Dominik Hasek Takes His Rightful Place Among The Greats

There was always something mesmerizing about watching Dominik Hasek play. It was dizzying to watch him acrobatically contort his body in ways the human body is not supposed to comfortably move. It's fickle, arbitrary, and mostly capricious to declare someone the greatest at anything.

With Hasek, it's almost harder to argue that he isn't the best to ever play the position. He'll join the sport's other giants with a place inside the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, Canada come November, and it couldn't be more deserved.

Long before he became a sort of punchline—Hasek comeback joke number 15,354—and kids discovered his name while screwing around in shootout mode of the EA Sports world with some European team whose name was as arduous to pronounce as playing goaltender in those games was, Hasek was busy winning the Vezina Trophy six times, the Hart Trophy twice, and getting his named carved into the silver of the Stanley Cup twice. He was nothing, if not dominant.

His awards and accolades could fill any trophy room to capacity. Most impressive is the five times he finished in the top three—including those two wins—in voting for the Hart Trophy, the award given to the league's most valuable player. It's rare for a goaltender to even get such votes, much less win the award.

Patrick Roy, one of the other "greatest of all time," who played in the same general era, finished top three in Hart voting just twice. He never won the award. Martin Brodeur, a man that sometimes earns himself a similar distinction, who also never won a Hart trophy, never finished higher than third place in voting.

"After I retired I really began to appreciate what the game did for me," said Hasek in a release from the Hockey Hall of Fame. "My goal was just to make the NHL, and achieving this recognition is far beyond what I could have imagined."

So how much better was Hasek than everyone else throughout his prime years?

Adam Gretz, a Pittsburgh-based freelance hockey writer, posted this chart on Twitter, which illustrates exactly how much more dominant Hasek was than everyone else, even the second place goalies.

To summarize, if you have trouble reading charts, through the Dominator's prime, it's not even close.

Perhaps, his most impressive career performance came in 1998 at the Winter Olympics in Nagano. There, he went 5-1, giving up a merely six total goals in the six games he played. That year, with Hasek backstopping them, the Czech Republic won their first and only gold medal. His performance helped launch him to superstardom and into the strata of hockey's all-time greats before he added those two Stanley Cup victories to his resume in 2002 and 2008.

Stylistically, Hasek was just pure fun to watch. His style, if you can call it a style, changed the way the game is played today. Goaltenders take what made Hasek successful-although they clearly can't do it like he did-and co-opt it into their more standard style. His ability to cover the lower portion of the net, while inviting shooters to try and test his reflexes, was a beautiful cat-and-mouse game. He's the player you remember, 50 years from now, that you were lucky enough to have seen play.

Goaltending, prior to the era in which Hasek played, was full of guys standing up like dorks. Sure, he wasn't the only one who played a different way, but he played like he had never been taught. His positioning was like watching a kid ride a bike backwards. It didn't always make sense, but it got results.

Maybe Hasek just figured something out that nobody else really has. He knew exactly where to be positionally and knew, if he was caught, he could recover.

"I just try to do anything I can to stop the puck and that's the way I play," Hasek told InGoal Magazine.

"He's kind of unorthodox but he takes away time and space and forces guys to make good shots," Ray Emery, who served as a backup to Hasek on the Ottawa Senators during the 2005-2006 season, told InGoal Magazine in the same story from 2012. "Even though he's doing a two-pad slide instead of a butterfly, it's still the same objective: take away the bottom of the ice and make guys put the puck over him. He's really good at taking lanes away too. He reads plays and that's why you'll see sometimes he'll come flying out if he sees a guy on a breakaway has his head down, or if a guy is cutting down the wing, he'll cut that lane off between the D-man and the near post."

His impact on the game is immeasurable. In 1990-91, Hasek's first year in the NHL, there were three other non-North American goalies in the league: Jarmo Myllys of Finland, Peter Sidorkiewicz of Poland, and Kari Takko of Finland. Combined, those three played 427 games, while Hasek played 735. None of them ever finished a season with a save percentage above .900, while Hasek's career save percentage is .922. It's safe to say, he paved the road for European goaltenders.

This season, 35 goalies from outside North America appeared in at least one game, including Henrik Lundqvist and Tuukka Rask, arguably the top two in the game. His impact will be felt for generations, as he helped pave the way for future goaltenders to get a shot. It's easy to see why every team is trying to find the next Hasek, devoting more scouting resources to European leagues.

So, in November, Hasek will join the ranks of the greatest goaltenders of all time in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It's simple, when you look at the numbers, to see the impact he had both on and off the ice. He was a champion and helped grow the sport. It's only appropriate that he finds a home in the halls of the league's best.