philippe eko eel does indeed have some fairly specific gear requirements when it comes to pretty much all of his equipment and his uniform - pretty much everything on his eel body needs to be custom made and it's because of that very eel body itself. see, an eel tends to have different proportions and structure than a human person. chief among these differences is a much thinner torso and lack of additional appendages coming off of said torso. humans have two legs and two arms, eels are preetty much just straight down from head to tail. the slender nature of philippe eko eel means he can't quite fit into a typical hockey sweater, nor pads, nor skates oh boy don't even get me started on the skates! At first when he was coming up through juniors these requests were new and therefore difficult to fulfill quickly but now that he's an established player (superstar even, some may say), the equipment staff in atlanta knows how to meet all of these necessary demands