Book excerpt: The Turco Grip

Some hockey history thanks to former Dallas Stars goalie Marty Turco

I went down a wormhole this morning scouting Los Angeles Kings goalie prospect Carter George, a second-round pick in the 2024 NHL Draft, for the ongoing prospect series over at EP Rinkside.

George is intriguing to watch for several reasons, but it’s hard not to focus on his stick handling.

As a goalie prospect, George is by far the best stickhandler I’ve seen recently (Adam Gajan is probably close-ish) and some goalie coaches think he’s the best puckhandling goalie to come through the draft in years.

Here are some of his highlights that I pulled while going through film today.

It’s hard to watch an elite puck handling goalie and not think about Marty Turco.

Turco was one of the best puck handling goalies of all time, and revolutionized the position by introducing the “Turco Grip,” flipping his glove over for better control on the stick.

I wrote about this at length in my 2018 book, 100 Things Stars Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, which you can still find on Amazon or other bookstores.

I figured it be a good day to pull that chapter as excerpt for today’s post.

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The Turco Grip

Goaltending has greatly evolved over the course of hockey history.

In the late 1800s, the goalie was another skater whose main responsibility was checking opposing forwards in front of the goal markers. He wasn’t allowed to kneel, lie on the ice, or catch the puck—stand-up goaltending wasn’t a style; it was a rule.

Clint Benedict was the first goalie to challenge that rule and often dropped to the ice to make saves, rolling and flailing to keep the puck out of the net. In 1917, the first year of the organized NHL, rules were changed to account for Benedict’s style and those copycats that would follow.

While goalies were allowed to drop to the ice, most didn’t do it. This was an age before masks, and few had the courage to drop to their knees and make saves in that manner, like Glenn Hall did with the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks in the 1950s.

Hall was ahead of his time. While Roger Crozier and Tony Esposito used a similar technique in the NHL in the 1970s, and Vladislav Tretiak baffled Canadians during the 1972 USSR-Canada Summit Series as a butterfly goalie, it didn’t truly become the modern medium of goaltending until Patrick Roy popularized the style in the mid-1980s.

Around the same time Roy was redefining standard positioning with the Montreal Canadiens, Philadelphia Flyers goalie Ron Hextall was changing another key part of a goalie’s arsenal.

Hextall was a trailblazing puck handler; for the first time in modern NHL history, a goalie was both good enough and confident enough to make passes and even take shots at the opposing net.

Hextall inspired an entire generation of puck-handling goalies, including Marty Turco. The long-time Star had 22 assists in his career and quickly established himself as one of the NHL’s best puck-handling goalies when he made his debut in 2000.

Turco wasn’t just one of the best; he was also an innovator and redefined how goalies played the puck.

Before Turco entered the NHL, goalies didn’t have an ideal grip on their stick. The glove hand was used more as a pushing mechanism, and goalies were one-dimensional and predictable in where they would pass the puck.

But Turco flipped his glove hand over to the other side of the stick. It gave him better control and more options; instead of being limited to straight passes, Turco could change the angles and could actually make a seamless backhand pass. With better leverage on the stick, he could make hard, accurate saucer passes.

“I couldn’t shoot it as high that way on my forehand, but it was flatter, it was more accurate, my ability to change angles went from about 15 percent dispersion to about 60, 65 percent,” Turco said. “Better yet, I had a backhand, I had a legit one. One where I could get it up on the glass even, and make more pinpoint passes as opposed to just shoveling it over there. The whole point of playing it is to get your defenseman the puck quicker so they can take less of a beating from forecheckers. Once you have a backhand, it changes your dynamics, and the forechecker has to make a decision.”

Other goalies started to notice Turco’s success and copied the Stars goalie, starting with former Dallas prospects like Mike Smith and Dan Ellis. Eventually, the “Turco Grip” became standard teaching in goalie schools, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an NHL goalie that doesn’t mimic Turco’s technique in today’s game.

“I’ve been out of the game so long that I start reminding the young goalies, like ‘Hey, you know who started that?’” Turco said. “You’re welcome.”

The “Turco Grip” was born in a practice when Turco was playing for the IHL’s Michigan K-Wings during the 1998-99 season. During a drill, Turco was having trouble stopping the puck behind the net on his backhand with a more traditional grip.

“You just don’t have much leverage on your toe on your backhand, and then I kept losing the puck and had to chase it, and finally, I just got pissed off and turned my hand over and jammed it into the boards,” Turco said. “And of course, I flipped my hand back over to play it the traditional way.

“Then we introduced a forechecker to the drill, and the forechecker was on me quick one time, and I slipped my hand over to stop it, and I slid it over to my partner, or my defenseman, behind the goal on a perfect little pass,” Turco added. “I was like, ‘that felt pretty good,’ and I just went from there and started playing it.”

When he got to the NHL, the circumstances were in place for Turco’s puck-handling style to thrive and truly popularize his grip.

The Stars wanted their goalies to move the puck and help eliminate forecheckers with quick passes.

“By the time I got here, the door was cracked open for me, and I kicked that thing through,” Turco said. “(Ken Hitchcock) didn’t have a handle on me, and Dave Tippett had all the confidence in the world in me, and saw that every mistake that I made was bettered by 20 to 30 good plays, we thought that outweighed it.”

Turco said he never planned to be an innovator, but passing the technique on to younger goalies became a natural conversation when other goalies in Stars training camp would ask Turco why he was so good at puck handling.

“By the time I was the starter and young guys would talk to me, I’d say, ‘Come on, try this, it’ll make you better,’” Turco said. “We were all on the same team and trying to win hockey games, so I thought it was my duty to pass on information to the next generation, the next line of players.”

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If you want more stories like that from the Stars and their history, you can buy my book here.

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If you want more on the Turco grip, here is a video of Turco himself explaining it that I found on YouTube.