Anthony Stolarz Interview: Training with Sports Performance Lab

After starting off the season on the taxi squad, Anthony Stolarz has been on fire as of late. Since being pressed into duty for the Anaheim Ducks in the face of injuries, he has set a franchise record for the number of saves in a shutout thanks to his 46 saves against the San Jose Sharks. With the cutting edge training that Stolarz has received at the Sports Performance Lab in New Jersey during the off-season, it’s easy to see how he has been able to post an impressive .928 save percentage in six games for the Ducks so far, despite long stretches without game action. 

Stolarz was gracious enough to give Crash the Pond some of his time, discussing his season in Anaheim, his training regimen with the Sports Performance Lab, learning from Ryan Miller, and much more. Here is the full interview.

Crash the Pond: What has this season been like for you, spending a large portion of it on the taxi squad, then playing and setting records, all while dealing with the COVID protocols?

Anthony Stolarz: Obviously being on the taxi squad, it’s something that none of us have really experienced before. We didn’t really know what to expect early on, but I had a little experience a couple of years ago in Lehigh Valley. I was the third goalie, so I had a little experience knowing what my body needs, what I can do in terms of working out off the ice, as well as on the ice, what I need to stay sharp. 

The other thing that was key, too, was the mental approach. Obviously, everyone wants to play, and especially for a goalie, there’s only one goalie that can play. Having dealt with this a couple of years ago, I kind of knew what it would be like. Going in I knew I needed to keep an open mind and continue to work, and if I got an opportunity, just make the most of it. 

CTP: As a goaltender, is it challenging to stay mentally and physically prepared when you're not getting consistent game action, or is there a way of getting close to replicating that in practice?

AS: It’s definitely hard. As a goalie, like I said, you only got one guy in the net in games, two guys in practice. Usually, the bulk of my work comes in before practice. I’ll hop out, warm up with the other goalies, do the drills with them, but once practice starts, [John Gibson and Ryan Miller] take the nets. If any of them need a breather, or if they just want to hop out, I’ll get in. 

A lot of my work comes after, too, with the “Stay Ready” squad that we have here in Anaheim, and [Ducks goalie coach Sudarshan Maharaj]. It’s not like a forward or a defenseman, where in the drills, you’re involved, you’re doing line rushes. I’m kind of a bystander there, just kind of watching, spectating practice.

CTP: Has the setup of this season affected your training regimen at all? Have you done anything differently? 

AS: Because of the taxi squad being there, we’ve had a lot more time to work out. So for me, I’ve been able to focus on a lot of things, like my lower body, core strength, flexibility, so I’ve really been able to put more of an emphasis on that than I normally would if it was a normal season.

For me, as a goalie, I don’t like to be too sore when I’m going out there and playing, but here with the taxi squad, we’re working out every day and doing upper body and lower body. It’s definitely a little different, but there’s some benefits to it as well. Like I said, just being in shape and working on some things that you normally wouldn’t be allowed to in a normal season. 

CTP: So, in a way, you’re coming out of this in better shape then you might normally be.

AS: Oh yeah, I would say so, for sure. Or, at least I’ll have more of a head start on summer training. Just in terms of going in, you don’t normally take a couple of months off. Once you get to January, February, with the grind of the season, you’re not doing too many workouts. I’ll be ready to go as soon as the season is over, get right into summer training. Skip that “being sore” phase.

CTP: Speaking of your summer training, I understand that you train at the Sports Performance Lab in New Jersey during the off-season, how has that helped your preparation?

AS: It’s actually been huge for me. Obviously, I live in Jersey, I was drafted by Philadelphia, so I was fortunate enough to have that facility in the summer in New Jersey and be able go there in the summer and train and get ice with other players. Someone I grew up with, Matt Weis, he recommended [the facility] to me, he worked out there with [SPL coach Andrew Watkins] for the last two years. I thought I’d give it a shot and try it out. 

It was probably the best decision I could have made. Just the technology that they have there to enhance your game and the knowledge that the entire staff has. Especially for me, having had knee injuries in the past, Andrew’s expertise helped me strengthen that knee. I haven’t squatted in 4, 5 years, and here I was this summer, I’m putting up 240, 250 pounds. So it really gave me the confidence to go out there and have no limits

CTP: Are there any training methods that stand out to you, that set the Lab apart?

AS: Definitely, the force plates. With my knee injury, my left side is a little more off than my right. So, using the force plates allowed me to get that balance back, so that I wasn’t compensating with my right side. We also had a lot of hand-eye coordination drills. 

They have this screen, where you touch it when it lights up. There’s noises that they put to challenge your brain, make it seem like it’s an actual game. The technology that they have there, it’s next level. From what I’ve seen, they’ve only been upgrading it since I left, so I’m eager to get back and see what they’ve got there. 

CTP: Shifting back to the Ducks a bit, you’re around John Gibson and Ryan Miller quite a bit. How much have you been able to pick up on being around them, or maybe vice versa, where they pick up on things in your game?

AS: I’ve been extremely lucky to have two great goalies there. We help each other out, talking to each other when we’re on the ice. For me, I take little things from their game and see if I can incorporate it into my game. That’s something that, for the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to do, just watching and studying other goalies and seeing if there’s something that I can put into my game and help me.

Millsy has been extremely helpful, just being able to talk to him. If there’s anything going on, anything he sees, he’ll come over and talk to me and he’ll be like “Hey, maybe if you try this, let’s see how it goes”. So we’ve had a great relationship and I’m very fortunate to have those two with me.

CTP: What are some of the biggest things that you've learned from Ducks goaltending coach Sudarshan Maharaj?

AS: Probably the biggest thing with Sudsy is just utilizing my size. In the past, I tended to hunch over a bit and make myself small while thinking that I had everything covered. We’ve been doing a lot of tracking stuff this year to keep my chest up, keep my hips up and I can definitely see the results there. I just love his philosophy throughout this season. Instead of just going out there and doing drills, we’ve been focusing on one or two things every week. 

We’ll do drills every day to hammer those things into my game, make sure I’m comfortable with it, and then we’ll move on to something else. Along the way, we’ll go back and touch on some things. I think it’s really allowed me to feel confident in my game, just try some things that maybe feel a little uncomfortable at first, but as I practice and do them more, I feel more comfortable and can start to incorporate them into a game. 

Obviously, you want to be playing, but you also want to make the most of your time on the taxi squad, and I’ve been able to do that and I think it’s really helped my game.

CTP: In my opinion, out of the three Anaheim goalies, you’re the one that seems to handle the puck the most. When you get into games, and you haven’t been getting in consistently to build the rapport with your defensemen, how tough is that in terms of breaking the puck out?

AS: We have a good system, in terms of the calls and the communication when the puck gets rimmed in. Playing the puck is always something I’ve enjoyed. I can remember when I was a mite and a squirt, teams would dump the puck into the corner and I’m chasing it down. This was before the trapezoid rules were implemented so you know, I would just go nuts. Martin Brodeur was my favorite goalie growing up so if there was one thing I could take from him, it was probably playing the puck. 

I’ve played with a lot of [Anaheim’s] defensemen before, whether it was in San Diego last year, or the one game I played in Anaheim last year. It’s something that we work on quite a bit. At the beginning of practice, coach will rim it in, and we’ll do our ups and our overs, just trying to get the D to play the puck. I’m confident enough in my puckhandling ability that if I just get thrown in there, I’ll trust the guys and trust that they’ll make the right calls, while also trusting that my instincts will make the right play too.

CTP: It seems like the goaltending position is constantly evolving. For you, over the course of your career, what have been some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen, whether it be in the field or in your own game?

AS: The biggest change is probably the [vertical-horizontal] technique, to the reverse VH. I actually watched film from my days in London, and I would do everything on the post in the VH. So you’re up on the post, one leg’s up, the other’s along the ice. 

The game’s evolved now to where you’re pretty much just doing a butterfly and leaning into the post. If you look around the league now, I think you’re seeing most guys doing the reverse VH. I think it gives you such a better chance on second chance opportunities. Guys are so big now, so there’s very little room, it’s going to take a perfect shot to beat them. That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve noticed over the past couple of years.

CTP: How tough is it to push off from the reverse VH? When you’ve got your pad inside the post, do you just lift your skate up and push off, how exactly does that work? It looks challenging.

AS: My skate is actually on the post, so it’s actually quite easy to get a push. I know there are some goalies, like Tuukka Rask, who put their pad inside the post. Anton Khudobin as well. They’ve been doing it for so long that they’ve kind of just perfected it. I’ve always felt more comfortable with my skate on the post and just leaning over. 

You can get a really good push if there’s any rebound chances. I feel like it’s a tighter seal, whereas with the VH there’s just so many holes. When you’re in the reverse VH, you’re in the butterfly, if the puck hits you, it’s usually going to hit you in the chest and drop right in front of you so you can track it. When someone throws the puck in your feet, when you’re in the VH, you’re in scramble mode trying to find the puck. 

CTP: You mentioned puck tracking. Maybe this is me not understanding the position, but I was watching your save from Monday night against San Jose, where you made that big glove save on Timo Meier in the first period. There was a point shot from Brent Burns that got blocked, and it looked like you were scrambling a little bit, but then you immediately turned your head towards the puck and then were able to push off, slide over to the left, and make the glove save. How much do you work on head movement and puck tracking, and how important is that to your game?

AS: Yeah, one of the things I actually worked on during the quarantine is that I learned how to juggle. That’s definitely helped, and like I said, at the Sports Performance Lab, we did a lot of hand-eye coordination stuff, working on our reaction time, too, a lot of head movement.  They have the glasses that flicker, which you can adjust the speed of, and it’s actually extremely challenging. 

But yeah, on that play, I saw that the shot got blocked, and the puck went to the left. The first thing that you learn as a goalie is you want to turn your head and locate the puck. So I pushed across and saw that [Meier] was going to shoot it and that he was going high. The puck kind of hit my glove, and you know, you want to butter the toast a little bit as a goalie, make it look flashy. I think just the awareness to look and push across to get myself in a good position definitely helped. The most important thing there is to make sure you locate the puck first, to give yourself a chance to make that second save.

CTP: Definitely a solid windmill on that glove save.  In regards to the Sports Performance Lab, I see that they’re really big on using data for training. How much do you pay attention to that and has that maybe benefited your performance at all?

AS: I actually look into [the data] quite a bit. In the summer, we would do monthly tests that would be like the tests we do in training camp in Anaheim. I was always monitoring my scores to see how I was progressing, whether that be on the vertical jump, or in the Wingate test, which is a 30 second stationary bike sprint, which isn’t my favorite thing in the world to do. Andrew would sit there and push me, yell at me, get me motivated to do it. That’s definitely something I monitored, you work so hard, you want to beat your scores to show that progression and that all of your hard work is paying off. 

CTP: I also saw that they have brain training. Have you dipped into that at all, what does that even entail?

AS: Yeah, like I was mentioning earlier with the hand-eye coordination and the board they have, they have this thing where you have to track things on the board with your finger, like the circles and the balls that are coming at you. It forces you to figure out what the best route is in that situation.

Another thing we would do, they have a pattern of dots on the board, and then you would have to remember where each dot was, what sequence, what order that they popped up in.  It really challenges your brain. Another thing we would do is hand-eye coordination drills with noise to simulate playing in a real live game. 

They’ve got some cool things over there, and I don’t even think we went through half of the games and the brain training stuff. We had 6 or 7 of us in a group there over the summer, so we turned that into a little competition which was fun too. 

CTP: Wrapping things up here Anthony, when are we going to see you shoot one down the ice and get an empty net goal, when is that going to happen?

AS: I think in the next opportunity I get, it would definitely have to be a two goal game. I had an opportunity in San Diego this year but it was weird, they dumped the puck in and I had a little too much time, so that kind of panicked me a bit. 

I ended up handing it off to the defensemen. I figured, you know what, they need the points more than I do. Obviously, it’s something that every goalie dreams of, for me that would be huge, even just to get the opportunity to throw one down there.

CTP: How much easier is that to do now with the composite goalie sticks, like with the True stick that you’re using?

AS: It’s so much easier. I put a ton of wax on my stick, too, just because I know I play the puck so much. With the ice crews coming out throughout the game, if the circumstances come,  the conditions should be pretty good for me to throw one down there to at least give it a shot. I don’t think I’m going to flub it, with these sticks I can get the puck in the air over the redline from my goal. If I get the chance, I’m definitely going to rip it. 

CTP: Well all right, since you brought up the stick wax, I have to ask: how much thought do goalies, or even you put into your tape job? You hear with skaters all the different styles, so for you how much goes into it, even for your handle and things like that?

AS: For my handle, I like comfort. I don’t have the notch in there, the cutout. I just have a normal goalie stick. The only thing I’ll do is put some medical tape around the shaft, so that it deadens the vibration of the stick when it gets hit by a puck. I’ll put the lizard skin, the baseball type tape, on my handle. 

My tape job is pretty standard, I think it’s more of a goal-scorer’s tape job. I try to go halfway down the blade, all the way to the toe. It’s simple and easy, you take so many shots in practice and whatnot. I’m not a huge fan of taping my stick every day, so the less tape I use, the less amount of times I have to tape it. 

CTP: That’s all I’ve got for you Anthony, this was a pleasure and thanks for taking the time.

AS: Not a problem, thanks for wanting to do the interview, I appreciate it.