Belak hoping to get his shots
Leafs defenceman possesses hard shot but rarely uses it
By JOE O'CONNOR
National Post
Toronto Maple Leafs tough guy Wade Belak just might have the fastest hands in professional hockey. To be sure, when the gloves come off, Belak's lefts and rights come in rapid succession, and the combination of blows is often enough to turn the clearest of minds cloudy.
But when it comes to directing shots at the enemy net, the 6-foot-5, 225-pound Saskatoon native appears downright timid.
Belak has just 14 shots on goal to show for the nearly 300 minutes he has spent on the ice this season. Over the same span, he has been in 12 fights.
"He does have a shot, let me tell ya," says Leafs back-up goaltender Trevor Kidd, whose occupational hazard includes being a target for players in practice. "He's in the top five guys in the team with a really hard and heavy shot. But he's a situational player in games, and he's a defensive type of defenceman, so he's got a different responsibility than a Kaberle or a McCabe."
It wasn't always so. As a kid, Belak and his brother would head down to the family basement and spend hours rifling pucks at a road hockey net. And while some of their shots found the mark, many others did not.
"We used to take out the windows and black-out the walls pretty good," Belak confessed following yesterday's Leaf practice. "We did some damage."
All the time spent honing his howitzer, however, has largely gone to waste in the pro ranks. Belak has directed 98 pucks at the net in 216 career games, for an average of .45 shots per game.
"When you don't shoot, you can't score," reasons forward Tom Fitzgerald.
"But I think Wade is probably in the mind frame of, well, he'd probably hurt a lot of people if he shot it through them, so he makes the safe play and gets the puck down deep."
In a 6-0 thumping of Florida last week, Belak scored his only goal of the year.
"I had a wide-open net and I was worried I was going to hit the goalie," Belak said afterwards. "It was like slo-mo for me."
The majority of Belak's shifts come as the Leafs' sixth defenceman, a role that provides for less than 10 minutes of ice time per game. And Belak's role within that role is to police the other team, and avoid making mistakes.
"It's tough, five on five, to put yourself in a good shooting position," says Belak. "The wingers are playing tight up on the defence these days and you don't want to get blocked, so unless you are on the power play you are going have a tough time teeing-it-up."
Belak's soul-mate in the brawling department is Tie Domi. Never known for his silky touch around the net, Domi appears to have blossomed into a scorer this season. His 12 goals have him one short of his career best with 25 games to go. Though Belak readily receives instruction from Domi on the finer points of using his fists, he isn't quite prepared to ask his fellow enforcer about what he should be doing to find the back of the net.
"I think he's just lucky half the time," Belak says with a laugh. "Did you see his goal last game?"
Asked then if has considered consulting with Mats Sundin, who leads the Leafs in goals with 27, and shots taken with 157, and Belak finally admits that like boxer Roberto Duran, his manos are simply made of stone.
"I don't think that would do any good. I just don't have the hands I guess, so I'm going to stick to plumbing it out."
