Career Retrospective: Arturs Irbe
I recall sitting behind and slightly to the right of the net in Maple Leaf Gardens, and I was enthralled. I was 9 years old and attending my first-ever NHL game; I was seeing the pros up close! The Leafs were playing the Stars, with the likes of Mats Sundin, Wendel Clark, and Felix Potvin lining up against Mike Modano, Joe Nieuwendyk, and Sergei Zubov. I don’t remember everything from that game, though a few things do stick out: the game ended in a 3-3 tie after 5 minutes of overtime, we nearly got hit by a puck deflected off Felix Potvin’s blocker (there was no protective netting behind the net at that time), a kid near me kept screaming Tie Domi’s name over and over again, and Arturs Irbe, who played in net for the Stars that night, shot the puck over the glass and got a penalty for it. I don’t think I even knew that was a rule at the time, but I thought it was pretty cool - but then, I was a goalie, so everything goalies did was just amazing to me back then. I don’t know why that little moment stuck in my memory so clearly, but I can still see him shooting it out of the rink in my mind, even now.
So, fittingly, he is the subject of my first career retrospective. To me, Irbe is a bit of a legend, above and beyond seeing him live as part of my first attended NHL game. He was a very good goaltender during his time, as we will see, but he was also a fascinating character. He was relatively small in stature at 5’8; only one other goalie was shorter than him in 1996-97 (Michael O’Neill, who played 1 game that season). Compared to the behemoths tending the twines today, he is downright minuscule - of the 98 goaltenders to play in the 2023-24 regular season, the shortest was Juuse Saros at 5’11 (and the only one below 6’). This meant he had to rely on his agility, quickness, and athleticism to make saves. He was one of the few Latvians to play in the NHL; at the time of this writing, only 28 Latvians have played at least one NHL game, and of those, only 10 have played more than 100. Despite being a goaltender, he is fifth on the all-time games played list for Latvians with 568. And, of course, no article about Irbe can be written without mentioning how he embodied and enriched the tradition of the oddball goaltender stereotype with his equipment preferences (more on this further down).
Irbe’s journey to the NHL began when he was drafted by the Minnesota North Stars in the 10th round in 1989 at 196th overall. San Jose then selected him from Minnesota as part of the 1991 Dispersal Draft. If that sentence seems odd to you, it is; if I may digress here a bit, the circumstances surrounding San Jose’s expansion franchise were unique, to say the least. The Gunds, owners of the North Stars, were hemorrhaging money and wanted to move the team to San Jose, where a new arena was being built. The league balked, and instead brokered a deal wherein the Gunds would sell the North Stars to Norm Green and Howard Baldwin and be awarded an expansion franchise in San Jose. The expansion Sharks would initially choose unprotected players from the North Stars in a Dispersal Draft, and then both the Sharks and North Stars would participate in an expansion draft to fully round out their teams. The absurdity of this situation for the North Stars was made more stark by their recent unexpected playoff success. Despite earning only 68 points in the regular season, they went on a miracle run to the 1991 Stanley Cup Finals, but could not overcome Mario Lemieux and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Yes, the Minnesota North Stars competed for the Stanley Cup and then immediately thereafter participated in an Expansion Draft. Truth is stranger than fiction, so they say.
Having been plucked from Minnesota’s system, Irbe played 13 games in San Jose’s inaugural season in 1991-92, behind the likes of Jeff Hackett and Jarmo Myllys (with Brian Hayward and Wade Flaherty taking a handful of games each). By 1993-94 he had full control of the starter’s crease and had a banner year, winning 30 games while playing a league-leading 74, playing in the All-Star game, finishing 5th in Vezina Trophy voting (a career-best), and helping lead the Sharks to their first-ever playoff appearance. This was particularly unexpected since the team had won a staggeringly abysmal 11 games in 1992-93 - which was 6 fewer than their first season! In their first-round series, the 8th-seeded upstart Sharks took on the powerhouse Detroit Red Wings, with a roster featuring Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov (who won the Hart, Selke, and Lindsay trophies that season while finishing second in league scoring), 52-goal man Ray Sheppard, Paul Coffey, and a young Nicklas Lidstrom, to name but a few. In one of the great first-round upsets in NHL history, the Sharks took the series in 7 games, with Irbe stopping 28 of 30 shots in the deciding game to secure the victory. The magic nearly continued as the Sharks took the Maple Leafs to another 7-game series in the second round, but couldn’t quite close it out.
During the following off-season, disaster struck: Irbe’s hand was bitten by his dog, resulting in a fractured finger, nerve damage, and a severed artery. This denoted a turbulent period lasting several seasons in his NHL career. Though he was still in the starter’s role for the shortened 1994-95 season for the Sharks, his performance languished, and by 1995-96 only played 22 games (losing the starting job to Chris Terreri), signifying the end of his time in San Jose. He signed with the Dallas Stars in 1996-97, playing 35 games (during which I watched him put up 2 of his 8 penalty minutes for the season), backing up Andy Moog. The following season he again joined another new team in the Vancouver Canucks and played the most games (41) for the 1997-98 squad, amongst a who’s who of 90s goaltenders: Kirk McLean, Garth Snow, Sean Burke, and Corey Hirsch also saw netminding duty.
Prior to the 1998-99 season, he signed with the Carolina Hurricanes as a free agent, once again finding stability and success. He occupied the starter’s role from 1998-99 to 2001-02 in which the team won two Southeast Division titles. He played in the 1999 All-Star game (his second and final appearance), and in 1999-00 and 2000-01 led the league in games played with 75 and 77, respectively; the latter is tied for the third-most appearances in NHL history (for those wondering, Martin Brodeur played 78 in 2006-07 and Grant Fuhr played 79 in 1995-96). For those two seasons he finished fifth in wins with 34 and third with 37, respectively. He went on to play two further seasons, backing up Kevin Weekes, before his NHL career ended in 2004. A little-known fact: the last game he played, in spring 2004, was the last tie game in NHL history, as the shootout was then introduced after the lockout.
Perhaps the defining portion of his career took place in the 2002 playoffs, as Irbe and the Hurricanes marched their way to Stanley Cup Finals, dispatching the Devils, Canadiens, and Maple Leafs along the way. They ran into the legendary Detroit Red Wings; if you thought the 1994 roster I mentioned above sounded stacked, the 2002 iteration boasted an astounding 10 future Hall-of-Famers (Yzerman, Shanahan, Fedorov, Hull, Robitaille, Larionov, Datsyuk, Lidstrom, Chelios, and Hasek). Though the Red Wings made quick work of the Hurricanes, dismissing them in 5 games, Irbe never let in more than 3 goals in a game in the Finals and had a .919 save percentage for the series, including a heroic 50-save losing effort in Game 3, which went to triple overtime. Though he split the playoff workload with Kevin Weekes, who played 8 games to Irbe’s 18, he posted a remarkable .938 save percentage for the playoffs, good for 7th on the all-time save percentage list amongst goalies who played 4 rounds in a single postseason. It’s speculation on my part, but had the Hurricanes won the Cup, he would likely have been a front-runner for the Conn Smythe, as their leading scorer Ron Francis only had 16 points.
To me, the most endearing, or curious, aspect of Irbe’s career was his equipment. As a goalie myself who grew up in the 90s, NHL goalies were the epitome of cool. Equipment technology had advanced significantly by then, with modern helmets adopted by most of the league, and for the first time, pads, blockers, and gloves were customizable according to team colours. As a result, an individual goalie’s style became part of his legacy. To note but a few: Eddie Belfour wore his famous Eagle mask across multiple teams, John Vanbiesbrouck had the iconic panther mask and matching pads, Felix Potvin had “sharp” pads and teeth on his mask, and Curtis Joseph had the Cujo dog mask. Irbe eschewed all of that frill and style in the name of pure function. His helmet, a Jofa, was first assigned to him in the 1980s prior to playing in the NHL, and featured a cage coming well up beyond the margin of the helmet itself. This model was discontinued early on in his career, but, as a man of habit, he naturally abhorred the idea of a modern design. Consequently he had understandable difficulty in finding replacements when they were broken beyond repair; such was his trouble that the Hurricanes had to search online for them and buy multiple when they were found.
He similarly relied on his monotone grey leg pads, the scores of puck marks making them resemble thick tire-trod pillows, and repaired them himself with a sewing kit - a habit formed in Latvia behind the Iron Curtain when equipment and resources were in short supply. His blocker, grey/white at the beginning of its life, was hilariously obliterated to a nearly uniform black from pucks as well. At some points in his career, the demarcation between the Koho lettering of his blocker and the multitude of puck marks is indiscernible, rendering a piece of protective equipment more akin to a beat-up old gym shoe than something designed to stop vulcanized rubber shot at 100+ miles per hour. His reliance on equipment he knew was part of his craft: he insisted that knowing his equipment so intimately allowed him to judge how much movement he would need or how far a puck would rebound of him. With most professional athletes optimizing all facets of their approach to gain a razor-sharp edge over the competition, he delightfully rejected the new and fashionable and went with the tried, trusted, and true. The iconography of Irbe was defined by the absence of frilly flash, but one could hardly argue with the results.
Beyond the confines of the NHL, he was well-known for his representation of Latvia internationally. He played for Dynamo Riga within the Soviet Hockey League prior to his NHL career, from 1986-87 to 1990-91, starting for the latter 4 seasons. He starred for the Soviet Union national team in 1989 and 1990 (prior to Latvian independence in 1991), winning gold both times and top goaltender honours in the latter competition. He went on to play for Latvia in the World Championships nine times and in the Olympics twice. His status as a Latvian athlete was clearly held in high regard by his home country, crystallizing in the ultimate moment of national respect: he was the flag-bearer for Latvia in the 2006 Olympics in Torino. In 2010, in recognition of his achievements and lengthy international career for Latvia and the Soviet Union, he was admitted to the IIHF Hall of Fame.
While he was never considered amongst the league’s truly elite goaltenders during his time in the NHL, he nonetheless had a career many would envy. My lasting impressions of Irbe are his great seasons in Carolina as the starter, being the first real starting goalie for San Jose, his fabled (and pummelled) equipment, and of course, the time he shot the puck out of the rink at Maple Leaf Gardens. To me, he will always be a lasting figure in the lore of the game.
Sources:
https://www.nbcsports.com/nhl/news/pht-time-machine-1991-dispersal-draft-and-birth-of-the-sharks
https://thehockeynews.com/all-access/top-100-goalies-no-93-arturs-irbe
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-02-sp-15101-story.html
https://www.iihf.com/en/static/5114/hall-of-fame
https://webarchive.iihf.com/channels10/iihf-world-championship-wc10/home/hall-of-fame/index.html