Stick flex is chosen by feel and it should not be

Two players the same size will use sticks forty units apart, and neither can tell you why beyond preference.

Two players, same height, same weight, same position, forty flex units apart. Ask either one why and you will get a shrug and the word feel.

Feel is not nothing. A stick is the only equipment that transmits information back to a player's hands, and a man who has taken a million shots with a particular whip knows things about it that no lab will find. But feel is also how a player ends up using the stick he happened to be given at seventeen, cut to a length that was right for a body he no longer has.

The physics is straightforward enough to be useful. The shaft stores energy when it bends and returns it as it straightens, which is why a snap shot from a loaded stick leaves faster than the arm alone could send it. Load it too little, because the flex is too stiff for the player's strength and technique, and the shot is all arm. Load it too much, because the flex is too soft, and the shaft bends past the point where it returns cleanly, the blade twists, and accuracy goes. There is a right region for a given player and it is narrower than the market's habits suggest.

Length interacts with all of it, and this is where the choosing-by-feel problem really bites. Cutting a stick down stiffens it, and by a meaningful amount, because you have shortened the lever. A player who trims two inches off a stick and keeps the same printed number is now shooting with something noticeably stiffer than the one he liked, and he will usually blame the batch rather than the saw.

Then there is the trade with stickhandling and defence. A softer shaft feels better on the puck and worse when you are trying to lift somebody's stick or hold a lane, and it breaks more often, which matters when a stick failure at the point creates a break the other way.

I would want every player measured once with a shot radar and a decent camera, across three flexes at their actual cut length, before anybody asks them what they prefer. Half of them would learn nothing. The other half would find they had been fighting their equipment for years.

Preference should be the tiebreaker. Right now it is the whole process.