Or if you live in Canada check out Hockey Supremacy (I get a kick back from sales)
Luckily, when I ordered my Vaughn SLR 3 Pro Carbon pads, I mistakenly got one pad with the stock soft flex and one pad with the stiff flex I ordered. This allowed me to put the stiff and soft pads side by side with the puck machine to show how important thigh stiffness is.
Vaughn fixed the issue with my custom pads and I had them back and stiff in about a weeks time.
Soft and stiff pads are always a personal preference thing, a lot of goalies (Vaughn’s NHL goalies especially) like a softer more traditional style of pad, so moving to a stiffer thigh rise isn’t something these goalies want to do. Quick, is a perfect example of this and he is still wearing pads built with Vaughn V4 internals, and you can see how soft his thigh rises are.
Goalies have to figure out what their preferences are, but more companies are going to stiffer and stiffer above the knee break to help the puck stopping ability as well to increase durability in the pad. If the softer thighs help your game more, this is a trade off you can make. But I highly recommend goalies trying a stiffer thigh with a softer below the knee section and see if they can still manage. Bauer and Brian’s still offer a relatively softer feeling pad with more substantial thigh rises to help bridge this soft and stiff pad gap with the Hyperlite and GNetik V options.
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