When he was nothing but a rookie hopeful in the Montreal Canadiens organization nearly two decades ago, Patrick Roy essentially was told he would never amount to anything by Jacques Plante, then the team’s part-time goaltenders coach.
When he was nothing but an unproven, recently acquired goalie with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim in 2000, Jean-Sebastien Giguere described his career as “a mess.”
Roy became a Hall of Famer and four-time Stanley Cup champion, arguably the best goalie in NHL history. Giguere is a Conn Smythe Trophy winner and Stanley Cup champion. Whom do these men credit greatly for the bulk of their success, when others doubted them?
Francois Allaire, a man nobody believed would amount to much of anything in the NHL.
“I can pretty much say I would never have made it in the NHL without Francois’ help,” said Giguere, now an Avalanche goaltender. “I had played some games, but I was never a regular. … The day I got traded to Anaheim, he called me and said: ‘Why don’t you come over to my house? We’ll watch some video.’ We’re from the same town (Blainville, Quebec), so I could do that. The day I did that, everything changed. Everything started to become a little simpler. What a lucky break for me.”
Allaire, hired this past summer by the Avs, is something of a Wizard of Oz-like character and rarely talks to the media. He talked to The Denver Post when he was hired in June, but only briefly, and has declined all interview requests since.
Allaire, 58, never played in the NHL or in major junior. He played only one year of college hockey, in 1975 for the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec before the school downgraded the program to the intra- mural/club level. His dream of being an NHL goalie having ended early in life, he decided his best route to the big time was learning all he could about the position, and becoming a master professor.
Allaire’s quiet, bookish nature lent itself to such a journey, and what he found after years of a nomadic, backpacking journey through European and North American hockey towns following his graduation in 1978 was that nobody seemed to have any idea what it really took to be a great goalie.
“A perfect fit”
What prevented Allaire from becoming just another person yelling from the peanut gallery was part gumption, part serendipity.
Bursting with ideas about what he had researched, Allaire persuaded a small Canadian publishing company to print “Hockey Goaltending for Young Players” in 1983. In the book, Allaire laid out his principles for what it took to succeed between the pipes.
The book drew the attention of some lower-level coaches in Quebec junior hockey, including Pierre Creamer, who coached a Montreal Canadiens affiliate in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Creamer would be later promoted to coach the Sherbrooke Canadiens and took Allaire with him. It was there that Allaire started working with a third-round Montreal draft pick named Patrick Roy, who proved to be an eager student.
“I was hungry to learn and soak up as much as I could, and he loved to teach. It was, to me, a perfect fit,” Roy said.
At that time, it was commonly believed goaltenders needed to stay on their feet as much as possible and not move around much. Goalies also were supposed to keep their skates dull, better for sliding across the ice in last-ditch, “stack the pads” situations where movement was necessary. But Allaire wanted his goalies to move around, adjusting to the play developing in front of them, and also had a radical idea that a goalie’s skates should be as sharp as possible, to better “push and plant” the body with every movement of the puck.
“Every time there’s a pass in the zone, there’s a push and there’s a stop,” Giguere said. “There’s no gliding. You push, you stop, you set with every pass. So you need skates that are sharp because you need to stop hard, and you need to have a good edge to push from one side to the next and stay ahead of the play. You always want to stay ahead of the play, so when the guy actually shoots, you’re there in position to make the save.”
“Keep it simple”
With the Roy-coached Avs, Allaire has found another willing young pupil in Semyon Varlamov. After Allaire was hired, he met with Varlamov and Giguere for a week in Montreal, going over techniques he thought could help the Russian goalie, including raising his catching glove and working hard on planting more from side to side. Allaire noticed a tendency of Varla- mov’s to sometimes slide out of the blue- painted area in making saves, leaving him vulnerable to rebounds. Varlamov now uses the push-and-plant approach.
“I’ve learned so much working with him,” said Varlamov, whose .924 save percentage this season is the best of his NHL career.
Roy said it’s Allaire, not him, who makes the call on who should start in goal. Roy rarely talks with the Avs’ goalies during drills at practice. That is Allaire’s territory.
“We were very lucky when he was available to us this summer,” Roy said. “For him to be available to me as my first goalie coach during my first NHL coaching job, that was an easy decision for me.”
After being hired in June, Allaire told The Denver Post: “One of my trademarks is I try to make sure guys are feeling good and keep it simple, create good routine, make sure the guy is happy coming to the rink. Then, after that, look at the tape and then find their best strength and build around it.”
So far, so good.
Goalie whisperer
A look at five notable goalies whom Francois Allaire has helped during his career:
Patrick Roy, Montreal: The Hall of Famer credits Allaire as the biggest reason for succeeding early in his NHL career.
D J.S. Giguere, Anaheim, Toronto, Colorado: Giguere is on his third team with Allaire as his goalie coach. He became a star with Anaheim under Allaire’s watch in the early 2000s.
Guy Hebert, Anaheim: Before Giguere took over in 2000, Hebert had several outstanding seasons under the tutelage of Allaire.
Jose Theodore, Montreal: He developed into an all-star goaltender under Allaire, and later won the Hart Trophy.
James Reimer, Toronto: Although Allaire’s tenure in Toronto was shorter than the others and criticized by some, he worked hard with Reimer, who now is one of the NHL’s better goalies.
Adrian Dater, The Denver Post
