TIJUANA, Mexico — It is not hyperbole to declare that Stick P18300278 is the latest iteration of a tool that has kept Kevan Miller in the NHL.
This particular stick — which, on Sept. 5, was packaged with another preseason sample in a cardboard container at Warrior Hockey’s Tijuana factory for shipment to Boston — was customized for Miller for two purposes: to maximize his performance and to keep him healthy.
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The way Miller and Adam Oates, his skills coach, see the situation, the old Warrior stick the Bruins defenseman was using on March 5, 2016, put his livelihood at risk. When Brad Marchand sent a rim around the TD Garden boards, Miller could not pick the puck cleanly off the wall. As Miller bobbled the puck, he exposed himself to be trucked by a lethal opponent: Alex Ovechkin, the 6-foot-3, 235-pound puck predator.
By the time Miller tried to settle his initial bobble, all the warning lights were blinking on his dashboard. Instead of being in a protected position with his lead shoulder braced for impact, Miller presented his back to Ovechkin, practically with a “Kick Me” sign taped to his numbers. Miller’s arms were to his right side, useless as stabilizers, as he tried to corral the puck. He was hunched over with his face level to the dasher.
So when Ovechkin arrived, the Washington behemoth drove Miller face-first into the wall. Miller crumpled to his hands and knees. He missed the next three games because of a neck injury.
“Could have been a lot worse,” Miller said. “Could have been a concussion. Could have been way worse.”
Oates was watching. In the ex-Bruin’s opinion, the curve and lie of Miller’s stick prevented the defenseman from settling the puck. So through Peter Fish, Miller’s agent, Oates offered his services, which included a suggestion: a new stick.
Miller listened. He tried a Warrior model with dimensions per Oates’s recommendations. It was a career-changing revelation.
What were the differences?
“How you carry the puck, how you pass, how you shoot,” Miller said. “It makes you stand up more. You see the ice differently. You see angles differently. Honestly, it changes how you skate. It’s weird.”
Miller, 30, scored one goal and 15 assists while averaging 19:28 of ice time per game last year. The undrafted defenseman will earn $2.5 million this season. His contract expires after 2020.
P18300278 is a progression from the first Oates-recommended model Miller tried. Like all of the company’s sticks, it started as a roll of carbon fiber that was cut, molded, baked, sanded, finished, painted, polished, and packed at Warrior’s Tijuana facility.
The trick was to extract what Miller wanted in his mind and bring it to life in his hands.
Warrior is owned by New Balance, the Boston-based footwear and apparel corporation. It is the title sponsor of the Bruins’ practice facility in Brighton.
CCM, Bauer and Warrior supply the majority of NHL sticks. Aside from proprietary differences, the three companies, in general, follow similar design and production processes. Based on informal feedback from several equipment managers, there are no significant variances in quality of performance between the brands. Ten of the Bruins use Warrior sticks: Miller, Marchand, Noel Acciari, David Backes, Zdeno Chara, Ryan Donato, Torey Krug, Sean Kuraly, John Moore, and Tuukka Rask.
Some players have individual sponsorship deals in which they are paid to use certain sticks. Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews, for example, signed agreements with CCM and Bauer, respectively, even before they played their first NHL game.
But teams pay for most of their players’ sticks. Budgets can vary from $300,000 to half a million annually. Pittsburgh, guessed one equipment manager, is probably spending the most on sticks of any team in the league. It is up to the player to decide which company is best for his needs.
A stick is a player’s most personal piece of equipment. It is a musician’s instrument, a painter’s brush, a chef’s knife, a writer’s pen. The right stick tucks goals in nets and assists on blades. Wins follow. So do raises.
Ex-Bruin Marc Savard, a Warrior guy, applied custom “Disher 91” graphics to his sticks. He would tape them just so, talk to them on the bench, kiss them for good luck, and even take some of them home at night.
Like Savard, Oates was a disher. The Hall of Famer recorded 1,079 career assists, seventh-most in NHL history. He was a stick geek to the end, when, late in his career, he tore a tendon in his right index finger.
Doctors plucked a tendon from his wrist and inserted it into his finger. The procedure compromised some of the mobility in Oates’s right hand, a critical appendage for handling pucks and feathering feeds. So Oates cut down his blade to give himself more leverage on his backhand.
It was not the first time Oates tinkered with his stick.
In 1993, before the start of the Bruins’ first round of the playoffs against Buffalo, Oates received a 12-stick order from Louisville. Every stick was an inch short.
“I… lost… my… mind,” Oates said. “So I went to a woodsmith. He took finishing nails, added an inch, taped them special. First shift, I felt it break in my hand. I had the worst playoffs of my life. Couldn’t play. So I changed companies. That’s not a mistake that’s allowed.”
Oates has not stopped thinking about sticks. After a two-season run as the Capitals head coach, he is now a skills coach for players like Miller, Steven Stamkos, and Mark Scheifele. According to chatter among his peers, Oates charges the highest rates of anyone in the industry. It is a price Miller and those in his cohort are happy to pay, partly because Oates has opened their eyes about the sticks he urges them to use.
It does not surprise Cam Neely that Oates is diving deep on sticks. The Bruins president has always known his former center to be cerebral. But even if Neely doesn’t delve as deeply into sticks as Oates, he sees room for improvement, particularly in the lie — the angle between shaft and blade.
“He thinks the game a lot differently than most,” Neely said. “Even when he played, and even more so now, he’s looking at players. I haven’t gotten really deep into it with him as far as curve on the blade. But for me, it’s always been about lie. I don’t know how many players really focus on lie with sticks. What happens is they might get a stick they like and have some success, but I think you can play around with a bit more. I’d like to see more blade on the ice for most of these guys.”
Compared to the rest of the league, Oates’s clients are in the minority. He thinks a majority of NHL players are using the wrong stick.
“A lot. Seventy-five percent,” Oates declared.
Oates, a paid Warrior consultant, has arrived at this percentage through video study. The analogy he uses is auto racing. Players are racecars. They go straight and turn at rapid speeds. When they tug on the wheel, the puck should flow with them on their blades without a second thought.
The bobbles Oates regularly sees on video signal sticks that do not align with their owners. His concern with fumbled pucks is injury more than poor performance. He sometimes sees players with ill-fitting sticks lose the puck, look down, restrict their field of vision, and get run over. Oates classifies such players as using “concussion sticks.”
“If I go to take it and I bobble it, look where I go,” said Oates, leaning over and lowering his head. “I just lost my view for a second. That’s death in our game.”
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Oates has identified two areas where most players fall short: lie and curve. Within one or both of these plots, in Oates’s opinion, Torey Krug’s stick caused him to finish last season on crutches.
To a casual observer, Krug could do nothing to avoid the fall and feet-first tumble into the Garden boards that broke his left ankle and ended his season on May 4 against Tampa.
Torey Krug ankle injury pic.twitter.com/gueEhJv8hD
— Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) May 5, 2018
Oates doesn’t agree.
“He fractured his ankle,” Oates said, “because of his stick.”
As proof, Oates points to the Bruins’ 4-3 shootout loss against Columbus on Oct. 30, 2017. As Krug went back for a puck, he faked to his backhand, then darted the other way. This placed him in Oliver Bjorkstrand’s crosshairs. Bjorkstrand smoked Krug.
When asked about the play recently, Krug recalled thinking he had faked Bjorkstrand out well. Oates didn’t see a fake. He saw a one-way street.
“He went to go this way, and he can’t,” Oates said, leaning to his left. “His stick won’t let him go that way. So he put on the brakes, and the guy hammered him.”
In Oates’s thinking, Krug entered the same scenario against the Lightning: going back for a puck and not being able to go to his backhand. With that door closed, Krug’s options were limited. They became even more so when he lost his footing.
“Same exact angle. Same exact angle,” Oates said. “The play dictated that he go that direction. And he couldn’t.”
Krug talked to Oates on the phone this summer. Whether it’s because of skepticism, cost, or need for further consideration, he has not hired Oates as a coach. Krug has not changed his stick.
It is straightforward to equip players with skates. Feet are measured. Boots are pulled on and laced up. A twirl confirms whether the skates are fit for purchase.
It’s not so easy with sticks.
Kids, naturally, gravitate toward the sticks of the stars. Flashy graphics catch eyes. Budget often dictates an acquisition. It can be as simple as a parent grabbing, sometimes by chance, the right stick.
“Erik Karlsson. Money,” Oates said. “Man, is that guy good. So good. Guy weighs 160 pounds and he’s the best in the world. Why? Why? Because he’s the perfect specimen with the perfect tool. He’s a lucky man. Whatever tool his dad gave him, he’s a lucky man. I hope he sends his dad a card every year.”
Part of the issue is talent. A future NHL player is so good, fast, and agile that he zooms through the development stages without thinking twice about his stick. Only when he arrives in the NHL and struggles does he realize he is using the wrong tool.
Another part is culture. Hockey players skew more toward the team than individual, wanting to fit in. The stick is part of the process.
“Traditionally, it’s a team sport,” said Warrior lead stick engineer Isaac Garcia. “It carries with it the side effect that no player wants to stick out that much. It’s true in the NHL. It’s even more true in youth, junior, and high school. They don’t want to stick out. Sticks will look largely similar aside from slight variations. There’s not a lot of change that people are willing to accept.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge is the difficulty for players to verbalize what they want. Even for those in the NHL, the right stick is about an indescribable touch.
“I can’t even describe that feel,” said former Hart Trophy winner Martin St. Louis. “It’s just the feel. You’re comfortable and you’re ready to go.”
In 2016-17, Max Pacioretty, a Warrior client, scored 35 goals. Last season, the left wing scored only 17. He changed his curve multiple times as he chased his game. Part of his problem was trying to explain what was missing and what he needed in a tool that is expected to fulfill more than a dozen duties.
A player generally focuses on his shot when choosing his stick. It should be the least of their concerns.
A stick has to handle pucks on forehand and backhand. It’s there to send and receive passes from both sides of the blade. It’s asked to chip a puck out, snag a puck off the wall, defend with stick-on-puck touch, and take faceoffs. It must be sturdy enough to cross-check, slash, and hold up an opponent.
When you finally get to your shot, there are multiple options: wrist shot, snap shot, slap shot, backhand, one-timer.
“It’s the least important skill in our game: shooting,” Oates said. “You’ve got to play. You might get one shot in two games. And it’s a breakaway. Is that a shot? It might be a rebound. People think of shooting — taking a wrister from 30 feet. How many guys get to take them in our game? It’s too fast. Now the occasional defenseman, Brent Burns, takes five a game. But if you watch those shots, they’re off balance. He’s just hitting the puck. That’s not a shot. You’ve got this nice amount of time, stand there, set the puck up, take your time, shoot the puck. Well, that never happens. Never, ever, ever happens. A lot of guys think of shooting only. No. You’ve got to play, man. You’ve got to play our game. Shooting’s a component. You’ve got to play. You’ve got the best shot in the world but you can’t play, you’re not in our league.”
Hockey’s demands are as specialized as golf. Tiger Woods has 14 clubs in his bag to drive, iron off the fairway, chisel from the rough, blast out of sand, chip onto the green, putt. If hockey were like golf, a player would return to the bench, take a breath, and switch sticks for appropriate scenarios.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way.
Instead, a player is equipped with the equivalent of a one-bladed Swiss Army knife that has to whittle wood, screw nails, uncork a wine bottle, trim nose hairs, and pick teeth, all while avoiding animals intent on his destruction.
Good luck with that.
Such was the line St. Louis tried to ride in his 13 seasons in Tampa. For part of his career, he was linemates with Stamkos. In that partnership, St. Louis was the passer. In other games, the coaches put him with Vincent Lecavalier. St. Louis was the shooter.
St. Louis had to optimize his stick for whatever duties he asked to fulfill. The 5-foot-8 St. Louis also had to wield his stick for self-preservation in danger areas and dig for pucks against men six inches taller.
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So even a future Hall of Famer like St. Louis could end up in a bind. If he wanted whippier action, he needed more curve to absorb the puck and keep it within the blade’s pocket. If he cut his stick down to chase stiffness, he had to change his flex.
“If you’re not confident with your stick, it translates,” St. Louis said. “It’s everything. If you don’t trust how the puck is going to bounce off my stick, you’re a hair behind. You’re a second late. Mentally, it just snowballs.”
St. Louis spent hours consulting with equipment managers and sales representatives until he was satisfied with his stick. Miller had it easier.
“Put the other one away,” Miller recalled Oates’s instruction. “This is what you’re using.”
This was the W28. It is the curve, in Warrior’s marketing language, known as the Gallagher. The curve, named after Montreal’s Brendan Gallagher, is growing in popularity. It has a toe curve, good for snapping pucks off quickly and stickhandling in close quarters. Other popular versions are the W03 (Backstrom), a classic curve, and W88 (Zetterberg), which has a closed mouth, ideal for a defenseman who plays a control game and passes the puck.
This will be the third season Miller uses this stick. For marketing purposes, it is the Covert QR Edge. Its internal designation is the T8Q2X. Miller uses a 100 flex — whippy enough to snap off pucks, but stiff enough to dish out the cross-checks he is required to deliver.
It took on-ice testing with Oates to convince Miller to switch from his old Warrior model. It also required collaboration with pro sales rep Peter Marshall, who claims Boston as part of his territory.
For Miller, settling on a new stick was relatively simple. It’s not as easy for other players. Companies like Warrior need stick whisperers to translate a player’s preferred sensations into black-and-white specifications. In fact, Warrior has one on staff: custom/pro sticks manager Jared Quartuccio, who regularly holds one-on-one sessions with players to help them express their desires. A lot of it is trial and error.
“The process would typically be one of the guys who maybe uses a competitor’s product talks to us, talks to the rep, about what they want,” Quartuccio explained. “If they send us one of their current sticks from one of our competitors, we’ll do an array of tests on the stick: capture the flex, the kick profile, shape, textures, coatings, weights, balance points. Then we’ll make a decision on what product of ours to send to that player. If the player’s curve is something we have, we’ll make the stick for them to try. If it’s not a curve we have, we’ll go through the process of digitizing, making a 3-D model of a custom curve, then make the mold from that.”
Warrior has approximately 2,000 molds in its Tijuana factory. The hope is that a player’s desired curve exists in one of those molds. If not, Warrior will design and build a new mold to that player’s specifications.
Marshall and Miller have worked together since the California native’s arrival in the NHL. Like with his other customers, Marshall fills out Miller’s order sheet with his specifications, then submits it to Warrior’s headquarters in Warren, Mich.
From there, the order is filed with the Tijuana factory. It is where P18300278 began its life.
Carbon fiber is a stick’s primary material. It is a petroleum-based product used in numerous industries, from drones for defense companies to bicycles for recreational riders. It is a go-to material because of its strength, stiffness, and light weight.
Warrior’s suppliers produce their carbon fiber in Sacramento and Alabama. For proprietary reasons, their identities are not disclosed.
To make their carbon fiber, Warrior’s suppliers repeatedly heat and stretch their raw materials. The carbon fiber is then blended with resin. Heat and pressure transform a sticky and clumpy goo into a refined product: extremely fine strands of a high-strength composite. This arrives in Tijuana in what look like giant rolls of toilet paper.
Most of the Tijuana factory is hot. Ovens used to bake the blades run at 280 degrees. Tropical, heavy Mexican air flows through the facility. But the storage area housing the thousands of pounds of composite rolls are refrigerated to prevent degradation. The room where blades and shafts are shaped is also air-conditioned.
P18300278 began by looking like a kindergarten project. Sixteen layers of carbon fiber, all cut in seemingly random forms, were held together by a rubber band along with a bar code designating that the bundle belonged to Miller.
Each piece, however, was cut with a specific shape in mind. Layer by layer, in an ordered sequence, a worker fitted every piece onto a block. By the time he was done, he had created P18300278’s blade, much like a cigar roller shapes his or her creations.
The blade was then fitted into an aluminum mold of Miller’s preferred curve. The mold was placed into an oven to bake for approximately 45 minutes.
At another station, P18300278’s shaft was being made in a similar way: all by hand, each layer of composite fitted to specific instructions. If you pictured machinery, robotics, and factory lines pumping out stick after stick, you would be mistaken. Hands are the preferred tools of production. As such, a stick takes about 7 to 10 days to be made. A rush job can bring this down to as short as two days.
Once blade and shaft were complete, they were fused at a junction point called the hosel. It then proceeded through closing stations: washing, filling, sanding, painting, graphics, and a laser-printed stamping of Miller’s name in white capital letters. After final inspection, P18300278 was wrapped in plastic, tied off with a rubber band, and packaged for shipment — first by truck to Warrior’s nearby facility in Chula Vista, Calif., then by air to Boston.
Several days later, P18300278 and its companion arrived at Warrior Ice Arena. Miller personalized it with white tape on his blade, more white tape for the shaft around his top hand, and 86 written in marker below the knob.
Miller used P18300278 during the Bruins’ preseason trip to China. Marshall, meanwhile, placed a 12-stick order to supply Miller for the start of the regular season. As of Sept. 24, the 12 follow-up sticks were still in plastic in a closet behind the Bruins’ dressing room in Brighton.
Miller had yet to tuck into his supply of fresh sticks. P18300278 was suiting him just fine.
What you need to know about sticks
Toe: Generally where most players prefer their curves. It allows for faster loading of pucks than a heel curve.
Heel: Players from previous generations preferred to have big heel curves. Perhaps it was because shooters usually had more time to load their shots. This allowed them to roll the puck from the heel to the contact point mid-blade.
Impact zone: This is the strongest part of the blade because it sees the most action. The face of the blade is stronger than the back.
Hosel/taper: Leaguewide, the trend is toward a thinner taper. While this reduces stiffness around the hosel, the flex increases significantly, allowing shooters to load pucks easily and release shots rapidly. The downside, especially for players with heavy shots, is a reduction in accuracy and a tendency to spray pucks.
Kick point: Depending on the player’s preference, a stick will have a lower (closer to the blade) or higher kick point. This is the area that flexes when a player shoots the puck. Because of the trend toward quick releases, rapid loading, and minimal time for windups, most players prefer a lower kick point. In general, defensemen with more time to shoot have higher kick points.
Lie: The angle of the stick. The lower the lie, the greater angle is between shaft and blade. A stick with a higher lie has less of an angle between shaft and blade. A player’s lie depends on his height and the length of his stick. A tall player with a short stick, for example, would have a higher lie. A short player with a long stick, in contrast, would need a lower lie.
Knob: The butt end of the stick. Most players are satisfied with a plug that fits into the end. Older players prefer knobs. Martin St. Louis used custom wood knobs.
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