Jakub Aittokallio sits at the end of a bar in Edmonton completely alone, shocked if anybody were to come up to him with praise or to ask for an autograph. The star goaltender sits there staring into his drink apparently lost in thought. He's been doing that a lot lately, he says, finding himself in moments where he wonders what could have been and what he can do now.
Twenty games into the season for the Edmonton Blizzard, Aittokallio has yet to be pulled from action. He's started in all twenty and has a below-average save percentage with a mid-level goals against average -- both of which he describes as pedestrian numbers. He's five months removed from winning his second straight Challenge Cup, the third Cup in four years for the Blizzard organization, each of which he was around the club for. It should be the happiest time of his life.
"It's been hell lately," says Aittokallio as he takes a drink, snapping back into reality yet again. "I've struggled to find my groove, get my boundaries. The simplest mistakes, I keep making them. I need something."
Something is what he got back in April when the playoffs came around and he received a call from his former goalie coach in Finland. The message was simple, and it's what he tries to remind himself of every day: trust your instincts, stay focused, and be yourself. Too many times last year, he says, he would play down to the level of his mediocre opponents. He wasn't Jakub Aittokallio, he was Dustin Rose, or Mike Verminski, or Lauris Prikulis.
This season he expected to have another renaissance year, with another big break out coming after giving up on the t-push and working with his coaches all summer long. Instead, he's barely near .900 for save percentage, and he's beginning to see a lot of the old problems returning to his game. He just doesn't know what can fix them now.
"Jakub needs to just get his confidence back," says Cole Reinhart. "He's a great goalie, but when he thinks things are going poorly, he falls apart. He's a bit of a headcase, but all it takes a good stretch of games and he's going to be riding high all season."
Seeing all these issues, Jakub has called everyone he can. He's worked with the coaches and spent his off-days in his personal gymnasium back at home, just hoping to find some way to fix his broken game. His wife is skeptical of how much this will help, though. She visits him in the gym every day with a simple request.
"Jakub, come up and take a break. You've been working every day for five years now, even God rested on the seventh day."
Scouts seem to agree with Jakub's wife, Jennifer, a lot. They say his game has become a little more lazy with each passing moment. His calm demeanor in net may help keep the crowd from getting to the team, but his body language suggests frustration and that he may just be breaking down.
Leading up to this season, Jakub Aittokallio had played three seasons in the SHL. During that time, only four other goaltenders were full-time starters and none had played as many minutes or faced nearly as many shots as Aittokallio has in that time. Two deep playoff runs will do that to someone, keeping him from going home while most other players were resting their wounds.
To compound all of that, he doesn't even stop when he finally gets the chance to take a break. The trainers are always on high alert during the summer awaiting a phone call from Aittokallio asking for some help nursing swelling or soreness.
"We tell him to just stop for a little bit, but he won't listen to anybody," says Nick O'Reilly, the head trainer in Edmonton.
Aittokallio continues to refuse to stop, saying he can't stop until his form is perfect. Until he can find exactly what's been troubling him and how to fix it. That's why he's the only one on the ice three hours before any game, taking shot after shot from different angles and trying to find his holes. That's why he wakes up on off-days and goes down to the gym.
"If I quit at any point, that's saying I'm defeated," says Aittokallio. "If I stop working, I'm telling all the fans that I'm not good enough. They may think it, and people around the league may think it, but I will prove them wrong. I will do everything in my power until I finally prove that I am the best goalie and best all-around player in this league. If that means waking up at four in the morning and coming back up at ten at night, so be it."
So he works. In his basement and in his gym, he pounds a tennis ball against the wall and tries to catch it at odd angles. He lifts weights and watches film of his last five starts, taking detailed notes of everything he sees. For this season alone, he's already filled an entire notebook saying all the things he's done wrong.
"It's amazing. I'm supposed to be coaching him, and he's here teaching me where some of his problems may be," says Edmonton's goaltender coach Patrick Allaire.
He's become the lightning rod for any missed expectations for the Blizzard during this downspell, every loss is because of the bad goalie in net. He may have won back-to-back Challenge Cups, but he's no Honcho. He's no superstar. He's no legend.
This is the kind of talk that fuels Aittokallio. This is the kind of talk that he has a love-hate relationship with, knowing he needs it as fuel but wants it to stop. Until now, he's never really been unloved by people.
Growing up in a small town outside Tampere, Finland, Aittokallio didn't have much to do. So when he was bored, he would grab his brothers and go out back. He would put on his mask and pads and work on every imaginable play. He'd go side to side and discover better ways to defend the angles. He'd figure out when he could poke check and when to hold back. He'd learn to stay focused on the task at hand.
Somewhere along the line, he lost some of those basics. His angles have been getting choppy since he came to North America. His focus has lingered to the crowd at times. Sometimes it seems the only person capable of bringing him back to earth, snapping him back into reality, is his best friend Teemu Nurmi.
"He'll start yelling at me when I get too out in the distance there," says Aittokallio. "Back when we were growing up, we played together in Finland. He'd always complain about what I was doing, and I'd do the same about him. It was always good natured though."
Back in his hometown, Aittokallio didn't have many people challenging his style or trying to argue that he's making mistakes. In fact, his only real challenger was Nurmi, now his teammate in Edmonton for the back-to-back Cup victories. Nurmi would talk about how Aittokallio's glove was low, so naturally, Aittokallio worked on fixing that. Then Nurmi would talk about another hole, and Aittokallio would fix that.
As they grew older, they quit finding holes in each others games to criticize. They quit seeing the problems, and that may be where things went wrong. Aittokallio became a phenom. He was a young superstar in the making, with all the people in town swooning over his supernatural abilities and never giving him crap for a bad outing once in a while.
Now he's in Edmonton hearing all different shouts from the fans. He's hurt, he's damaged. He doesn't understand why, and he doesn't care. He just wants to fix it, by any means necessary. He works every second to become a better goaltender. He focuses on simply improving, knowing where his flaws lie but seeing very small improvements.
"At first, my skating was destroying everything. If I can't get back on my feet quick enough to jump back into position, I can't stop the puck," says Aittokallio. "Now, it's improved but it still needs a lot more work. Now my style control is low. I need to work on keeping myself upright when I drop to butterfly. I need to work on keeping the glove high. I need to keep my body big."
Aittokallio knows his flaws. He knows the fans dislike him, and there's a lot of arguments that he may have just been lucky to be on a good team. He may not be any good at all.
During S15, Aittokallio developed a routine. He would go to the arena in the morning for an optional skate. He would talk with his coaches about some scouting reports and if he could get some extra help on anything. He would go home and talk with his wife and have dinner. Then he'd take a nap just about three hours before the game. When he woke up, he would head to the arena and get ready for meetings and warm-ups.
During S16, Aittokallio destroyed that routine. The press continued to say his game was deteriorating. To combat this, he decided he would try to find better ways to spend his time before games. Whether he was going to start or not, he would constantly be working.
This began to become a shock to Aittokallio's system. Ever since he was a teenager in Finland, he'd been going home a few hours before games and taking a short nap. It refreshed him. It helped him focus. He says he'd even dream of how the game would go and know how to react later. Now the media and the scouts were noticing him becoming more and more tired throughout the season.
After his most recent playoff run, it's possible Aittokallio could crap out completely. It's possible he could be too tired to compete on a nightly basis anymore. He says that none of this has to do with his play, and he should be too good for energy to affect him. His coaches have a different view.
"When you change a routine, it takes something out of you," says Allaire. "For him, it took a lot of energy. Then he's out here playing every night, spending more time out there than any other goalie in the league. When he takes a day off, it's to still work out. Sometimes you need a break, he just won't listen to us."
Now nearing the halfway point of the season, Aittokallio is trying to prepare a little differently. He's become so tired that he just couldn't take it anymore. His wife had their first child recently, and his inability to sleep during the night has led to more and more issues in the early parts of the season. Now his wife can draw him back upstairs. Now he takes naps before his games with his newborn son, Joshua.
After all the hatred that continues to pour on him, he finally finds peace in a nap.</div>
Quote:[b]Word Count: 1869
Let me know what you think of this. I've been trying to figure out how to write it for a while, so I hope it turned out alright.[/b]
An old man's dream ended. A young man's vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.
Quote:Originally posted by Green@Mar 17 2014, 08:34 AM well written, nicely formatted apparantly.
Can I get a tl;dr version? I'm tired.
I think I see what you did there.
Also, thank you gorlab. I tried to make it nice for anyone who'll read it, may do more like these just about different players if it's liked enough.
An old man's dream ended. A young man's vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.
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