Throwing It Back To T-Blades
Previously on Throwback Hockey Gear…
Throwing It Back To The CCM X-Ray Helmet
Throwing It Back To The TPS Response
I don’t think there’s ever been an invention in hockey as… unique… as T-Blades before. Since the beginning of time, hockey skates have consisted of 2 things. A boot and a steel blade that gets resharpened after however long you go between cuts. Could be after each game, could be twice a season if you’re a washed up beer leaguer who doesn’t get to the rink until after the pro shop is already closed. Either way, you sharpen your skate blades and that’s the way it was for thousands upon thousands of years. Then came T-Blades trying to reinvent the wheel with a predominantly plastic blade which was intended to get repeatedly replaced and attached to the holder.
Instead of sharpening your blades whenever they get dull, you’d just throw them away and attach a new blade to the holders. These, of course, came in around the same time that all hockey equipment companies were drunk with “ingenuity”. The early 2000s were a wild time for hockey gear to say the least.
Now personally, I never used T-Blades before so I can’t really speak to their performance. But holy shit there has never been a time in hockey history when rinks were louder than during the T-Blades Era. There was maybe a 3-year period where there were at least a handful of guys on every team who went with the T-Blades. And these fuckers were loud as hell carving up and down the ice. You’d walk into a rink during a practice and think some D1 college team was in the building with how loud the cuts were. Then you take a look at the ice and you realize it’s a bunch of mites barely making it to the other end of the ice without falling down. Didn’t matter though because anybody could throw on a pair of T-Blades and you’d sound like you were cookin.
Like I said, the T-Blade Era really only lasted like 3 years maximum and that was for a few reasons. For starters–I feel like these things fell apart pretty easily. The moment anyone lost one of the screws to attach the blade to the holder you knew it was only a matter of time before the whole thing went to shit. And secondly, if you were to drop your regular skates in the parking lot without skateguards on, you could just get them resharpened and it would be no harm no foul outside of the $6 it took to resharpen them. If you dropped your T-Blades in the parking lot without skateguards on, then you’re stuck having to buy a whole new pair. Now I know you’re asking yourself how many times do people accidentally drop their skates in the parking lot but shit like that happens more often than you’d think. Maybe not that exact scenario but you’ve definitely fucked up your blades before and didn’t think much of it. If you had T-Blades, that would have been devastating.
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However, there was still one player out there in the world who has been single-handedly keeping the T-Blade era alive himself. And that was Dennis Seidenberg.
Which made sense since Seidenberg is German and T-Blades are a German product. But unfortunately, it looks like Seidenberg has bought and used up every last T-Blade in existence and is now resorting to using regular skate blades.
End of an era. RIP.