On August 6, 2023, I remember feeling quite unready for the bulletin that 1970s Boston Bruins great Gilles Gilbert had lost his battle with cancer. So Monday’s news that Blaine Lacher died unexpectedly in Medicine Hat, Alberta, at age 53 feels – way – too soon.
As the last starter of the old-Garden era, Lacher’s short career may be trivial to modern Boston Bruins history, but he was pivotal in another dimension.
Goaltending as an art was giving way in the 1990s to goaltending as a science. More-protective, lightweight ge
Whereas a face-molded, fiberglass mask of the ’70s would spare a goalie a facial fracture, the jolt most certainly would stop a game and the goalie might escape concussion. The merging of the cage with the best that goalie-mask gurus like Ernie Higgins had to offer brought this piece of equipment to a level that prevented not only serious injury but the trauma that accompanied a puck to the face at high speed.
At the same time, bulkier chest and arm protection allowed goalies to abandon archaic, puck-stopping strategies meant to avoid injury. Cutting down angles and giving shooters less space has always been core to the goaler’s gameplan, but how they did that was as unique and quirky as the arenas in which they played.
While goaltending was simplified by better equipment, the ever-increasing speed of the game shifted focus from what is happening in the moment to what is likely to happen next. Anticipation, long considered a nuance, became fundamental, and saves outside of live situations were rehearsed.
Style points between goaltenders are harder to detect in today’s game.
It’s in this case that Lacher becomes more than a footnote in that he was the Boston Bruins’ first, true, butterfly-style goalie.
I’ll forever remember a unique encounter with the then-rookie in the Bruins’ dressing room in the final season of the old Boston Garden. All 48 games of the lockout-shortened schedule were played in 1995, and the former Lake Superior State starter finished his first NHL season 19-11-2 with a 2.41 goals-against average and a .902 save pct.
I was eager to ask Lacher about the playing style that was taking over pro hockey at the time.
The stand-up technique so prevalent in the 20th century was rendered obsolete by the emergence of a playing style that was ironically considered quirky when Glenn Hall and Tony Esposito were its torch bearers in the 1960s and ’70s. Now the dragging of goalie pads is universally foundational to the position.
combined with a more-detailed approach to team defense, leveraging a revolution in technique, even philosophy.