‘Why now? Why me?’ Broken sticks a constant source of frustration

Artemi Panarin glided into his usual spot in the left faceoff circle in the offensive zone, and cocked his stick high above his head, ready to unload and unleash as Brent Seabrook slipped him a pass right in his wheelhouse. Trailing by a goal and on a power play with less than two minutes to go in a game against the Winnipeg Jets on Dec. 4, the Blackhawks had the puck right where they wanted it.

Panarin’s stick — a marvel of modern sports technology, a one-piece composite that retails for a few hundred dollars — shattered on the downswing. Panarin chucked the chunk left in his hand over his head in frustration and raced to the bench for a replacement. Barely 10 seconds later, Panarin was right back in the action, grabbed a rebound and got the puck to Seabrook, who delivered another perfect one-timer feed to Patrick Kane in the other faceoff circle.

Kane’s stick broke, too. Ninety seconds later, the game was over and the Hawks had lost, 2-1.

“It’s not a fun feeling,” Kane said.

There are so many things that can go wrong in a hockey game. A turnover. A blown bit of coverage. A bone-crunching hit along the boards. Heck, Kane once scored a goal into his own net from 195 feet away during a delayed penalty. But whether you’re a sniper set up in the faceoff circle, a speedster on a breakaway, a big-shot defenseman at the point, or a penalty-killer hemmed into your own end, there might not be a lousier feeling than that of a stick crumbling in your hands.

“The worst,” Artem Anisimov said. “Just the worst. You see the empty net and somebody makes a great play to get you the puck and you try to score, and the stick just breaks. You just think, ‘Why now? Why in this situation? Why me?’”

Seabrook, who has the biggest slap shot on the team, used to be the Hawks’ most frequent victim of twig trauma. But he has since been supplanted by Panarin, whose booming one-timers from the left faceoff circle — he swings so hard, he often winds up on one knee on his follow-through — have made him one of the most dangerous power-play shooters in the league, and one of the most expensive. He goes through sticks like some players go through ankle tape.

In the aftermath of that Winnipeg game, Panarin was weighing an equipment switch in an effort to keep his stick — and his sanity — in one piece.

“It’s very frustrating, especially when it happens every other game,” Panarin said through an interpreter. “You start feeling a little bit unlucky with how many sticks I’ve been breaking. Might be time for a change.”

Anisimov said that same day that Panarin told him he was going to change things up, too. Panarin has five goals and eight assists in the seven games since he said that, so he might be on to something.

Panarin had been using an average flex stick. Flex measures the stiffness of a stick — or how “whippy” it is, as Andrew Desjardins put it. The higher the flex number, the stiffer the stick. The stiffer the stick, the less likely it is to break.

“You watch a guy like [Alex] Ovechkin, he uses around a 75 or 80 flex, and he breaks a lot of sticks,” Kane said. “I use a 102-105 flex, so I don’t break as many sticks. But they get a lot of wear and tear throughout a game, so a lot of factors go into it.”

Indeed, centers tend to break sticks a lot because of the battering they withstand during faceoffs. Penalty-killers and net-front power forwards tend to break sticks because every time they use their stick to block or redirect a shot, it weakens the shaft. And high-end skill guys tend to break sticks because they have the puck a lot, and opponents are constantly slashing and whacking at their sticks in an effort to dislodge it.

Look at an NHL bench during a game and you’ll see players constantly evaluating their sticks, running their fingers over them and looking closely for nicks and fractures. Because the slightest ding could lead to an explosion the next time they rear back and fire.

“The only you way you can probably prevent it is just by looking at your stick,” defenseman Brian Campbell said. “Sometimes you get a puck off your stick, or you block a shot, and you’re like OK, let’s make sure there’s no dents. That’s basically the only means of prevention. But sometimes you can grab a brand-new stick right off the rack, and take one shot, and it breaks. Those are the bounces and the breaks of hockey, I guess.”

Kane called it a “shocking feeling,” when a stick breaks. No matter how often it happens, you’re never ready for it. It can get in your head, too.

“The unusual thing is when you pick up your new stick, and it still almost feels like it’s broken,” Kane said. “It takes a couple shots to get it back to normal. It’s a pretty weird and unusual feeling, that’s for sure.”

It happens to everyone. Campbell survived a harrowing minute without a stick while the Sharks had the Hawks pinned in their own zone late in the third period last week. Seabrook saw a big opportunity for a power-play slap shot fizzle late in the second period against Ottawa on Tuesday. Niklas Hjalmarsson’s stick shattered when he had an open shooting lane Friday against Colorado.

Kane estimated he goes through about 100 sticks a year. Duncan Keith goes through even more. A typical player will go through, on average, about one per game. It’s a far cry from the old days, when two-piece wood sticks would last for weeks, months, even seasons at a time. They cost a lot less, and lasted a lot longer.

“Companies are smart,” Campbell quipped. “Parents are not.”

True, for kids just playing on a pond or at the local rink for fun, the sturdy old sticks might be a much better investment. But for NHL players who don’t even have to pay for their own sticks, the extra power generated by the newer technology is well worth the tradeoff — no matter how many open nets go undisturbed, no matter how frustrating it gets.

“I think it’s gotten better,” Desjardins said. “For a few years there, I think companies were playing with things and I feel like there were a lot more broken sticks. But it’s always going to happen, and it’s always frustrating. I mean, hey, it can change a game.”

Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com

Twitter: @marklazerus