as much, but you can see slowly (it comes in).

And Grubi does an amazing job on his feet and moving around the ice on his feet. Joey has really done an amazing job of taking some of that from Grubi, and he's been really good on his feet, relying on his feet a little bit more. And he's been so fast by doing that. And that's been great.

So, I encourage the styles. If they were both the same, that'd be great, too, but I don't look down on whether they play one way or the other.

On the second part about would the fans need to know about that? (It comes down to) does the puck go in the net, or does it not? I think sometimes fans will see a save a certain way, and they'll be like, “Oh!” The biggest one is when they see Joey play the puck. Fans need to understand that that's just the way he feels comfortable in the game, and a lot of the time, that helps his teammates to break out. That's a part of his game that he's really improved on, and he's really developed. Grubi is more of just stop the puck, get it into (his teammates) hands and let them (break out).

Neither one of them is right, neither one of them is wrong. That's just two different styles, and the team has to adjust to what kind of goaltender they have. I think that the way they make saves…obviously Joey is a bigger guy than Grubi, so he takes up a little bit more net. Maybe his depth doesn't need to be as much as Grubi's (whose) depth has to be a little bit more to get hit by certain shots. Or if he can't seem to be able to get hit by pucks because he's in the right position, sometimes that means that you have to scramble back a little bit harder because you may be a little bit further out. So, it might look a little scramblier, but if the puck goes in on the first shot, there is no second shot to have to scramble for, right? So, I think fans should just know that these guys are experts. They're (among) the best 70 in the world, and their execution their work ethic are at the peak of the world. They know what they're doing.

Let’s wrap up with some conversation about the position as a whole and kind of where it's going. We know Joey has shared he's he does a lot of virtual training and preparation. Grubi’s sampled with it, too. What are your thoughts on bringing that element in? How do you balance that with traditional reps? And how does that become part of the goaltending equation?

I have a background in entrepreneurship, and I've always thought if you own a business, you're always trying to improve it, and (thinking about) how can we find the edge? Since I've been coaching goaltenders, that's what I've always done, is try to find what is the next edge. Like the personality assessments. We would learn the personalities over the course of a year. But if we can do a personality assessment and learn that like in an instant, why would we spend the whole year maybe making mistakes and stuff when we can learn it quicker?

(Working on) vision. Grui does it every day, and Joey and Grubi both do vision training. Joey likes the virtual Sense Arena, and Grubi uses Synaptic. Two different things, but the idea of the vision training started with a goalie coach by the name of Mitch Korn. And Mitch and I worked together. I take that back. I followed Mitch for three years, and he was my goalie coach when I played, and we said, “Well, we work on the mind, we work on the body, but we never work on the eyes.” And so that's where it all got started. This is like 15 years ago, and that's how we met these people in Minnesota who do all the vision testing, and that's how that whole thing grew. And now everybody does it. It's kind of standard practice. But back when we did it, when we first started it, we were, like, the only goalies doing it.

And then, you work on; you look at the mind. It used to just be like, either you're confident or not, or, if you were struggling, it was just like, I'll forget about it. And then you learn that it's like an injury. You don't work out once you get injured. You work out before, so you don't get injured. Well, working on the mind. You can't just work on it when the goalie is struggling because it's too late! He's injured! He's been working on it before so that he never gets injured, so that his ups and downs are so minimal and so fast that he's more consistent.

My best example of that is Grubi. He had a game against San Jose, and it wasn't one of his best games, and he really struggled in that game. The very next game, he goes into New Jersey, and was incredible. And then he wins against the Rangers, and now he's rolling and playing great.

Years passed when I didn't maybe work on the mind as much as I should have. Maybe I was in the old school mentality of don't talk about it unless he's struggling and working on it before so that he doesn't get to a struggle. Grubi was able to bounce out of that like that the very next game. He was incredible and just rolling. It's because we had worked on it before - the ability to just let things go and to move on, and how no day is the same as the next day. And just because you had a bad day this day doesn't mean you have a bad day the next day unless you take it forward with you.

And those exercises of being able to let go…Grubi has been doing them for three years now, and so I thought that was the best example I've seen of this year of the ability to work on it, and then something bad happens and to be able to bounce out of it right away…people need to know that that's taking Grubi three years of working hard every day on the mind and positivity and being in the present moment and letting things go, not being so hard on himself. So that's a great example of prep work on the mental side.

I think all of those things, all the goalie coaches, all the coaches in the league are always trying to find an edge. I think that's what people are seeing is that “What's the next edge?” Is it a new skate sharpening? Is it a new skate boot? Is it a new stick that you know doesn't ever break? Or is it whatever the scenario is? But we're always looking whether it's equipment, whether it's nutrition, whether it's vision, whether it's mental, whether it's communication…communication is such a big one that we never talk about and in hockey, just the communication between teammates, how that makes each other feel and bring us together, right?

All these little tiny edges that you're always trying to find always remind me of running a business, and you are always trying to grow your business and make it better, right? Can I do a little bit more marketing? Should I hire this person who would do a little bit better job? What if we change this little thing to do with our product? Maybe we could sell to this industry instead. So that's no different than the goalie, right? How can we find that little edge to make it a little bit better every time?

I think we're at a 15-year low in terms of league average, save percentage, around .900 this year. And I've heard people say one of the games within the game is the shooters versus the goalies. The shooters find an advantage, and then the goalies counter. What do you see as maybe the next challenge to overcome, or the next advancement, or the next edge that goaltending needs to tackle specifically?

I don't know that necessarily it's just those things. Myself, I think that the game is changing. You look at hitting is way down. East-west (passing) has opened up so much. Last year was the most east-west goals ever scored in the NHL. That has nothing to do with the goalie in terms of are the goalies not playing as good? It has everything to do with the game itself has changed. And then the goalies have to catch up, and then they catch up, and then they get better. And then all of a sudden, everybody does so much video in pre-scouting that if they see one little opening, they attack it, right?

You see right now a lot of goalies getting beat dead angle, off the head and in, right? Well, that's a difficult save because if you stand up…people always forget that in the 80s, when goalie stood up on those shots, they would get beat through the five hole, and then the coaches would be mad. Now they go into Reverse VH, they don't get beat five hole, but they get beat up top, and the coaches are mad. It's a difficult save to make because you're stuck on the post. If you stand up, yeah, you're taking away high, but then you're giving up low. If you go down, you're given taken away low, but you're giving up high. So it's (about) what are we going to do to attack both, right?

I’m not going to give away all our secrets, but I would say it is a game of cat and mouse. We come up with one way to do it, then usually what you find…no different than life, no different than business, is the first ones to adopt a new way of doing things throws everybody off. And they have amazing success, whether you look at when everybody was butterflying, Marty Brodeur was staying on his feet more and one knee down. And then you had Dominik Hasek, who was just scrambling. And he had a different theory of getting close to the puck and taking away time and space. If you look at then Tim Thomas, who played totally different than everybody else. Carey Price. When he first came into the league, everybody thought he slid around on his knees all the time. The coaches at the time hated it. I remember Montreal was shopping Carey Price around to trade him because they didn't like it. They thought he was on his knees too much. Now everybody plays like that, right? Because he had amazing success, and then everybody else follows.

So I think if you can be an innovator and be the first one, then usually you get the most success because everybody's like, “wow, where do I score on this guy?” Jonathan Quick - another example of a guy who totally changed the way the game is played, and he was the first one to do it, and he had amazing success, right? We could sit here and go through the League of players, (but) I think that the guys who have the confidence to do something different and to be able to perfect it usually end up getting the most success. And then the players and the video catch up, and then that style tends to go down, and then they have to come up with the next thing.

I think right now we're just in a little bit of a transition period and the game keeps opening up, right? Technology is better. The players are training year-round. So the players, their skill and talent, is so much better than even five years ago. it's unbelievable to see how good these kids are. And then, on top of their willingness to look at video, if you think about how easy and how every single day, these kids are watching video, so their ability to study it is at a whole different level than anything we've ever seen before.

Ten years ago, you didn't have all the Instagrams and all that to look at all these plays, right? I think social media plays a big role too. You see a goal go in top shelf on a dead angle goal…back in the day, you might get it in the newspaper, or you might see it on ESPN or TSN highlights of the night. Now you get it on your feed 500 times in a day, so it's all you see. So now, what do you think next time you go to the game? “Oh, I'm going to shoot there. I'm going to try that.”

And so trends, like anything else on social media, trends in play just explode, and everybody's doing them. And whereas before, maybe it took a little bit longer for it to disseminate through the whole league, now it's instant. “Oh, that play worked. Let's do that the next day.” And so you have to constantly be improving and be better as a goaltender. On our side, we have to constantly be getting better and better every day and changing and tweaking. One thing I will say about all that is I think it's cyclical, too. I think that because there's more east-west, you got to be on your feet a little bit more, so that you can move there. So then the game starts to be more stand on your feet. I think that challenging and depth is affected by all this. I think it's cyclical. I think the goalies will catch up, and the players will move ahead, and the goal is, will catch up, and then the goal is, will get ahead, and then the players will catch up, and it's constant.

This conversation was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.