Leevi Merilainen didn’t arrive in Vancouver with much time to spare, but he did arrive with a mask worth noticing.
Picked up a week ago from Ottawa, the new Canucks goalie initially had only Senators-coloured gear and his old mask. That meant a quick turnaround was needed, and Canucks equipment trainer Brian “Red” Hamilton made the call to Basil Ackerman of Custom Cages to get the job done before Saturday’s game against Calgary, where Merilainen made his first start as a Canuck.
Ackerman, who has spent the past decade handling hockey-related printables for local teams, said the timing was tight even by his standards. He usually works with minor or beer league teams, but he can handle NHL requests too - as long as he’s given a little more breathing room than a day.
“It takes a day just to wrap and cure and let it dry,” Ackerman told me on Saturday afternoon, during a break in his busy work day.
That’s why the timeline mattered. Hamilton explained that Merilainen would need the wrap quickly with the season starting Tuesday in Edmonton and a skate game set for Saturday, and Ackerman was able to get the mask ready in time.
“They thought that that would be a great idea,” Merilainen told reporters after the game. “I thought that was an awesome idea. I’m happy we did that.”
The design leaned hard into the past. Ackerman said he had already created the small John Garrett caricature on the lower left side of another local goalie’s mask, so the idea was already in his head when Hamilton brought it up. A longtime Canucks fan who grew up calling Garrett “Cheech,” Ackerman wanted to make this one feel retro.
“I really wanted to do something retro,” he said. “Something ’80s.
With John Garrett, yeah. Something different.”
He described the process as a kind of specialized car wrap for a goalie mask, built with printed art and layered effects.
“It’s like a car wrap but its got a lot of special effects,” he explained of how he gets the art on the mask. It’s like a great big sticker that he prints.
“It’s got three different types of lamination, so it’s matte and gloss and it’s also got hologram.”
Ackerman said he was happy with how it turned out, and he also shared a personal link to the Canucks’ look. He said he grew up in the ’90s and loved the Linden-Bure era, and that his mother, Rose Smith, worked then as one of the team’s cooks.
“Oh yeah, she’d come home with all kinds of stories,” he chuckled.
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