Deconstructing Patrick Roy: as the Avalanche roll into high gear in the playoffs, opposing players will try to get inside the head of the game's best goaltender. Good luck

Sporting News, The, April 29, 2002 by Adrian Dater

He is the poker player who can see everyone else's cards.

You think you've got Patrick Roy fooled, but you don't. You think he doesn't see you lurking by the side of the net, hoping to get off a quick one-timer past the near post, but he does. You think you can be the one who beats him through the five-hole, the one he has so tantalizingly exposed, but you can't. You think he'll be the one who gets tired first and lets in the big overtime goal, but he won't.

Roy knows what you're going to do before you do. Like a worn-out pool table in a working-class tavern, he has seen all the shots from all the angles. He knows all the mind games, everything from the ethnic slurs of his French-Canadian heritage to the whispers about the width of his pads. He knows the book on him is to shoot high, and he encourages everyone to read it. That way, you eliminate about four-fifths of the net to shoot at, bettering the odds you'll miss.

He loves it when you doubt him. It makes it much easier to make it his personal crusade to prove you wrong. Everyone from his first coach Jacques Lemaire, who derisively asked Roy at his first training camp with the Canadiens if he wanted a pillow to make all his flopping easier on his body, to his boyhood idol, Daniel Bouchard, who publicly proclaimed, "I think we've found his weak spot" after going up two games in a 1993 playoff series with Quebec, has had to fermer la bouche in the end.

Roy is like the most basic of high school geometry theorems: He is proven, beyond any doubt. So why can't he just accept that and slowly recede like a Maui sunset? Why, at age 36, did he have to go out and make fools of skaters two-thirds his age or younger? Why couldn't he just have been happy with the unprecedented third Conn Smythe Trophy he won last June with the Avalanche, when he put his name on the Stanley Cup for the fourth time and Ray Bourque's for the first? Why did he have to go out and play as if he would be on the first plane to the Av's minor league affiliate in Hershey, Pa., if he didn't go out and stone 'em every night this season?

Because he's Patrick Roy, silly. You thought you had him figured out, but you didn't. It's always the other way around.

I like to give my team the best possible chance at winning, and for me that means being as well-prepaid, as well-educated, maybe as I can be," says Roy, the NHL's career wins leader in the regular season (516) and the postseason (139, after the Avs took a 2-0 lead over the Kings in the first round of the playoffs).

"I like to know what a player's tendencies are, what he's going to do on a breakaway or where he likes to shoot the puck. Not only that, but what a team's tendencies are. Do they like to dump and chase? Do they like to set lots of screens in front of the net and put shots from the point? If you're a goalie, you've got to know what the other side is going to try and do as best yon can. You're cheating your teammates if you don't."

But Roy's filing cabinets are remarkably free from large envelopes crammed with information on each NHL player. His video library is notably absent titles such as "The Breakaway Tendencies of Jaromir Jagr," or "Slap Shot, starring Brendan Shanahan."

Roy keeps it all upstairs, in the John Nash-like mind of hockey. Pick a game, any game, from his past and Roy can tell you all about it: what the score was; who it was who scored on him, if anybody; what the between-periods entertainment was.

"It's amazing," says Adam Foote, Roy's teammate and road roommate for the last seven years. "He'll bring up things from games five years ago that I have no. idea ever happened. He'll say, `Oh, yeah, we lost that game, 2-1, to Calgary. Remember, Theo Fleury got the (winning) goal?' And I'll be like, `No, I don't.'"

Roy's fertile mind this season more than made up for any millisecond reflex time he might have lost on his glove hand or butterfly technique over the years. Roy's 17th NHL season was his best, at least statistically. He set a new career standard for goals-against average; at 1.94. His save percentage was a robust .925, and his nine shutouts total was another personal best. Despite Colorado battling a Stanley Cup hangover for the first half of the regular season, and without superstar Peter Forsberg for all of it, Roy led the Avs to second place in the Western Conference and the team's record-tying eighth straight division championship,

His performance made him the favorite to win not only his fourth Vezina Trophy as top goaltender, but his first Hart Trophy as regular-season MVP. in a season filled with great showings by some of the league's oldest players (Chris Chelios, Adam Oates and Ron Francis), Roy's might have been the best.

"The guys who still love to play find out what it takes, with the diet, the daily regimen, the training, and they really are world-class," says former NHL defenseman and current ESPN analyst Brian Engblom. "They have the knowledge of themselves, when to rest and when to pour it on in an 82-game schedule. Look at Chelios; he can't do what he used to do, so his game has changed, but obviously he's a lot smarter. He doesn't get himself in situations like he did which he was in his second year in the league.