Decline of right-hand catching goalies in NHL

When Michael Hutchinson was traded from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Colorado Avalanche before the NHL Trade Deadline on Feb. 24, it provided him with an unexpected and increasingly rare opportunity: to practice and play with another right-hand catching goalie in Pavel Francouz.

With Hutchinson and Francouz, the Avalanche have the first right-hand goalie tandem since Jonas Hiller and Jeff Deslauriers played together with the Anaheim Ducks near the end of the 2011-12 season.
For Hutchinson, it's his first right-hand catching partner since his first professional season in 2010-11, when he played with Nolan Schaefer for Providence of the American Hockey League.
"That was the only other time in my career and that was almost 10 years ago," Hutchinson said. "We were talking and [Francouz] wants to try one of my sticks, so it's kind of cool you finally get a chance to try other gloves and sticks because as southpaw goalies, you never get that chance. It's been a while since there's been a lot of lefties."
Hutchinson is right about the decline in right-hand catching goalies.

Among the 87 goalies to play at least one NHL game this season, six catch with their right hand (Hutchinson, Francouz, Cal Petersen, Louis Domingue, Gilles Senn, and Charlie Lindgren), combining to play 83 games (73 starts) before the NHL paused its season on March 12 due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus.
In 2018-19, six right-hand catching goalies combined to make 52 starts, and in 2017-18, five combined to make 46 starts, the fewest since three goalies combined to make 39 starts in 1963-64.
The past three seasons are the lowest start totals in a season for right-hand catching goalies since the NHL expanded from six to 12 teams in 1967-68.
The question is, why? Explaining the decline is harder than tracking it.

Statistically, it would be hard to compare the success of right-hand goalies with their left-hand catching counterparts without being able to account for the quality of the shots each faced.
Anecdotally, there don't appear to be any significant disadvantages to playing as a right-hand catching goalie.
Tomas Vokoun, who played 700 NHL games over 15 seasons from 1997 to 2013, said catching with his right hand in 2007-08 was an advantage because there were more left-handed shooters (552 to 300), so they came in with the puck on his glove side.
Lindgren, who has started six games for the Montreal Canadiens this season, said it can confuse shooters.
"You talk to players and it totally messes them up, especially breakaways," Lindgren said. "They usually they like going low blocker, and I've got my glove there, so if anything, it benefits me. At least that's what they say."
This could simply be a down cycle for right-hand catching goalies, one that will turn around as the likes of Francouz, who is 21-7-4 with a 2.41 goals-against average and .923 save percentage in his first NHL season, and Petersen, who is 5-3-0 with a 2.64 GAA and .922 save percentage as a rookie with the Los Angeles Kings, earn more starts.
Yaroslav Askarov, a right-hand catching goalie who currently plays for Neva St. Petersburg (RUS-2), is also expected to be the first goalie selected in the 2020 NHL Draft. Some scouts believe he is the best goalie prospect since Carey Price in 2005.
Still, it's hard to ignore the decline from 2009-10, when eight goalies combined to make 322 starts, a list led by Vokoun (62 starts), Hiller (58), Steve Mason (55), Deslauriers (48), and Jose Theodore (43).
"Definitely fewer now," Hutchinson said. "When I was in Toronto, I talked to [Frederik] Andersen about switching hands because there's been so few lefty goalies lately that I wanted to just join the masses and start catching normal, so we had a little debate to see how long it would take to feel comfortable switching."
The ability to do so at a young age could help explain at least some of the decline.
Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, who won the 2019 Vezina Trophy, said last season that he had to switch to catching with his left hand because he couldn't get a glove for his right.

"I'm left-handed all the way and I do everything with my left, literally everything, so I should have played like Louis [Domingue]," Vasilevskiy said. "But because it was Russia, it was tough time, we didn't have equipment for right-hand goalies, so basically I had no choice."
The availability of right-hand equipment has improved, with more in stock at hockey specialty stores and through online retailers. Yet the NHL averaged 139 starts by right-hand catching goalies during the past decade (not counting the shortened 2012-13 season), compared to 279 the previous decade. And in the 10 seasons from 1979-80 to 1988-89, the NHL averaged 287 starts, including a League-high 12 goalies catching with their right hand in 1983-84, and a League-high 364 starts the following season.
It's a strange juxtaposition because, in theory at least, right-hand catching equipment should have been harder to get back then.
"I actually played the opposite hand my first five or six years because they didn't have gloves for my (right) hand," Grant Fuhr, a Hockey Hall of Famer who played in 868 NHL games over 19 seasons from 1981 to 2000, said in a message. "My dad helped me turn a baseball glove in to a goalie glove until I got my first set."
That type of innovative solution seems less likely to be approved now. Perhaps then, the decline in right-hand catching goalies can be linked to the fact that there still isn't always a right-handed glove in minor hockey associations where players take turns playing goalie and share equipment at early ages.
"If you're a young kid, you can learn to catch or play either way, so a lack of southpaw gloves is probably why there's a lot of left-handed people who probably don't play southpaw in net," Hutchinson said. "It's a lot easier just to get gloves that are normal."
And a lot harder to find a playing partner in the NHL that doesn't use them.