Goalies need to embrace chaos, ‘Godfather of Swedish Hockey’ says 

Welcome to the NHL Chat Room, NHL.com's weekly Q&A feature where we talk to key figures in the game, gaining insight into their lives on and off the ice. This week, we feature Thomas Magnusson, who has been called the “Godfather of Swedish Hockey.” Magnusson was a speaker at the 2026 National Goaltending Symposium in Boston in August, after retiring last year as the head of goaltending development for the Swedish Ice Hockey Association.

BOSTON -- Thomas Magnusson has a message: Embrace chaos. 

The longtime goalie coach is not alone in his feelings about the state of goaltending right now, from Sweden to the United States to Czechia. Goaltenders, he believes, are too predictable, too similar. Which is why he thinks they need to transition, as he said, from “predictable puck-stoppers to more adaptable problem solvers,” something that will take work from goalies and courage from goalie coaches to achieve. 

Though Magnusson has retired from leading goaltending development for the Swedish Ice Hockey Association, he remains tied into the hockey and goaltending worlds, with frequent conversations with NHL coaches, NHL goalie coaches, and other leaders throughout the hockey world, advocating especially for an increase in creative goaltending. 

Sometimes, as he put it, goalies would benefit from being made to have a “sketchbook save” instead of a “textbook save.”

Magnusson is advocating for more practice and fewer isolated drills, for less repetition. 

He wants there to be as many goalie styles as there are goalies, something that he believes can be achieved with a shift in approach to a game-based practice through a new direction for goalie coaching. 

He spoke to NHL.com about the current state of Swedish hockey, and about where goalie coaching is and what its next steps should be.

What do you see in Swedish hockey right now?

“I think it’s good. We have a lot of young talent coming up and we see each year at the draft that we do quite well. That’s overall. We’re not doing that well on the goalie side, though, looking at the draft, if that’s a measure.”

Who excites you, in terms of Swedish goalies?

“If you’d asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have had a straight answer. Now since I actually retired a year ago, it’s harder for me to name one goalie or any specific goalie. What I think is fascinating though is the influx in general of European goalies in the National Hockey League. That is a trend. I think it started with Finland and then came Sweden and now you see more countries, like of course all the Russians and now we see the Czechs, so on a broader perspective I think it’s interesting how many different countries are producing top end goalies (right now).”

The United States just saw an exceptional goalie performance in Connor Hellebuyck’s en route to a gold medal at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, as Sweden did with Henrik Lundqvist leading the team to gold at the 2006 Olympics.

What impact did Lundqvist have on Swedish hockey goaltending?

“He was exceptional. First of all, who he is. Not only as a goalie, but as a person, how he presents himself and how dedicated (he is) as a goalie but also dedicated as a human being, as a father and representing hockey. So he’s been representing Swedish hockey for so long and being a figure that everyone looks up to as a hockey player in general, but for us in the goalie industry or business or community, it’s been exceptional for us to have him there as a role model.”

How do you change practices to encourage more creativity?

“I think it’s more of a shift. It’s more of a shift toward understanding the importance of the entire situation. Not to decompose so much in practice as we have done. We decompose into technical parts and even the technical parts into glove saves and blocker saves and we do skating separately. Have them couple more tactics and techniques and have more parts from the game brought into the situational stuff, not take out all the technique. We need that. It’s foundational, yes. But I see it as more of a shift toward having more of the aliveness and the game-like situations because they need to include the information-processing, the decision-making, the problem-solving – and you take that out when you drill isolated technique. So you can’t expect the goalie to apply that technical ability to 100 percent in a game because then they have to make those fast decisions, so they have to practice on picking up information, processing information, and putting that into solving problems in the game situation.”

Does that mean there’s a lack of creativity?

“I was a phys ed teacher, I was taught the traditional way. Break down the skill into isolated parts and then put them together. There is a new way of looking at that in the ecological dynamics field, it’s a research field. So there is actually pretty new research backing that we don’t act on, as a goalie for example, the way we thought that we have a computer that’s going to pick out all our memories and what we have trained to do, drilled to do. In a situation in a game, you act instantly, without going back to your memory because you know how fast that puck is? You don’t have time for that. You act instantly if you practice acting on the information. So the foundation of that approach is perception and action coupling. You practice with those coupled, then you learn to pick up information and act on what you see without having to go through all that process that I was taught at school.”

How does that work?

“One word that is used in this field is attunement. You learn to get attuned to your environment. If you practice that you will bring that to the situation in the game. But if you tried to cut it up in portions and do each part of the technique separately, how can you act on what you see if you’re gonna pull this out and this out and put them together? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make sense. … The first five years I went to practice and, OK, we’re gonna do glove and low shots and high shots. Then after a couple years, I think it was around the time we started using a lot of video, so this was in the ‘80s, we got a chance to sit down with the goalie after the game and watch video, so what did you see? I started asking questions, what did you see here? I’m not telling you what to do, but what did you see? … Then we went out on the ice and instead of having a plan for 10 drills, we had one situation. It didn’t break down the skill, it broke down the situation into shot and save. What happened before? There was the skater or a pass and we can build for an hour different scenarios.”

And that builds a goalie that’s less robotic?

“That’s what we need. They all look the same and the problem is that makes goalies very predictable, easy to read, and that’s what we want to get out of. So we’re not going tell the goalie what angle we’re going to have here, how to hold your – that’s individual. But we tell them that you should move on your movement in balance and have economy of movement so you’re not getting tired. That’s enough. Balance, economy and how to get mobile and how to get power in your movement. It’s not how you move. That should come from you.”