Pro Tips: Jake Allen on trust and the importance of not chasing change
“I know I'm a good goalie in this League and I just have to keep going back to that and not straying from my game because I know my game works, and when it does, it's good.”
Looking back at Jake Allen’s season in St. Louis, it would be easy to understand why he felt so good about his game.
After all, he finished the Coronavirus-shortened campaign 12-6-3 with a career-best .927 save percentage while adapting to a reduced role behind new No.1 Jordan Binnington.
The thing is, Allen didn’t utter the above words at the end of the season. In fact, Allen delivered the quote to InGoal Magazine during a Nov. 5 visit to Vancouver. At that point, he had only started three games in the first five weeks of the season for the Blues and despite a 2-1-0 record had posted a 3.72 goals-against average and .855 save percentage, not exactly the kind of numbers that invoke a talk about how well your game works in the NHL.
With those words, Allen also delivered a great lesson about the importance of trusting your foundation, not focusing too much on results over a short period of time, and not chasing changes in your game because of them. It was one of several lessons Allen shared that day that are worth re-visiting now, as he has come off the bench behind Binnington in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and helped the Blues overcome a 2-0 series deficit against the Vancouver Canucks.
Still ahead in this article:
Allen's exact word for what he kept coming back to — and the 32-save start against Edmonton that followed the next day — is in the next paragraph.
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