The Red Wings revamped their goaltending coaches when Derek Lalonde was hired, bringing in long-time Hershey Bears goaltending coach Alex Westlund at the NHL level, and hiring Karpat Oulu’s Roope Koistinen at the AHL level last month.
The other constant over the course of the Lalonde regime has been goaltending development coach Phil Osaer. The Red Wings’ goaltending prospects speak glowingly about the tip of the Red Wings’ developmental spear.
This morning, Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff posted a profile of Osaer, who’s given Sebastian Cossa a leg up on learning the professional ropes:
Grading and developing puckstoppers is not an exact science. Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman willingly acknowledges this is an area of the game that remains in flux for his team. This is both in terms of the direction they’ll be taking and investment they’ll be making in goaltender development.
“The majority of the league is kind of creating these department of goaltending, so to speak, and Phil is our department of goaltending,” Yzerman said. “It’s debatable. We’re all trying to figure out how many guys we need on the staff. Phil works hard. He does a lot of scouting for us. He’s really dialed into the goalie world, the goalie fraternity, I guess. He does a lot of scouting for us.”
In the past year, Osaer has held a big say in a couple of major aspects of Detroit’s goalie future. He’s taken a very hands-on approach with 2021 first-round pick Sebastian Cossa, supervising his training and development while Cossa was playing last season with the ECHL Toledo Walleye.
“Particularly him living in the Detroit area and Toledo just down the road, he was able to spend a lot of time in Toledo with Sebastian, working on his development, working on his technique,” Yzerman said. “Kind of being his de facto goaltender coach. He’s had a really positive impact on it. I know Phil really enjoys that part of the job as well. It was a very beneficial year for our organization and for Sebastian and we’re very fortunate to have Phil here. It was a positive year both for Phil and the organization and for Sebastian most importantly.”
I know that the Red Wings were pretty happy with previous goaltending coach Jeff Salajko and Grand Rapids’ Brian Mahoney-Wilson, but Salajko commuted to Detroit, Grand Rapids and Toledo from his home in Columbus, Ohio, and that complicated things.
As Duff notes, Osaer, who came in with Lalonde from Tampa Bay, is based in the Metro Detroit area, which makes things a lot easier.
The wild card in the mix is Koistinen. The Griffins went through 8 goaltenders last season, never really settling on a steady starter. As such, the Griffins brought in Koistinen from Karpat Oulu of the Finnish Liiga, where Koistinen was in charge of developing goaltenders for Oulu’s Under-20 team.
While coach Westlund and coach Osaer are “my age” (Osaer is 43 and Westlund is 47; Osaer was the director of hockey operations for MSU for several years, so he’s got managerial experience, and coach Westlund helped develop the Hershey Bears’ AHL goaltenders for half-a-decade), Koistinen is only 30, and the Wings appear to be appealing to the younger generation in hiring someone who has almost exclusively been utilized in a developmental role.
I would not be surprised if the Wings bring in one more “roving” goaltending coach and/or add a goaltending-specific person to their analytics department in the future,; for the present moment, it’s Westlund at the NHL level, Koistinen at the AHL level, and Osaer essentially reprising the role of Dan Cleary at the developmental level, providing one-on-one input and advice both on the ice and off for the Red Wings’ developing prospects.
The next couple of years will tell us whether the Wings’ still-new goaltending coaching department will bear fruit.
