The Quiet Greatness of Martin Brodeur

I got to see the now retired Martin Brodeur play in the seventh game of the 2003 Stanley Cup Final against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Before the series began, my dad could only purchase tickets to a theoretical seventh game, with the bold parenthetical "IF NECESSARY" printed across them. As it happens, that game was the same night as as my middle school science fair, which accounted for 100 percent of my grade that quarter. When the series began with two consecutive and relatively effortless Devils 3-0 wins, my dad and I all but dismissed the possibility of a scheduling conflict. But, the home teams held court throughout the series, and a seventh game came to fruition.

At the time, the science fair seemed like a vast, evil adult conspiracy to keep me from going to a very important hockey game. In retrospect, it only seems like a larger, more nefarious conspiracy, since I now fully grasp the pointlessness of a middle school science fair. The prospect of missing out on a Game Seven to stand in an overcrowded gymnasium next to a tri-fold poster board explaining how different gradients of light affect onion plant growth was, I could only assume, the fiendish work of a consortium of hockey-hating science teachers the likes of which the world could hardly reckon.

Luckily, my parents had their priorities in order. My dad winked and nudged that a fever would be coming on just after school that day. My mom would have none of it: if we really wanted plausible deniability, I'd have to call out sick for the whole school day. With that, my mom called the school the morning of June 9, 2003, regretfully informing them I had come down with a mysterious illness and would be unable to attend the fair. She then warned me not to get caught on TV.

It seems like a long time ago that I was in middle school making the drive across the George Washington Bridge to see Brodeur play. The scary thing is, at that time, he had already been playing in the NHL for a decade.

Hockey fans are prone to reminisce about seeing Gretzky's passes, Lemieux's wrist shots, or Scott Stevens' preternatural ability to concuss another human being on command and within the strict-ish bounds of NHL legality (a skill he displayed earlier in the series against poor, diminutive Paul Kariya, who definitely scored a goal in a Stanley Cup game with a severe concussion). With players like that, you could see the greatness, the inherent skill. If there was a Hall of Fame eye test, they passed it.

Brodeur is likely the best goalie to ever play, but, somehow, he doesn't pass the test. He was a model of consistency in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s—starting somewhere between 67 and 77 games a year with a save percentage hovering around .910 almost every year. Unlike some of his flashier, more acrobatic contemporaries—Dominik Hasek and Ed Belfour come to mind—Brodeur simply, predictably, and inevitably got in the puck's way nine times out of 10, every season, for 20 years.

While Brodeur plodded along with the Devils game after game and year after year, the starting goalies in the Stanley Cup Finals became a violent clash of consonants: Arturs Irbe, Miikka Kiprusoff, Nikolai Khabibulin, Jussi Markkanen, Ray Emery, Antti Niemi, Michael Leighton, Brian Boucher, Tim Thomas, Roberto Luongo, Tuukka Rask, and Corey Crawford are all (excellent) names that either induce nervous laughter or sweaty spines depending on your rooting interest. Some of them were stellar for a brief period, but none of them were consistently great, and many were greatly inconsistent.

I purposely left one name out of that list: Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Brodeur's counterpart in the 2003 series. Both goalies had phenomenal playoffs, but Giguere gained most of the fanfare for his wily style, sudden emergence, and a spectacular Western Conference Final against the Minnesota Wild in which he gave up a single goal the entire four game series. Jiggy, as he was affectionately known, was the story going into the finals.

Entering Game Seven, Brodeur had three shutouts in the Finals alone, while Jiggy had only one (in an overtime game), but a ridiculous .945 save percentage in the postseason overall. It was widely assumed that whoever took the game and the Cup would also get the Conn Smythe Trophy for most valuable player in the postseason.

The Devils did their thing, which I could easily observe from the rafters of the Continental Airlines Arena: a perfectly executed trap defense, neutering any Ducks attack before it ever got off the ground. The Devils got a goal early in the second and tightened the noose further. Brodeur made 25 routine saves. Jiggy dove and flopped around in spectacular fashion, leading lots of people who don't know how hockey works to think he was doing a very good job in the same way that the guy who is always power-walking around the office seems really busy and important until you realize it's because he always forgets his laptop in the other room.

After another Devils goal and an empty-netter, Brodeur celebrated his third Cup since 1995 (he would play in one more Finals nine years later [nine!], but lose to the Kings). Maybe it was only a shock to the people inside the building, but Jiggy became only the fifth player in history from the losing team to win the Conn Smythe; this despite the fact that Brodeur had four shutouts in the Stanley Cup Finals, which makes it exceedingly difficult to lose the series.

I remember the crowd booing Jiggy viciously, in the way that only a New Jersey hockey crowd can mix boos with curses in the same syllable. It makes me sad that I can vividly recall the aroma of Bud Ice particles spewing from the mouth of the stranger sitting next to me as he cursed Jiggy and questioned the purity of his parents, but I can't remember the performance of the man he thought more deserving of the award. In a way, Brodeur's effortless consistency made each performance tragically forgettable.

There will always be Brodeur detractors, who insist the Devils' notorious trap defense was more responsible for Brodeur's success than his actual skill set, that any goalie could have succeeded under that system. There could be a tiny grain of truth to this, but Brodeur's save percentage actually went up after the 2004-05 lockout, which did away with the two-line pass rule and rendered the trap all but extinct. He also won two of his Vezina Trophies after the lockout, the award given to the best goalie.

Still, I sympathize with the need to bring Brodeur's vast accomplishments down to Earth and into a realm we can understand. It makes more sense, in some kind of abstract way, to credit the system rather than his timeless ability to stand in front of a frozen flying cylinder. Brodeur has been stopping pucks in the NHL for almost as long as I've been alive. I'm still trying to think of a save. It shouldn't be hard: there are 28,928 to choose from.