Dave Dryden wasn’t just a great goalie, he was an equipment innovator

The hockey world mourns the loss of former NHL and WHA goaltender Dave Dryden, who passed away Oct. 4 at the age of 81.

He was an excellent goaltender, but people may not know that Dryden was a true innovator. He pioneered the first cage combination goalie mask and was an instrumental figure in equipment design.

Legendary mask maker Greg Harrison had plenty to share on what Dryden contributed to the position.

“Dryden would show up at Cooper (the hockey company now known as Bauer) when I was working there,” Harrison said. “He’d come into the design department and ask, ‘Why do we need all this leather on the glove and blocker? We can use nylon and make it lighter.’ ”

It was trial and error back then. The nylon worked well in areas of the equipment that didn’t come in contact with the ice very often. So Dryden, along with the equipment designers at Cooper, tinkered until they found the magic combination of weight and durability.

According to Harrison, many of Dryden’s ideas would end up in Cooper’s product line the next year. Retail buyers directly benefited from Dryden’s curiosity.

“He was such a humble man,” Harrison said of his friend. “He never received any credit. Not that I think he wanted it anyway.”

Dryden, who retired after the 1979-80 season with the Edmonton Oilers, was the first to wear a padded practice jersey that he sewed together on his own. More than a decade passed before the first padded practice jerseys were available in stores.

While impossible to verify, Harrison believes that Dryden was the first to attach arm pads to his chest protector. Goaltenders had always worn them separately before Dryden decided to bust out the needle and get creative.

I started playing goalie in the late 1980s with two-piece upper-body equipment. Yet Dryden had already laid the groundwork for today’s chest and arm protectors years before. By the early ’90s, two-piece protection was no longer available.

Dryden also left his mark on leg pad design.

“We made him a pair of pads, and on the inside edges we put about a ⅝-inch piece of wood,” Harrison remembered from his time working at Cooper. “But we found it broke. So we used a rounded PVC plastic extrusion instead. You can see it when he played with Edmonton. The pads had a sharp edge to them on the inside. It kept the puck from sliding through.”

Most of the innovations Dryden came up with weren’t that visible, but it was impossible not to notice when, in 1979 as a member of the Edmonton Oilers, he took the ice wearing a mask design that had never been seen.