Elvis Merzlikins maturing with Blue Jackets: 'I'm not that impulsive kid, like I was'
Fernando Pessoa’s career as a Portuguese poet and philosopher elevated him into the ranks of brilliant 20th century literary minds.
Perhaps he should’ve been a goalie. One of Pessoa’s famed quotations offers advice that every human who’s ever stood in front of a net or goal as a human barrier should keep at the ready.
“I always live in the present,” it starts. “The future, I can’t know. The past, I no longer have.”
Goaltending in hockey, especially the NHL, requires a number of traits. Long limbs, agile athleticism and the courage to stand in front of a frozen rubber disc traveling upwards of 100 mph are all wonderful assets, but it also takes a mind that calculates angles like an engineer and a short-term memory bank that self-erases like that little blue fish, Dory, in “Finding Nemo.”
In other words, NHL netminders would probably be wise to follow the advice of Jason Sudeikis’ fictional soccer coach on the popular “Ted Lasso” TV series.
“Be a goldfish.”
And that’s a good spot to bring the Blue Jackets’ top goldfish, Elvis Merzlikins, into the discussion. Merzlikins is off to a tough start to his fourth NHL season manning the net for the Blue Jackets, and one of the skills he’s honing is the challenge of letting go.
“That’s what I’m trying to learn, because they’re frustrating,” he said, referring to multiple goals he’d allowed in his first four games that were either odd or shots he should’ve stopped. “Example? The Nashville goals. I mean, they were horrible to me. I keep thinking what I could do better to save them, but at the end of the day they weren’t even lucky.”
The first in the Jackets' 5-3 victory over the Predators on Oct. 20 got by Merzlikins, he feels, with help from an unpenalized goaltender interference situation. The second, a backhand in front of the crease by former Blue Jackets center Ryan Johansen, was aided by a couple of bounces. A third was simply thrown toward the net from the right-wing, sailing through traffic before zipping over Merzlikins’ right shoulder and under the crossbar.
“I didn’t even see it,” said Merzlikins, who will draw his fifth start Friday against the Boston Bruins at Nationwide Arena. “The next morning, you watch the highlights and you see other goalies … they don’t have those goals and you’re asking yourself, ‘Why?’ Why to me?’ And then you see the other goalies (way out of position) and they just save it with a stick. And then, when you try it, it never happens.”
Welcome to the thoughts of a tortured goldfish.
Merzlikins, who is starting a five-year contract that pays $5.4 million a year, wants to be the same kind of bedrock in net that Sergei Bobrovsky used to be for the Blue Jackets. The Jackets would like that too, but Bobrovsky has something Merzlikins is still acquiring.
“Coming to the NHL (in 2019), I didn’t have that experience,” said Merzlikins, who counts Bobrovsky as a goalie he's admired a long time. “I still do not have that experience like ‘Bob’ has, so that’s where the consistency comes from. It wasn’t easy for me and Korpi (Joonas Korpisalo) to fill up those shoes (after Bobrovsky left in 2019). They were pretty big, but the more you play, the more you get to understand the game, and that’s how you’re going to get your experience −by playing.”
Also by forgetting.
A lot has changed in Merzlikins’ life since shifting his career to Columbus. He’s married now. He’s a dad. He also watched one of his close friends, Blue Jackets goalie Matiss Kivlenieks, die July 4, 2021, in a tragic fireworks incident at the home of the team's goaltending coach, Manny Legace.
Merzlikins is a different man now.
He’s also a different goalie than he was upon arriving March 2018 from Switzerland. Nearly doubling his career-high workload last season from 33 to 59 games taught Merzlikins a lot about himself and the league he’s trying to tame.
“I don’t feel that I am, anymore, that impulsive kid,” Merzlikins said. “I’m still Elvis, but I’m not that impulsive kid like I was and now I’m more mature. I’m more focused, really, on my job and every day I’m trying to think, ‘What I can do to get better?’ ”
Dropping a habit of eating “junk food,” is among the things Merzlikins has changed, and he’s getting more rest between games to handle a heavy workload. Becoming Lasso’s “goldfish” remains a hurdle, because allowing goals still makes his skin crawl, but like Pessoa, Elvis is starting to value the present more.
“It’s hard, but you have to do it," Merzlikins said. "You can’t overthink it. If you do, you’re going to burn out your brain. You can’t think about it. Just move on and keep playing ... and that’s when the results come."
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Elvis Merzlikins maturing as Columbus Blue Jackets goalie
