Welcome back to another edition of Ask Dubey!

There were a number of great questions this week, focusing on the mental side of the game, how I dealt with pressure and the mental side of goaltending, and advice that I would give to young goaltenders dealing with the same thing.

Let’s jump into a couple of questions.

That’s hard to answer. I wouldn’t say there was one point. There were definitley mental changes and shifts throughout my career. I had a mental shift, going from backing up to being the starting goalie in Edmonton, and then had my difficult year there. There are a couple of others that I could pinpoint, one being when I got traded from Edmonton, my game fell off a cliff.

When I got my one-year contract in Arizona, I kind of hit the reset button, and mentally, I kind of accepted that there was a chance that I had missed my window to be a starting goaltender in the NHL, just purely based on age. I was going in behind Mike Smith, and so I kind of just decided I was going to approach it and be and be grateful to be in the NHL in whatever capacity that was.

I like this question because it’s interesting to help kids deal with this kind of thing. We talk and work on these all the time on the ice, and the pushes and the stops and these things. This is obviously a very important part of hockey and learning how to deal with it, and not just thinking that because they’re 13 years old that they’ll be okay. “It’s just youth hockey,” but it’s not. These games are their Stanley Cup.

When you’re thirteen years old, all these games that you’re playing are the most important thing to you, and so you can’t downplay it whatsoever just because it’s not the highest level — it is to them. So when it comes to anxiety, what I try to tell my goalies is as soon as you start feeling nervous, the ore simple we can make things, the more we can simplify, the better.

I pick three things that I knew if I went out there and did those, that I was going to play well or set myself up to play well, and at the end of the day, if it was Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final or the first game of preseason, the games played the same way. If I could narrow my focus on that stuff and stop thinking about the importance of the game, or how many people were there, or how many people were watching, or if we need to win to make the playoffs. You try to just focus on these little things and just keep reminding yourself over and over, “If I do this, I’ll play well or I’ll set myself up to play well.”

You can tune into the full episode of this week’s edition of Ask Dubey below where I went further in depth on these topics, and some of the other great questions.