Have you had your Green Biscuit today?

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the Discount Hockey store in Woodland Hills to buy a new hockey stick. I wanted to get something at least very similar if not exactly the same as my current Warrior Mac Daddy, 85 flex, Jovanovski blade pattern. Needless to say, the fact that the Jovanovski (aka Lidstrom, aka W02) blade pattern doesn't seem to be sold widely anymore made me a disappointed customer.

I did pick up two other things: more black hockey tape (although it isn't Renfrew, and I think I like these particular rolls better than Renfrew) and the Green Biscuit. I'd seen it before and was curious enough to want to get it, but I never bothered to order it online. I saw some Green Biscuits in the display case of the checkout desk, and I thought "why not?"

As the linked video shows, the Green Biscuit works very well for what it was designed to do: stay flat on less-than-ideal surfaces. The friction of the vulcanized rubber of a hockey puck makes for nightmare-inducing and frustration-building training exercises because the puck won't stay flat as it would on ice. When you as a player are practicing stickhandling and trying to get better control of the puck, you want to increase your pacing. Doing so with a puck on surfaces other than ice or a shooting pad or varnished, smooth flooring is just going to disrupt pacing.

After practicing with this for a week in my garage (the only real space I have at the moment), it's everything that it's advertised to be, and I love practicing with it. This particular version is designed just for stickhandling and passing (they make a shooting version if you want something more durable), and it works wonders for it. There's a split in the flooring of the garage based on how the flooring was laid out, and the Green Biscuit glides over it like it's one continuous piece of flooring. I haven't used it extensively in the driveway, but it's a tiled pattern with space between the pieces, and again, the Green Biscuit slides over it all like I'm really stickhandling on ice.

If there's one thing not to like about it, I guess it's that the product works too well, if that's possible. While regular hockey pucks cause problems on rough surfaces, there is something to be said for learning how to handle bouncing or rolling pucks because those kinds of things happen in games all the time (especially depending on the ice quality). The puck stays flat to the point where you have to actively try to get it to flip up or do something other than slide on the surface. But as a training aid, it provides a seamless practice tool for stickhandling and passing.