The first time Sudsie Maharaj, the famed goaltending coach, saw Anthony Stolarz’s legs without pants on, he knew there was a problem.
The legs weren’t the same size.
One seemed perfectly muscled and conditioned. The other hadn’t recovered properly from a severe leg injury of the season before.
“I could see right then, just standing there, his balance was off,” said Maharaj, now the Anaheim Ducks director of goaltending. “I’m thinking ‘we got this great big goalie from Edmonton and he was basically playing on one leg.’
“He lacked balance. You can’t play goal without balance. When I saw him that day, I called our strength guys in Anaheim and we had Stoli fly out there and get to work on equalizing his base.
“And as he got his strength back, he got his balance back. And then we set out to fix other things. He’s a big man, but he had a lot of little holes in his game. We had to work on tightening him up, getting him to play a little more closed. And the one thing I expect of all my goalies, we had work on his hands — I’m ruthless about that. Once, we got his hands going, it was just a matter of finishing off with him.”
The long and winding road of Anthony Stolarz’s emergence as a National Hockey League goalie of consequence has seen seasons of twists and pot holes and and injuries and difficulty. This is his first year with the Maple Leafs, his fifth team in the past seven years.
This is his first real opportunity to be a starting goalie, to be part of a goalie tandem if need be, to be a major contributor to a team with ambitions as large as his 6-foot-6 frame.
When he watches from afar — and Maharaj doesn’t like to miss Leafs games — he watches Stolarz with great pride and great friendship.
“I don’t coach goalies, I always say. I coach people,” Maharaj said. “I try to get to know these individuals in depth in as many ways a as possible.
“I’ve always been impressed by him. Now he’s showing what he can do. But I think of him as the person he is. I remember sitting in the video room one day and we were just chatting. Things weren’t really going his way.
“He said ‘I really want to get one good contract. I want to get my parents a house.’ That, to me, summed up what Anthony Stolarz is all about. He wanted to do the right thing for his family. His dad worked in a factory and worked so hard to get him through hockey.
“He comes from a blue-collar background. He’s never stopped being that blue-collar guy.”
Stolarz was drafted in the second round to Philadelphia in 2012, the same draft in which the Leafs got Morgan Rielly. Stolarz was the fourth goaltender chosen in what might be the greatest goalie draft ever: Andrei Vasilevsiy was selected in the first round. Later, Connor Hellebuyck and Frederik Andersen were chosen. And, in the same draft, Matt Murray was taken, as were Linus Ullmark and Joonas Korpisalo. That’s five Stanley Cups and four Vezina Trophies from one draft.
The forgotten goalie through most of it: The giant from New Jersey by way of Corpus Christi junior hockey in Texas.
Vasilevskiy has been paid $66 million in his career. Hellebuyck more than $50 million. The combined salary of 12 seasons as a pro for Stolarz: Just over $7 million.
It didn’t so well in Philadelphia, where they always need goaltending. He was traded to Edmonton for a veteran goalie, Cam Talbot, and the Oilers, like the Flyers, needed a goalie. They didn’t think it was Stolarz.
He went to Anaheim as a free agent, mostly to work in the AHL in San Diego. The big team had John Gibson and Ryan Miller. There was no place for an imbalanced goalie on the major league roster.
But he was hard not to notice, his size being so unusual for a goaltender, his personality so honest, so refreshing and — dare we say this about a goaltender — so normal.
In one of his stints in Anaheim, on an off-day, Dallas Eakins, then-Ducks head coach, brought his daughter Cameron to the rink with him. He did his work. She wandered around.
On the ice, on the off-day, Stolarz was working on his game. Cameron walked to the bench.
“Who’s that?” his daughter asked. “He looks like a Transformer.”
“And I never thought of him that way before,” Eakins said. “But when you think about it, he’s 6-foot-6 before he’s on skates. Then he’s, what, 6-foot-9 with all that equipment on? And yeah, I’m thinking she’s right, ‘He looks like a Transformer.’ And I’ve kind of thought of him that way ever since.”
But much like Maharaj and like almost every coach that has been around Stolarz on his eight teams in three leagues through 12 complicated seasons, there is something about the personality that is so engaging.
“You get to know a lot of players in this game. You don’t happen to like all of them,” Eakins said. “But just as a person, this guy (Stolarz) is a 10 out of 10 human being. He’s a 10 out of 10 teammate. His teammates just love him. That started from Day 1 in San Diego. And after a month or so I remember Sudsie telling me, this guy is amazing.
“You think of the journey he’s been on. He’s had a lot of adversity. He’s had a lot of bad things to happen to him injury-wise. He’s been through a lot of rehab. A lot of guys wouldn’t have pushed through that.”
And last June, with Eakins watching on television from afar. he saw the Stanley Cup being presented to Stolarz in Florida after the Game 7 victory over Edmonton. And his eyes got moist.
“It made me so happy,” said Eakins. He’s one of those kids you cheer for.”
The Leafs needed a goalie to pair with Joseph Woll this season. One of the first phone calls they made was to Woll’s agent, Allain Roy. They asked him about Stolarz.
Now, this is unusual: Roy happens to represent both of the Leafs goaltenders.
The Leafs had watched all kinds of tape on Stolarz, not just from his breakthrough season as a backup in Florida last year, but from the years before that. They wanted a broad look at the goaltender. To understand who he was and what his game could be.
“Curtis (McElhinney, Leafs director of goaltending development) was all over this,” Leafs general manager Brad Treliving said. “He was at the top of his list from the beginning.
“We really dug into his game. One thing we discovered, last season was the first time he played for a team that was sound defensively. Some wondered: Did he all of a sudden get really good last year? I don’t think so. I just think he got the opportunity to show what he could do under the right circumstances. And when he did, he took his game to another level.”
With the Panthers, backing up the great Sergei Bobrovsky, Stolarz had a 2.03 goals against average and a .925 save percentage, the second-best numbers in all of hockey. He was the perfect backup goaltender on a championship team.
This year, in the goalie gulf that can be Toronto, his goals against is 2.18 and his save percentage is .927. Second in the league for a second straight season. No longer playing as a backup. In the five games he has lost, two of them in overtime, the Leafs have scored just six goals.
And, really, what has impressed Treliving in the first quarter of the new season is what impressed Eakins so much in Anaheim.
“He’s a wonderful guy,” said the general manager, who asked a lot of people, including the veteran Oliver Ekman-Larsson, about him before signing Stolarz as a free agent. “Oliver said the same thing everybody seemed to say. He raved about him. Everybody I asked said he was an elite teammate.”
That isn’t something that’s necessarily said of a lot of goaltenders. Jeff Reese, who coaches goalies with the Dallas Stars, was Stolarz’s first professional goalie coach. He remembers him as an eager kid with technical issues in goal.
“The truth is on all players, not everybody makes it,” Reese said. “I didn’t, really. I understand that. Some guys can’t push through the hard times. Some guys get on the wrong teams, wrong circumstances.
“I would never write anybody off, especially a guy that big with that much athleticism but I wasn’t sure he’d make it. That was a long time ago (I had him). After so many years, you can give up on some people.”
Stolarz never gave up on himself.
It’s one of the many reasons Sudsie Maharaj and Stolarz have remained close. Not just coach and player. This is friend and friend.
They text each other regularly. They are planning a lunch date out soon that will hopefully include Stolarz’s wife.
“She’s a force all her own. She’s a big-time lawyer, used to be a JAG lawyer,” Maharaj said.
“He’s wonderful. She’s wonderful. I’m so proud of them.”