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Valley: So is Hasek a guy that was born and raised that way, or was it something he learned? Did you experience a maturity change in his time in Buffalo? Korn: “I think it’s a little of everything. We all talk about nature versus nurture, and I think there are certainly components that are learned, and certainly components that they learn themselves through the School of Hard Knocks, or they learned because they played with a goalie partner. Even though he was very competitive, Eddy Belfour took it to the next level, and he played with Belfour in Chicago, so that had to have a positive impact on Dom. And yet there are things Belfour did that Dom told me he didn’t want to be like. Between periods, you couldn’t talk to Eddy. But with Dom, you could talk to him like it was the middle of the afternoon, because he was able to turn it off and turn it back on. That would be nurture; the experiences and guys you play with. But there’s also nature, which is inherent in you. I don’t think in all our coaching, you can ever make a non-competitive guy competitive. You’ll never make a non-killer a killer. And so there needs to be some of that coming from inside a person. Once in a while we can light the fuse, but it only stays lit for a little while. The elite goalies can keep the fuse lit all by themselves.” Valley: Does Pekka have the same qualities as Hasek? The competitiveness? What makes Rinne so good? Korn: “I would say the competitiveness is definitely there. Somebody once said to me about Rinne, that he would rather get hit in the head with a chair than give up a goal in practice. They never take a minute off, they never give up on a puck, they battle until the battle is over. When pucks are in the net, they dislike it. Peks is very competitive. He battles on every puck and that’s the internal, or I refer to it as the emotional part of the game. I think that competitive nature is more emotional because it’s less controllable. They’re more inherent. But when you talk about Dom and Pekka, they both have the uncanny ability to know what’s happening next, they both have phenomenal hand-eye coordination, and they read patterns. Hockey is a game of patterns, and the faster you recognize a pattern, the easier it is to stop the puck. Both of those guys had an unbelievable ability to know what’s happening next. They know where people are. There’s 10 people on the ice in their zone at any given moment, and they know where they all are. Those two guys probably track the puck better than anyone I’ve seen. And their ability to read pucks off the stick, which is a pattern as well, one that over time you recognize, and well, they know where pucks are going. They track pucks to their body and find pucks in traffic, they connect the dots because they understand the game with the parts that are missing when they can’t see the puck. They were so special that way, and that’s one of the key reasons why they are so special.” Valley: That’s so true because you don’t find it in a ton of goalies, but I look at Kari and his hockey IQ is so high. He’ll come in before a game and talk about setups on the power play and when to expect one-timers and he’s calculating these things with all of this information. Korn: “Remember earlier in this conversation we talked about guys that are goalie geeks? They’re educated and knowledgeable and recognize the patterns and know who they’re playing against. If you were a stock broker and were going to invest in a company, you were going to know everything about that company. You’d know the CEO and the CFO and the balance sheets and the debt and the new products before you invest in them. Goalies need to know that stuff too in order to be effective. Now I’ve coached guys that don’t want to know, and so do you. Even when we do the shootout and we teach our shooters how to score, they’re overwhelmed and they get friggin’ paralyzed. They don’t want to know, they just want to react. One guy says, ‘I just want to use my instincts.’ I said, where do you think those instincts come from? They’re developed inside you from your experiences. You didn’t just wake up as a two-year-old being able to play the piano. You have to learn how to play! Same with hockey, you develop those instincts. I give goalies knowledge to update their instincts, but they have to be able to use it, and some goalies don’t want that. I believe knowledge is power, and the more knowledge you have, when used properly, in theory, the more power you have over your opponent.” Valley: One of the things that we see with younger goalies is that they over-prepare. If we look at morning skates, yes Pekka is focused and Kari is laser-focused for the game, but it revs up during the day, but they’re very careful that it’s not revved up too high too early. What are some of the things that you see with that, with young guys over-preparing and being mentally exhausted by the time the game begins? Korn: “My saying is, ‘Don’t play the game before we play the game.’ And as players age, they start to figure out what works for them. For you it might be music, for this guy it might be a racquetball, for this guy it might be a jog, everyone is a little different in preparation. But I have tried very hard in every goalie I’ve gotten, to not let them get introverted in the morning of a game, or even at times leading up to a game. I think when you do, and you play a long season, even in a 32-game college season, and you’re a #1 goalie, at some point you will explode. So I don’t want them, for no better term, burying their head, shaking their head, trying to get ready to play by psyching up. I think that’s all a giant façade. You are successful at every level when you play on skill. You elevate that skill with emotion. The mental aspects we talk about is a skill - being able to control what you think and how you control what’s going on in your head during the game is a skill. And then there’s the emotion; the adrenaline that takes it to the next level is like a turbo boost for your skill. That’s why you see great performances at big moments. Great goalies turn in great performances because they’re on turbo boosts.” Valley: If I look at one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, it came from Curtis Joseph. He said you can prepare all day for a game. And you can go out in warm-ups and feel fantastic and the first shot goes off a player’s butt or skate and goes in. Now what do you do? Or, you could have had a pre-game skate where things weren’t going well, you go out to warm-up, you don’t feel right, but all of a sudden you pitch a shutout. So his bottom line was, just relax, play the game when the game is played, and control what you can control. For me, I didn’t get that advice until later in my career from him, and it was really helpful because I tried too hard. I tried to prepare too much, when all I needed to do was relax and play the game, let it unfold, and let it happen like it’s going to happen. You’re going to have great nights, and you’re going to have nights that aren’t great. Korn: “And there’s no correlation between morning skates, or no correlation from how you felt today in school. I have been watching morning skates and games for 22 years. I’ve stood at center ice and the head coach goes, ‘Wow is he sharp. He’s going to be awesome tonight,’ and he totally stinks. Or a coach will go, ‘Oh my god, are you sure you want to play this guy tonight?!’ and he plays great. There is zero correlation. The game is its own entity.” Valley: The other thing we should talk about is building upon that. When you have a rookie goalie that’s coming into play, whether the NHL or AHL or even at a younger level, what are the pieces of advice that you give to that goalie? We don’t want to get them over-thinking, so what do you tell them when they’re getting that big chance? Korn: “You have to love to play and you have to enjoy the moment. I think by enjoying it, you lessen the pressure just a little bit and you relax just enough to not be tense and paralyzed. The best goalies are agile, quick and fluid like Jell-O. But when you have too much induced pressure, you’re like cement and you can’t play like that. So that’s my first piece of advice for goalies; enjoy this. There are a million goalies that wish they were where you are today. Second, worry about what you can control. There are so many things that happen that you can’t control. I often say that every goalie is playing the game, and your brain is your computer. We use practices to program your computer. We don’t do it in games. Our job as goalie coaches is to help you program the computer in practice. For every action, we have an equal and opposite reaction. That’s what we do as goalies, we react. In a game, we just have to recognize what’s going on, and then pull the right program. In games, it’s purely reaction. It’s having been trained, and then you react. You recognize the pattern and pull the correct program so there’s no delay or over-thinking, just reacting. And so if you’re relaxed, you react way better than if you’re tense. There are delays when you’re tense.”