Two cups are better than one and when they come with a cool new diamond plate look you have yourself a great new goalie jock – or maybe something affordable to leave under the Christmas tree for the goalie in your house. InGoal shot this slightly irreverent look at Brian’s double cup while at the Let’s Play Hockey trade show in Las Vegas.

Whether it’s Diamond plate or not, adding a double cup to your equipment is well worth doing. Think two cups is overkill? Many NHL ‘keepers actually wear three! The double cup with a regular player’s cup underneath to keep everything in place.

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Long-time skate manufacturer branching out its product line

Graf Canada has long been known as one of the leading manufacturers of goal skates but when InGoal spoke with Chairman Claude Lemieux recently we discovered that Graf  has a new line for goalies in store for the upcoming season. While the four-time Stanley Cup winner may not have made his name in goal, he was happy to share his new product with our readers, noting that at under 690 grams the weight of the new Graf G7500 Composite Goal sticks are on par with some of the wooden sticks Lemieux skated with as a forward for six NHL teams from 1985-2009.

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NHL.com saves of the week featuring Fleury, Price, Luongo and Thomas – the best of the best showing off their highlight reel saves:

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Cory Schneider took a shot recently in practice that made his sharp looking Canucks tribute mask unusable. The training staff needed a replacement for him in a hurry and they turned to Mark Hart of Hart Designs who has done work for the Canucks in the past to create a bold new look.

We’ve got some great shots of the mask as well as several of it as artist Mark Hart created the artwork. But first, take a few minutes to watch the video as InGoal’s Kevin Woodley spent some time chatting with Schneider today about the design:

Johnny Canuck intended to look like logo under the ice. Note skate marks on ice. Also can see in the retro mask portion the faux-fiberglass texturing.

Completed Mask

Cory Schneider's New Retro Canucks Mask

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Cory Schneider's New Retro Canucks Mask

Mask Under Construction

Cory Schneider's New Mask Under Construction

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Cory Schneider's New Mask Under Construction

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InGoal’s Managing Editor Kevin Woodley gives his game 2 analysis

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The most acrobatic goalie in the league didn't make the top ten saves of the year - see who did. Photo by Scott Slingsby.

NHL.com has released their top 10 saves of the year – and two weren’t even made by goalies. Have a look and see what you think – did they get the rankings correct? Is the well-placed loss of a stick a great save? Which saves didn’t make the list that you thought should have?

Hit up the comments and get the debate started!

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Here are your NHL saves of the week for March 7.

Which is your favorite? Carey Price’s poke check? Michal Neuvirth’s sprawling glove?

Or was the best save not even made by a goalie?

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Johnson traded shutout for knockout, and gained a measure of fame in the process

Dipietro will be out four to six weeks with facial fractures and knee swelling suffered after falling to the ice when Johnson landed a huge left hand just below his right eye.

“It’s frustrating, it’s unfortunate and every other emotion you can throw in there,” DiPietro told The Associated Press Friday. “I’m sick of losing, our team’s sick of losing. You never go into a fight expecting you’re going to get smashed in the face that hard, or with these kind of consequences, but it happens and you move on.”

Post-game X-rays after the fight came back negative, but a CT scan reportedly revealed the damage.

It’s easy to understand Dipietro’s frustration. In the fifth season of a 15-year, $67.5-million contract, he only played 13 games combined over the last two seasons, and just 21 this season, as he struggled to overcome serious hip surgery and continues to have trouble with strained groins and a surgically repaired left knee.

The latest setback comes after Johnson one-punched Dipietro with 16.5 seconds left in the Penguins 3-0 victory over the Islanders, and was quickly being celebrated all over the world wide web for a different kind of glove hand. Johnson’s combination of a shutout, an assist and a fight was quickly lauded as the goaltender’s equivalent of the Gordie Howe Hat trick (a goal, an assist and a fight).

There was only one problem: Johnson lost the shutout when he accepted Dipietro’s invitation to dance.

Despite a lot of reports that Johnson became the first goaltender to record a shutout and a fight since Detroit’s Chris Osgood dropped his blocker and glove with Patrick Roy way back on April 1, 1998, the reality is Johnson lost his goose egg when he was kicked out and replaced by Marc-Andre Fleury for those final few seconds.

At that point it became a team shutout and won’t be credited officially to either goalie (ironically if they left the net empty and kept the puck out, Johnson would have gotten the shutout on his record).

Not that Johnson seemed particularly upset about it.

“The guys didn’t know I had that little mean streak in me,” Johnson, who has 14 career shutouts, but no fights in the NHL, told The Associated Press. “It was something I’ve kind of wanted to do for a while. Maybe it’s just a little bit of frustration about some things.”

Playing for just the second time in almost a month despite now having an impressive .929 save percentage and 1.90 goals-against average might be one of them might be one of them, but if there was any bitterness it wasn’t shared by the guy getting most of the starts. Penguins No.1 Marc-Andre Fleury was pumped at the punch.

“Johnny was sick,” Fleury told The Associated Press after mopping up in the win. “He’s a righty, first of all, and he goes in as a lefty. That was awesome. He was so calm, so relaxed. It was just boom! His expression never changed. It was just boom, and that was it.”

Adding to the irony is Johnson was coming to the defense of widely loathed Penguins agitator Matt Cooke, who was shoved high by Dipietro while skating near his crease at the other end. Considering Atlanta forward Evander Kane received kudos and congratulatory messages from all around the NHL after one-punching Cooke last season, you’ve got to wonder if Johnson might get some hate mail for having Cooke’s back.

At the very least, Johnson, who stopped 20 shots, gets credit for letting up after his hard left dropped Dipietro to the ice, holding off with a right hand that was poised to strike again when he saw Dipietro was hurt.

“I didn’t intend to hurt anyone or anything,” he said. “It was just a lucky punch.”

It left DiPietro’s face visibly swollen with a welt over his right cheek. Initial Internet rumblings Dipietro had suffered a broken orbital bone were dismissed after the X-rays came back negative after the game.

“It was tough to tell at the time,” DiPietro told The Associated Press after the injury was announced on Friday. “Your adrenaline is rushing so hard that fortunately in a fight like that you don’t feel anything until afterward. It’s unfortunate and frustrating and every other emotion you can throw in there. … I didn’t realize at the time that his arms were so long or that he could throw such a hard left punch, but I found both of those out pretty quickly. It’s a tough game and it’s a physical sport. Unfortunately my face paid the price.

“Right now it’s soft foods and hang out. Those are my favourite things: to work out and eat and play hockey. I can’t do any of them so it’s not really the best of injuries. You don’t really ever want a broken face to be the reason that you get extra rest,” DiPietro said. “You keep telling yourself that everything happens for a reason. I am not sure what that reason is yet, but hopefully at some point it will come to the surface. It will make winning the Stanley Cup that much sweeter.”

For more NHL video check out this week’s Top 10 Saves

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Here are the top ten saves of the week as presented by NHL.com. Which one was the best? Which one did lady luck have the greatest hand in? Let us know in the comments below!

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Calgary star Miikka Kiprusoff stretches 3 hours on game day, including 45 minutes after both the morning practice and the game itself.

No matter what level you play at, the importance of stretching before playing goal is as obvious as remembering to put on your cup (or in the case of most NHL goalies, two).

But what about after a game? What about after a practice?

Too many goalies don’t bother to stretch after they’ve played. They could learn something from Calgary standout Miikka Kiprusoff, whose 3-hour game-day stretching routine includes 45 minutes before and after both the morning skate and that evening’s game.

With that in mind, regular InGoal Magazine contributor Maria Mountain has put together a video highlighting five key post-play stretches for goalies serious about taking their game to the next level.

“Did you know that the stretching you do as a goalie to improve your flexibility is different from the stretching that you should do after a game?” said Mountain. “The first is what I call Flexibility Training, while the latter is Restorative Training. With your restorative stretching the goal is to help your body recover from the stress and trauma of the game. To tell your body that the emergency is over and it can now start the repair phase.”

The stretches in the video will help take some of the tension off the muscles you use most while playing the position, and therefore help those muscles recover quicker. For more goalie-specific training from Maria Mountain, be sure to check out her exciting new Rapid Response Goalie Training package.

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