The butterfly saves goals and costs hips

Goaltending solved the low shot decades ago and has been quietly paying for it in groins ever since.

Ask a goalie coach about groins and watch the face change.

The butterfly was a genuine solution. Drop, seal the ice, take away everything along the bottom of the net, and force shooters to beat you high in a space that is smaller than it looks on television. It worked so completely that it stopped being a style and became the position. Nobody stands up any more except by accident.

What it asks of a body is unusual. The hip goes into deep flexion and hard external rotation, repeatedly, under load, on a surface with no friction, several hundred times a night if you count practice. The joint was not designed to be parked at the end of its range for a career. Over years the socket rim and the head of the femur can start to make contact where they should not, cartilage gets irritated, and the adductors that fire to pull the legs back in are working against a joint that no longer moves freely. So the muscle strains. Everyone calls it a groin injury. Often the groin is the symptom and the hip is the story.

Then the reverse VH arrived and made post play better and the loading worse. Pinning one pad vertically against the post with the other leg extended is a superb way to seal a short-side corner. It is also an extreme position held under pressure, and goalies now spend real time there in every game rather than passing through it.

The honest trade-off is this: the technique saves goals, and the goals it saves are worth more to a team than the twenty-eight-year-old hip is to the team's spreadsheet. That is a cold sentence but it is how the decision actually gets made.

What I do not accept is that this is unmanageable. The clubs that take it seriously spend real money on mobility work that keeps the joint moving through range rather than only strengthening the muscles around it, they cap repetition volume in practice rather than letting a goalie take four hundred shots because a coach wants shooting drills, and they look at hip range in the summer instead of waiting for the first strain in November.

The rest run a goalie until something tears and then call it bad luck.