The journeyman, playing for his fifth team in nine seasons, knows the equipment staff are his \u201clifeblood\u201d as a goalie and worries that a midseason pad replacement would just pile onto their workloads. With Lyon under contract through next season, white-and-red alternate pads will have to wait until the summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank god I\u2019ve been reasonably successful in them, otherwise I probably\u00a0would have switched,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt was just a moment of weakness, and next year, I\u2019ll definitely not get the black gear.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Alex, he\u2019s being kind to the team. He could easily ask for a different set of black gear for that uniform,” reacted head equipment manager Dave Williams, adding that TRUE brand, which Lyon switched to from Vaughn last summer, has a roughly three-week turnaround for pad orders.<\/p>\n
While light-colored\u00a0pads change how the 6-foot-1 Lyon feels, the way he wears them actually improves his coverage of the net. Explaining his setup, Lyon pointed to the laces connecting his skate holder to the bottom of his leg pad \u2013 they’re unusually loose, he demonstrated.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, whenever I go down, basically my pad sits off my skate this much (points to gap), and I gain like six inches of width from my butterfly,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou have to have other crazy attributes in order to survive as a small goalie. It\u2019s just math: the bigger you are, the more space you take up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lyon\u2019s approach is in stark contrast to that of tandem-mate Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, one of the NHL\u2019s tallest goalies at 6-foot-5. Luukkonen cinches his leg pads super tight and with leather straps, not the more typical, modern Velcro. He had the straps removed near the knees, keeping things nice and loose up top while secure down low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The journeyman, playing for his fifth team in nine seasons, knows the equipment staff are his \u201clifeblood\u201d as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544141,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-544140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}