Dominik Hasek had a well-known rule among Buffalo teammates: if you got the better of him, you weren’t leaving the ice until he got it back. It wasn’t ordinary competitiveness so much as maintenance. He wanted to finish every session feeling like the best goaltender in the building.
Curtis Brown learned exactly how far that went.
The setting was a post-practice contest the Sabres called “three puck,” where a player took three attempts, two from between the top of the circles and one on a breakaway. On this particular day, Brown scored on all three.
He knew immediately what he’d just done.
“Scoring on an NHL goalie is one level and it’s nothing to shake a stick at,” Brown said, per NHL.com. “However, on Dom, everybody knows, the opponents know, your teammates know, that’s another step.”
Understanding the improbability of it, Brown made for the exit as quickly as he could. Then he heard a Czech accent closing in behind him.
“Brownie! Brownie!”
How competitive was Dominik Hasek?
Hasek caught him before he reached the room and refused to let him go inside.
“Dom had chased me down and would not allow me to go into the locker room because that was unacceptable to him to end that way, and he wanted to, probably, redeem his superiority in this particular case,” Brown said. “So, of course you can’t not go back out onto the ice with Dominik Hasek when he calls you back.”
READ MORE: Dominik Hasek once had another nickname than ”The Dominator”
What followed was a correction.
“We went back and did multiple rounds. I do not remember how many rounds, I do not remember how many pucks, but I did not score on him again,” Brown said. “So, after scoring three in a row and making the right move to leave the ice, my instincts were perfect to leave. Unfortunately, I only got so far before I came back and I was put, I guess you would say, back in my place.”
That obsessiveness produced one of the great goaltending careers. Hasek won six Vezina Trophies and became the only goaltender in NHL history to win the Hart Trophy twice, taking it in 1997 and 1998, the first netminder to claim the award since Jacques Plante in 1962. He added Olympic gold with the Czech Republic in 1998, two Stanley Cups in Detroit, and entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2014. Buffalo retired his No. 39.
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