Pelle Lindbergh was the goalie who got the NHL to introduce water bottles at the goal.
But not everyone was behind the proposal.
Once the icon hit back at an opposing coach – with the most beautiful comeback.
Pelle Lindbergh is one of Sweden’s true greats in ice hockey, even though his career was unfortunately cut short, after a death that shocked the entire NHL. Lindbergh had a huge breakthrough in 1984, taking a young Philadelphia Flyers all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. And the following year he continued to play big.
Was the first with a water bottle
Pelle Lindbergh had his breakthrough during the close of notorious leader Mike Keenan. Keenan ruled his teams with an iron fist, and he made enormous demands on his players. But it was also Keenan, together with Pelle Lindbergh, who got through a huge change in the world’s best league, which made it easier for all goalkeepers in the future.
Pelle Lindbergh had problems with dizziness when he played, which he often highlighted in the dressing room during period breaks. Lindbergh was dehydrated, feeling faint, and that’s when Keenan came up with a brilliant idea. During one game, Keenan asked one of the players on the team to go with a water bottle and put it on Lindbergh’s goal cage, something that today is completely obvious in hockey, but was then seen as something that was completely wrong.
Excellent answer
In a playoff game against the Edmonton Oilers themselves, with Wayne Gretzky at the helm, opposing coach Glen Sather was mad about the invention of a water bottle on goal. He threatened to not even let his players go on the ice unless the Flyers stopped using the bottle. Lindbergh had then been the best goalkeeper of the entire playoffs, and maybe it was just an excuse to throw the Swede off balance. But Sather was adamant that he refused to see the bottle up on goal.
– We might want a bucket of chicken on our goal. Or a bucket of chicken over their goal. Or maybe hamburgers? I mean, if you can have a bottle of water there, let’s have lunch there, Sather said, ironically.
But Pelle Lindbergh took it all in stride, to say the least. When the press asked him about Sather’s actions, he answered, according to Sports Illustrated, as calmly as possible:
– Preferably for me, it sounds nice! Sometimes I get hungry out on the ice.
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