Donald Brashear wants you to be able to afford your new hockey stick

Go log on to HockeyGiant.com. Like, right now. Go take a peek at how much sticks cost. Shit is crazy expensive. Sure, you can get a hockey stick for $50, but it's not going to be very good. If you want a halfway decent stick, you're going to spend at least $100, probably north of $150.

And if you want a stick like the professionals use -- and why wouldn't you, especially with one of the few pieces of equipment (in any sport) that actually impacts how you perform -- you're spending $200 or $250.

Former Flyers enforcer Donald Brashear wants to change that. He's launched his own line of hockey sticks, which he says are top of the line and will cost you half the price. Via Color of Hockey:

"I was retired for five years, so when I ran out of sticks and I went to buy one at a store, I thought the sticks were so expensive," Brashear told me recently. "Even though I have money, it didn’t make sense for me to pay $300 bucks [CAD] for a stick just to play in the beer league." ... "In six months, eight months, I sold like close to 3,000 sticks with no marketing, no advertising, no nothing. Only word of mouth," he told me. ...

"I hit two markets: the parents who don’t want to pay for a stick that’s too expensive and the beer league player who wants a high-performance stick." ... "I bring my sticks, other players take them and they realize ‘That’s a nice stick, it light,'" Brashear said. "I say ‘Why don’t you try it?’ They try it and they adopt it."

Brashear's company, BRASH/87, manufactures sticks at the junior, intermediate and senior level. They run from $129 CAD to $189 CAD -- or between roughly $100 and $150 USD.

There's no way to know if they actually match up to those $200 or $250 sticks without trying them, but next time you break your stick over the goal post in frustration, it might be worth checking his twigs out. The price is right, at least.