Marc-Andre Fleury faced more or less every shooter of his generation across 21 NHL seasons, from the tail end of the dead puck era through to the modern game. Somewhere in there, a few shots stood out enough that he still remembers how they felt.
Marc-Andre Fleury’s hardest shot
Asked some years ago by Pittsburgh Magazine who had the hardest shot he ever had to deal with, the three-time Stanley Cup winner couldn’t separate two names – and both of them were defensemen.
“Either Zdeno Chara or Shea Weber,” Fleury said. “If you get a shot in the stomach from one of those guys, you feel it for a while.”
It’s not a controversial pick. Between them, Chara and Weber owned the NHL’s Hardest Shot competition for the better part of a decade. Chara won it five years running from 2007 to 2012, setting the all-time record of 108.8 mph in Ottawa that final year. Weber then took over, winning three straight from 2015 to 2017 and coming within 0.3 mph of the record with a 108.5 mph blast in his first victory.
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Only Al MacInnis has won the event more often, taking it seven times between 1990 and 2003.
Weber has spoken about what made Chara’s shot different, and it comes down to what a 6-foot-9, 250-pound defenseman can generate.
“When Chara and I were going head-to-head, he was just blasting it,” Weber said, per NHL.com. “108.8 is an extremely hard shot, I don’t know if people realize how hard it is. A guy his size with his strength, I don’t know how you get much stronger than that.”
Weber’s own power produced one of the more memorable moments of the 2010 Olympics, when he shot a puck clean through the mesh of the net.
Fleury retired after 21 seasons and was inducted into the QMJHL Hall of Fame this month. Chara and Weber have both since retired as well.
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