Bet this guy could make it work:
Link
*not a real guy
It kind of depends on the goalie, I guess - there’s a fair bit of variation.
Carey Price is 6’3" and listed at 219lbs, Martin Brodeur is 6’2", 216lbs, Roberto Luongo is 6’3" and 217lbs… then you have Henrik Lundqvist at 6’1" and 195lbs, Ryan Miller at 6’2" 175lbs and Tim Thomas at a tiny 5’11" 205 lbs.
Different styles and agilities seem to matter more than sheer size.
In that show, they got Ducks enforcer George Parros to take the shots. He got about 90% accuracy or something like that against the man in the fat guy suit (they didn’t get a real fat guy). Point being, if you got a legit 1st line goal scorer like a Teemu Selanne or Bobby Ryan or Corey Perry (to keep with the Ducks), then they would get an even HIGHER accuracy level still.
I would imagine that if it worked, it would be done today. And then because no one wants to watch it, the rules would change, either to but a size limit, or to increase the size of nets beyond what a human can cover, even a Bruddah Iz sized human.
Slight hijack- Back in the early Seventies, Al Davis, owner of the Raiders, looked into hiring sumo wrestlers to be offensive linemen.
He abandoned the idea for several reasons:
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Good sumo wrestlers made a lot more money in Japan than he could then afford to pay offensive linemen
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Sumo wrestlers train for SHORT, intense matches. They generally lack the endurance an NFL offensive lineman needs.
For an amusing take on the idea, there’s Beat the Queen (aka Porko Von Popbutton)
There’s a bit in the first Red Dwarf novel about genetically-engineered lifeforms, including them being designed for sports. For a soccer tournament, Scotland had a goalie made up entirely of a 16-foot by 8-foot wall of flesh, yet failed to qualify for the second round.
Shit, he’s almost as big as Zdeno Chara.
Size isn’t always what counts, either. Marc-Andre Fleury is 6’2, 180lbs, but it’s his flexibility that’s his real strength. I swear, it’s almost like he can turn his bones into liquid!
There are stories that New York Islanders Charles Wang once seriously considered sending scouts to Japan to see if sumo wrestlers could become goalies.
Interesting side note from this story, which is from mid-2006:
While the sumo idea was ridiculous and the GM change was a fiasco, the idea of giving very long contracts to top players has become common practice. I think there are at least 10 players with a contract of 10 years or more. The list in that article doesn’t include Kovalchuk, whose 17-year contract was rejected by the NHL but would up with a 15-year deal.
Nearly 6 years later and we are still laughing. Wang…Snow…Milbury… :smack:
There’s a book called Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan that tests this idea. As others have mentioned upthread, the idea doesn’t hold up under testing.
I would love to see that.
For fun, you can use Scott Gomez as the shooter 