Jacob Markstrom | #25 | G

[-Vintage Canuck-]

 

[Elias Pettersson]

Marky: I told Mikey that my 1st game I was pulled after 3 minutes so I said "you're doing better than me"

[SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME]

Say what you will about Botchford, but the article on Markstrom and Clark he just dropped on The Athletic is some of the best work you’ll ever see from a hockey journalist in this market:

https://theathletic.com/940853/2019/04/24/how-ian-clark-reinvented-jacob-markstrom-and-why-people-believe-its-sustainable/

 

Was gonna quote an excerpt, but can’t pick just one. Too many good quotes. I think I’m gonna just stick the whole thing inside a spoiler for people to read. 

 

Near the very end of the Vancouver Canucks season, the accolades were pouring in for Jacob Markstrom.

Many were choosing the netminder as the Canucks MVP, a recognition he was deemed worthy of after the best four-month goaltending run of his life.

From December on, Markstrom played like he could be a star. He had a .921 save percentage and a 20-14-6 record while backstopping a frail and depleted Canucks defence.

He was easily a top 15 goalie in the league and probably top 10.

But instead of bathing in accomplishments and basking in a citywide pat on the back for being one of the Canucks’ few players who excelled, Markstrom was, well, in some trouble.

He stumbled in consecutive late-March games. He gave up five goals in one to the Anaheim Ducks, of all teams, and after that he was summoned to his coach’s office, where Ian Clark was preparing to drop a hammer.

“You ever see those runners who just let up as they come close to that finish line?” a fiery Clark asked Markstrom.

“Are you letting up? Are you going to let up here at the end? Or are you going to sprint right through that finish line?

“You’re going off the path and you can’t do it.

“Get it back to who you were.”

Markstrom did just that. His next game was among the best of his season. He made 38 saves against the Dallas Stars, who didn’t score on any of eight shootout attempts.

The goalie would later describe his one-on-one with Clark as “huge.” Not only did it reset him for his final two starts, but it also provided a towering reminder of how much work he still had ahead of him to get “there,” because he wasn’t “there” yet.

And, to hear Clark tell it, that’s the way it’s always going to be.

“It’s never going to end,” Clark said when asked if he’ll run out of new ways to tinker with Markstrom’s game.

“I tell them to think about it like a skyscraper that has no top.

“‘OK, we just climbed that flight of stairs up, now let’s turn the bend and do another. And another. And we’re never going to stop.’

“That’s just the way it is.

“That is an important philosophical approach because we’re never there.

“As soon as we’re there, we get comfortable.”

Clark is part philosopher, part taskmaster, part spirit guide and all goaltending genius. He’s passionate, intense, a tornado of ideas, a fountain of metaphors and is among the top five goaltending coaches of all time. His legacy work, From the Crease — The Self Development Guide to Hockey Goaltending from 1998-2003, was a series of volumes written in magazine format that were bound together, forming a top-to-bottom manual on modern goaltending.

There’s a great word-of-mouth legend about Clark that originated when Hockey Canada was panicked about the country’s lack of great goalies.

Canadian officials sought out Sweden’s program, perceived to be a goalie factory, trying to figure out their secret developmental sauce.

The Canadians were told something along the lines of this:

“Why do you want to find out about our manual? We based it off Ian Clark’s writings.

“And he’s worked for Hockey Canada.”

Clark was a member of the Canucks’ coaching staff from 2002 to 2010 and returned this season after eight successful years in Columbus where he helped transform Sergei Bobrovsky into one of the game’s best goalies.

The challenge here was a significant one, in part because Clark had nothing to do with the goalies the Canucks had acquired, including Anders Nilsson, Thatcher Demko and the then-28-year-old Markstrom, who was talented and athletic but wildly inconsistent.

“In Columbus, I was very significantly involved in scouting and you essentially are picking guys who adhere to your vision, and your principals,” Clark said.

“That wasn’t the case here.

“In late November, the three of us, Anders, Jacob and I, were on the ice and I looked at them and said ‘You know what guys, it’s just not good enough.

‘You can say “screw you” all you want. I’m just telling you it’s not good enough. I’ve been in this game for two decades.

‘You may not like what I have to say. And you’re welcome to tell me but I’m going to tell you exactly what I think and I’m going to be your coach.

“We have a special relationship. It is a unique relationship. There has to be loyalty and they have to know you have their back but at the same time they have to know you will hold them to account.”

Clark set out to reinvent how Markstrom looks and plays in net, for sure. But he also reconfigured Markstrom’s approach, training and work ethic. Consider it a whole body approach and one that helped Markstrom take the biggest leap forward of his career this season.

“Clark is super passionate and he’s always pushing the goalies,” Markstrom said. “The goalies have to be the hardest-working guys on the team. He really challenges you to be that.

“I feel like I responded in a really good way to that part of it.

“He was clear right away. It was going to take a lot of work from me and it wasn’t going to be easy.

“I said, ‘I’m up for the challenge. It’s time for me to take another step.'”

There were lots of times in the second half of the season when Canucks head coach Travis Green would give his team the day off but it often didn’t apply to the goalies.

This is the way Clark explained it:

“The goaltender has an incredible responsibility to that locker room and to the franchise.

“It’s almost like an individual sport embedded in a team sport.

“You can argue that on any given night, on average, the goaltender has the greatest potential individual impact on the result.

“So there is a level of responsibility you have to embrace, and embracing it means being the hardest worker and the fiercest competitor on the team. That is fundamental to everything.

“Maybe you’ve heard me say this before, but elite goaltending is a lifestyle choice. It is how you carry yourself. It’s how much time you spend on strength and conditioning and it’s how you carry yourself at practice.”

Markstrom said Clark would often show up for their sessions together more fired up than he would.

“It would wear off on me and it made me want to work even harder,” Markstrom said.

The most difficult transformation, however, still had to happen on the ice, and Markstrom’s evolution and buy-in were tested during an incredibly challenging November. He won just three times in 12 starts and had an .887 save percentage.

“It’s a little scary,” Clark said. “This was his career.

“There was a bridge he had to cross. As you start to go over it, there is a chasm.

“At the time he was 28 years old and some changes were being asked of him and he had to cross that bridge, and that was the tough part.

“You could be thinking, ‘What if I don’t make it over?’

“But he had the courage and the openness to embrace these things because when you start crossing the bridge, there’s wind and turbulence.

“The bridge starts rocking and you could easily say ‘To hell with this, I’m going back.’

“But to get over it, you have to go from the conceptualizing stage to repetitions and then see it deployed under pressure, under duress, with risk in games with 20,000 people watching.

“When he did that, that’s when you know he’s made it over the bridge.

“We all want to snap our fingers and have instant impact, but it’s not easy.

“There are a lot of guys who would have turned back and gone to what’s comfortable.

“It’s a real credit to him. He was able to process most of this stuff not at a camp but during the season.

“This was processed on the fly.”

For his next chapter, Markstrom is out to prove he can be more; that he can be a goalie who can maintain a .920 for a season; that he’s not just a player who got hot for a few months.

He wants to prove he can be great. He burns to be on the same level as goalies like, say, Carey Price.

“I’m not happy about the start of the season, but I felt the longer it went the better I got,” Markstrom said. “That’s why I’m super excited.

“I was still searching for my game and to find it and keep going. Now I have to build on it.

“I want to make the highs higher. I want fewer lows. And I want to play in the playoffs. That’s what matters to me.”

Markstrom doesn’t really recognize the goalie he was only a year ago, and neither does Clark.

“There’s a lot of technical components (that are different),” Clark said. “I summarize how far he’s come in saying that he doesn’t chase the game anymore. He’s with it or ahead of the game and that’s absolutely vital.

“How did we get there? There are a whole bunch of inputs. It’s what you’re doing physically and mechanically with your feet to your stance.”

Clark changed Markstrom’s stance and set up to be more narrow with his feet and to have his hands up higher. He did the same with Bobrovsky after he got to Columbus and before he won two Vezina Trophies. The changes have allowed his goalies to track pucks better.

“If you’re going to spread your legs out and they are, for lack of a better phrase, not underneath you, then you have no mobility,” Clark said.

“It’s a fine way to make one save but that’s no way to prepare for the moment because you’ve lost your mobility. You’re spread out like a tripod, and if you take one leg of a tripod off, you can’t go anywhere.”

Clark’s plans for Markstrom are wide-ranging. There are alterations to Markstrom’s game that could improve him, which he hasn’t yet even brought up. And he has to come to camp in the fall in even better shape.

“I like to sprinkle little details over the course of a season that makes (a goalie) stop and think: ‘Oh, wait, that’s new,'” Clark said.

“I remember when I was coaching Dan Cloutier and (Marc) Crawford would come to me and say “Clarkie, what happened on that goal?'”

“I’d say, ‘Well, he has a tough time tracking pucks behind the net.’

“He’d say, ‘Well, fix it.’

“I said, ‘I will, Crow.

‘I’m going to fix it in the summertime.’

“And he’d say, ‘What do you mean in the summer?!’

“It was on the list.”

The list this summer for Markstrom is a long one, and Clark is asking him to reprioritize his training so when he returns he has the team’s best “energy system.”

“We don’t want a Lada engine, we want a Maserati engine,” Clark said. ‘It’s this thing that is taking us from place to place and if it becomes very smooth and efficient, that opens up our eyes to the game.

“That’s where our visuals are released and (Markstrom) sees the game very clearly now because he’s with the game.

“If he’s chasing the game all the time then you’re playing too physical and you can’t play cerebral and visual because all of the energies are being taken up with being physical.

“Oh, gosh, Carey Price, he makes it look so easy,” Clark said. That’s because he’s always with the game or ahead of it.

“He doesn’t have to work in the pre-shot. He’s not working.

“He’s seeing it clear. He’s making clear decisions. He has clear eyes and clear reads.”

What about Clark, though? He’s worked with some of the game’s best goalies. He’s helped write the blueprint, which modernized the position, and he’s in a constant state of change and growth.

Where does it come from?

“People say to me, ‘Well, who taught you, Clarkie?'” he said.

“The goalies who I coached taught me.

“I get something back, too. I think one of my skills evaluate goalies. I can take something they do well, and maybe they don’t even know how to articulate that skill. It’s like a foreign language.

“Maybe they came about it naturally, through their own journey as a goalie.

“But when I see something interesting I start thinking about how I can put that in a logical progression for a goalie.

“I’ve learned more from the goalies I coach than anything.”

[J-P]

Having Clark on board is a very underrated asset and bodes well for Marky and Demko and Canucks goalies in general moving forward. 

[aGENT]

11 hours ago, J-P said:

Having Clark on board is a very underrated asset and bodes well for Marky and Demko and Canucks goalies in general moving forward. 

They need to extend him ASAP though. IIRC, his current contract expires end of next season.

[SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME]

On 4/26/2019 at 9:44 AM, aGENT said:

They need to extend him ASAP though. IIRC, his current contract expires end of next season.

A little surprised Clark didn’t get a longer contract than that. But maybe they just wanted to see how he meshed with the current goalies and also into the coaching and management structure? Can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t extend him now, based on the results he’s already gotten out of our goalies.

 

EDIT: or did you mean Marky? He needs extension before end of 2019-20.

Edited April 27, 2019 by SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME

[aGENT]

3 hours ago, SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME said:

A little surprised Clark didn’t get a longer contract than that. But maybe they just wanted to see how he meshed with the current goalies and also into the coaching and management structure? Can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t extend him now, based on the results he’s already gotten out of our goalies.

 

EDIT: or did you mean Marky? He needs extension before end of 2019-20.

I was referring to Clark... Maybe it's another 2 seasons. Can't remember now.

 

Clark may have been the one not wanting to commit longer

 

 

 

[-AJ-]

On 4/25/2019 at 11:57 AM, SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME said:

Say what you will about Botchford, but the article on Markstrom and Clark he just dropped on The Athletic is some of the best work you’ll ever see from a hockey journalist in this market:

https://theathletic.com/940853/2019/04/24/how-ian-clark-reinvented-jacob-markstrom-and-why-people-believe-its-sustainable/

 

Was gonna quote an excerpt, but can’t pick just one. Too many good quotes. I think I’m gonna just stick the whole thing inside a spoiler for people to read. 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Near the very end of the Vancouver Canucks season, the accolades were pouring in for Jacob Markstrom.

Many were choosing the netminder as the Canucks MVP, a recognition he was deemed worthy of after the best four-month goaltending run of his life.

From December on, Markstrom played like he could be a star. He had a .921 save percentage and a 20-14-6 record while backstopping a frail and depleted Canucks defence.

He was easily a top 15 goalie in the league and probably top 10.

But instead of bathing in accomplishments and basking in a citywide pat on the back for being one of the Canucks’ few players who excelled, Markstrom was, well, in some trouble.

He stumbled in consecutive late-March games. He gave up five goals in one to the Anaheim Ducks, of all teams, and after that he was summoned to his coach’s office, where Ian Clark was preparing to drop a hammer.

“You ever see those runners who just let up as they come close to that finish line?” a fiery Clark asked Markstrom.

“Are you letting up? Are you going to let up here at the end? Or are you going to sprint right through that finish line?

“You’re going off the path and you can’t do it.

“Get it back to who you were.”

Markstrom did just that. His next game was among the best of his season. He made 38 saves against the Dallas Stars, who didn’t score on any of eight shootout attempts.

The goalie would later describe his one-on-one with Clark as “huge.” Not only did it reset him for his final two starts, but it also provided a towering reminder of how much work he still had ahead of him to get “there,” because he wasn’t “there” yet.

And, to hear Clark tell it, that’s the way it’s always going to be.

“It’s never going to end,” Clark said when asked if he’ll run out of new ways to tinker with Markstrom’s game.

“I tell them to think about it like a skyscraper that has no top.

“‘OK, we just climbed that flight of stairs up, now let’s turn the bend and do another. And another. And we’re never going to stop.’

“That’s just the way it is.

“That is an important philosophical approach because we’re never there.

“As soon as we’re there, we get comfortable.”

Clark is part philosopher, part taskmaster, part spirit guide and all goaltending genius. He’s passionate, intense, a tornado of ideas, a fountain of metaphors and is among the top five goaltending coaches of all time. His legacy work, From the Crease — The Self Development Guide to Hockey Goaltending from 1998-2003, was a series of volumes written in magazine format that were bound together, forming a top-to-bottom manual on modern goaltending.

There’s a great word-of-mouth legend about Clark that originated when Hockey Canada was panicked about the country’s lack of great goalies.

Canadian officials sought out Sweden’s program, perceived to be a goalie factory, trying to figure out their secret developmental sauce.

The Canadians were told something along the lines of this:

“Why do you want to find out about our manual? We based it off Ian Clark’s writings.

“And he’s worked for Hockey Canada.”

Clark was a member of the Canucks’ coaching staff from 2002 to 2010 and returned this season after eight successful years in Columbus where he helped transform Sergei Bobrovsky into one of the game’s best goalies.

The challenge here was a significant one, in part because Clark had nothing to do with the goalies the Canucks had acquired, including Anders Nilsson, Thatcher Demko and the then-28-year-old Markstrom, who was talented and athletic but wildly inconsistent.

“In Columbus, I was very significantly involved in scouting and you essentially are picking guys who adhere to your vision, and your principals,” Clark said.

“That wasn’t the case here.

“In late November, the three of us, Anders, Jacob and I, were on the ice and I looked at them and said ‘You know what guys, it’s just not good enough.

‘You can say “screw you” all you want. I’m just telling you it’s not good enough. I’ve been in this game for two decades.

‘You may not like what I have to say. And you’re welcome to tell me but I’m going to tell you exactly what I think and I’m going to be your coach.

“We have a special relationship. It is a unique relationship. There has to be loyalty and they have to know you have their back but at the same time they have to know you will hold them to account.”

Clark set out to reinvent how Markstrom looks and plays in net, for sure. But he also reconfigured Markstrom’s approach, training and work ethic. Consider it a whole body approach and one that helped Markstrom take the biggest leap forward of his career this season.

“Clark is super passionate and he’s always pushing the goalies,” Markstrom said. “The goalies have to be the hardest-working guys on the team. He really challenges you to be that.

“I feel like I responded in a really good way to that part of it.

“He was clear right away. It was going to take a lot of work from me and it wasn’t going to be easy.

“I said, ‘I’m up for the challenge. It’s time for me to take another step.'”

There were lots of times in the second half of the season when Canucks head coach Travis Green would give his team the day off but it often didn’t apply to the goalies.

This is the way Clark explained it:

“The goaltender has an incredible responsibility to that locker room and to the franchise.

“It’s almost like an individual sport embedded in a team sport.

“You can argue that on any given night, on average, the goaltender has the greatest potential individual impact on the result.

“So there is a level of responsibility you have to embrace, and embracing it means being the hardest worker and the fiercest competitor on the team. That is fundamental to everything.

“Maybe you’ve heard me say this before, but elite goaltending is a lifestyle choice. It is how you carry yourself. It’s how much time you spend on strength and conditioning and it’s how you carry yourself at practice.”

Markstrom said Clark would often show up for their sessions together more fired up than he would.

“It would wear off on me and it made me want to work even harder,” Markstrom said.

The most difficult transformation, however, still had to happen on the ice, and Markstrom’s evolution and buy-in were tested during an incredibly challenging November. He won just three times in 12 starts and had an .887 save percentage.

“It’s a little scary,” Clark said. “This was his career.

“There was a bridge he had to cross. As you start to go over it, there is a chasm.

“At the time he was 28 years old and some changes were being asked of him and he had to cross that bridge, and that was the tough part.

“You could be thinking, ‘What if I don’t make it over?’

“But he had the courage and the openness to embrace these things because when you start crossing the bridge, there’s wind and turbulence.

“The bridge starts rocking and you could easily say ‘To hell with this, I’m going back.’

“But to get over it, you have to go from the conceptualizing stage to repetitions and then see it deployed under pressure, under duress, with risk in games with 20,000 people watching.

“When he did that, that’s when you know he’s made it over the bridge.

“We all want to snap our fingers and have instant impact, but it’s not easy.

“There are a lot of guys who would have turned back and gone to what’s comfortable.

“It’s a real credit to him. He was able to process most of this stuff not at a camp but during the season.

“This was processed on the fly.”

For his next chapter, Markstrom is out to prove he can be more; that he can be a goalie who can maintain a .920 for a season; that he’s not just a player who got hot for a few months.

He wants to prove he can be great. He burns to be on the same level as goalies like, say, Carey Price.

“I’m not happy about the start of the season, but I felt the longer it went the better I got,” Markstrom said. “That’s why I’m super excited.

“I was still searching for my game and to find it and keep going. Now I have to build on it.

“I want to make the highs higher. I want fewer lows. And I want to play in the playoffs. That’s what matters to me.”

Markstrom doesn’t really recognize the goalie he was only a year ago, and neither does Clark.

“There’s a lot of technical components (that are different),” Clark said. “I summarize how far he’s come in saying that he doesn’t chase the game anymore. He’s with it or ahead of the game and that’s absolutely vital.

“How did we get there? There are a whole bunch of inputs. It’s what you’re doing physically and mechanically with your feet to your stance.”

Clark changed Markstrom’s stance and set up to be more narrow with his feet and to have his hands up higher. He did the same with Bobrovsky after he got to Columbus and before he won two Vezina Trophies. The changes have allowed his goalies to track pucks better.

“If you’re going to spread your legs out and they are, for lack of a better phrase, not underneath you, then you have no mobility,” Clark said.

“It’s a fine way to make one save but that’s no way to prepare for the moment because you’ve lost your mobility. You’re spread out like a tripod, and if you take one leg of a tripod off, you can’t go anywhere.”

Clark’s plans for Markstrom are wide-ranging. There are alterations to Markstrom’s game that could improve him, which he hasn’t yet even brought up. And he has to come to camp in the fall in even better shape.

“I like to sprinkle little details over the course of a season that makes (a goalie) stop and think: ‘Oh, wait, that’s new,'” Clark said.

“I remember when I was coaching Dan Cloutier and (Marc) Crawford would come to me and say “Clarkie, what happened on that goal?'”

“I’d say, ‘Well, he has a tough time tracking pucks behind the net.’

“He’d say, ‘Well, fix it.’

“I said, ‘I will, Crow.

‘I’m going to fix it in the summertime.’

“And he’d say, ‘What do you mean in the summer?!’

“It was on the list.”

The list this summer for Markstrom is a long one, and Clark is asking him to reprioritize his training so when he returns he has the team’s best “energy system.”

“We don’t want a Lada engine, we want a Maserati engine,” Clark said. ‘It’s this thing that is taking us from place to place and if it becomes very smooth and efficient, that opens up our eyes to the game.

“That’s where our visuals are released and (Markstrom) sees the game very clearly now because he’s with the game.

“If he’s chasing the game all the time then you’re playing too physical and you can’t play cerebral and visual because all of the energies are being taken up with being physical.

“Oh, gosh, Carey Price, he makes it look so easy,” Clark said. That’s because he’s always with the game or ahead of it.

“He doesn’t have to work in the pre-shot. He’s not working.

“He’s seeing it clear. He’s making clear decisions. He has clear eyes and clear reads.”

What about Clark, though? He’s worked with some of the game’s best goalies. He’s helped write the blueprint, which modernized the position, and he’s in a constant state of change and growth.

Where does it come from?

“People say to me, ‘Well, who taught you, Clarkie?'” he said.

“The goalies who I coached taught me.

“I get something back, too. I think one of my skills evaluate goalies. I can take something they do well, and maybe they don’t even know how to articulate that skill. It’s like a foreign language.

“Maybe they came about it naturally, through their own journey as a goalie.

“But when I see something interesting I start thinking about how I can put that in a logical progression for a goalie.

“I’ve learned more from the goalies I coach than anything.”
 

 

 

So glad we got this gem out of Botchford before he passed.

[ForzaTikare]

No penalty 

A bunch of Ekman Larsson fists to The face though. 

[Boudrias]

3 hours ago, ForzaTikare said:

No penalty 

A bunch of Ekman Larsson fists to The face though. 

Canuck luck knows no borders!

[xereau]

 

[CaptKirk888]

11 hours ago, xereau said:

 

So after reading this, he’s all good minor issue and will still play in worlds

[-Vintage Canuck-]

 

[-AJ-]

Interesting Fact: Markstrom had the longest shutout streak of his career thus far last year. On Feb 23, 2019, The Isles scored against him at 2:34 into the third period. He wasn't scored against in the entirety of the next game against the Ducks and was finally beaten again 8:19 into the 1st against the Avalanche on Feb 27. In total, his shutout streak was 85:45.

[SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME]

Markstrom tied for 10th place in the Vezina voting. 

 

 

Sure, it was just one 3rd place vote, but nice to see Marky listed with that company.

 

 

[Bissurnette]

 

[-Vintage Canuck-]

 

[Mrwipeout]

if marky can maintain the level of play from last year he should get a good deal as a no1 goalie for some years to come. 

[CaptKirk888]

https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-fantasy-hockey-top-25-goaltender-rankings-2019-20/c-282860450?tid=277729150

 

Marky made the list at #25

[5Fivehole0]

2 hours ago, CaptKirk888 said:

https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-fantasy-hockey-top-25-goaltender-rankings-2019-20/c-282860450?tid=277729150

 

Marky made the list at #25

The Athletics have deemed him top 10