Excerpt ….
…A big reason why Mete has the longest goal drought in the NHL is because he can’t shoot. Not literally, but his shot is so ineffective he’s reluctant to even use it. In 68 games this season, Mete has attempted 143 shots at 5-on-5, or just over two per game. In terms of shot attempts per 60 minutes of ice time, Mete’s rate of 7.95 is the lowest on the team. In fact, among players who have logged at least 800 minutes at 5-on-5 this season, Mete’s shot attempt rate is 32nd lowest in the entire NHL.
If Mete has anything to do with it, this will not be the situation for long.
“That’s the goal this summer, just keep shooting,” Mete said. “I’m going to start early. Not working out early, but shooting.”
Last summer, Mete couldn’t do any shooting because his left index finger – the bottom hand on his stick – was broken and he couldn’t grip his stick. Assuming he makes it to the summer healthy this year, Mete plans on visiting Tim Turk, a shooting guru who works with NHL players across the league and travels the world teaching the mechanics and intricacies of shooting a hockey puck.
Mete worked with him three years ago, but then the year after was his draft year and he went to the Memorial Cup with the Knights, then last year he was injured. He’s eager to go back to see him, and Turk is confident he can make a difference.
“What I do is I customize what they need to do to avoid reverting to comfort,” Turk said.
Reverting to comfort basically means going back to the way you have shot a puck your whole life, something Turk seeks to change so that it becomes the new comfort. He does this by fiddling with where to place your body in relation to the puck, where to place your hands on the stick, the mechanics of the release and sometimes even the hardware itself. In many ways, Turk is similar to a swing coach in golf, breaking down what he calls the “motion pattern” of a shot and making the necessary tweaks to achieve peak efficiency.
In fact, Turk is a big reason why Brendan Gallagher is able to shoot the puck as well as he does now.
Turk worked for the Canadiens from 2005-12 and was present at Gallagher’s first development camp in 2010. Gallagher was so impressed with what Turk did, he asked if he could work with him again later that summer, but Turk’s summer was fully booked with camps and clinics all over the world, so it was a no go. But Gallagher didn’t take no for an answer and decided to travel to one of those clinics.
He did it again the next summer, when he convinced Turk to hold a clinic in Vancouver for the various NHL players who train with him and his father, Ian, a professional physical trainer. Turk has held that clinic in Vancouver every year since.
“One thing he did with me was break down the parts of the shot, which really simplified it,” Gallagher said. “You play hockey your whole life, but you never really have someone break down your shooting. And then it becomes natural. You do it in the summer and then obviously when I’m shooting the puck now I’m not thinking about it. But when you do enough repetition it becomes natural. When you have that time in the summer to work on it a little bit, it pays off.”
Turk was also the one behind what has become the famous Gallagher curve, a pattern made by Warrior that is used by several players around the league, and also had him change sticks to one with a different kick point and flex.
That change in hardware, coupled with mechanical changes Turk made to his shot, has resulted in the Gallagher we see today.
“I probably got more power,” Gallagher said. “I think there’s just more consistency in my shot, I was able to repeat the same shot over and over again. That’s the big thing that I noticed.”
This is what Mete seeks, power and consistency in his shot. Turk has little doubt he can get there.
“There are levels of commitment that are related to a player’s passion to improve,” Turk said. “Victor’s passion to improve is very high.”
We have witnessed that passion to improve first hand this season in Montreal at one end of the ice, just not the end of the ice everyone expected. Considering Mete went to the AHL for three weeks to become a better defensive player and came back to the NHL vastly improved in that area of the game, giving him an entire summer to improve his ability to produce offence might yield similar results.
Then perhaps Mete would become the player he was always typecast to be….
written by Arpon Basu Apr 2, 2019,
Full article https://theathletic.com/901918/2019/04/02/how-victor-mete-is-changing-the-perception-about-small-defencemen-by-being-an-excellent-defender
