Why should penalized teams get to ice the puck? From that to bigger nets, Adam Proteau explains his four ideas to increase the entertainment factor during NHL games.
Why should penalized teams get to ice the puck? From that to bigger nets, Adam Proteau explains his four ideas to increase the entertainment factor during NHL games.
Sometimes, people believe the NHL is a fixed product, an entity that essentially remains the same from year to year and decade to decade.
While that’s true of certain elements of the league, the reality is the NHL is indeed a fluid, ever-changing industry, either in practical rules changes, the evolution of players and the advancements of technology. Like it or not, the NHL is like any other professional sports league insofar as it requires changes on the regular.
This year, another pro hockey league, the European-based Champions Hockey League, announced significant changes to its games, including a shorthanded team ending their minor penalty by scoring. Most of those changes make a lot of sense to this writer. But truth be told, we like other major changes that the NHL should consider making.
Hockey’s top league has a conservative bend in many regards, but the NHL should get credit for adopting rules such as the shootout and the highest-technology cameras and angles to ensure the proper analysis can be made on key plays.
That said, we’ve got other ideas in mind when it comes to changing the NHL. Here are four ways we’d make the game different, all with the mindset of increasing the entertainment factor. In no special order:
1. Bigger nets.
Don’t get us wrong, we recognize the NHL is in a good place coming off a season in which teams averaged 3.18 goals per game, the highest average in that stat since 1993-94 (3.24). However, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement.
Any time you get to a situation where teams win by a 7-5 margin, you never see lineups for ticket refunds. There’s something to be said for good defensive hockey, but let’s face it, more goals means more fun.
This is why we’d suggest a minor but important change to the size of nets. Think of how precise NHL players can be when shooting the puck. They can find the most limited of space and put the puck in with ninja-like accuracy. Now imagine giving players a couple more inches around the net. The best players in the sport would be drooling at the opportunity, and they’d make it much more difficult on goalies who simply take up most space by their large physical frames.
NHL players have gotten taller on average over the decades. The same should hold true for nets, which now are often patrolled by men of a 6-foot-3 size or larger. Let’s bring back the era where goalies had to be more athletic, as opposed to being physically imposing. We’d bet fans would hardly be able to tell the difference with slightly bigger nets, but the important people in the entertainment equation – the players themselves – would quickly recognize and benefit from the evolution to be more proportionate to ever-increasing goalie bodies and equipment.
2. All minor penalties are served for the full two minutes, regardless of how many goals are scored by the non-penalized team.
This was one of the rules the Champions League adopted for this season, and they should be commended for this one in particular.
If the league wants to underscore the message to players not to strike outside its rulebook, the way you make them truly pay for being penalized is by keeping them on the penalty kill for 120 seconds guaranteed.
The best teams in the league often are the most successful with the extra man. There could be more real separation of the haves and have-not-teams in the standings if we kept the penalized player in the penalty box for two minutes, and a club can score two or three goals on the power play.
With 120 seconds on the man advantage, NHL players would have to be more judicious in their choices to break or not break the rules against the top teams. Penalties that meant more to the bottom line of the game’s results than they do now would probably result in a cleaner game, and that should always be a goal for rule changes.
3. No icings allowed on penalties.
This wasn’t one of the Champions League changes, but from our perspective, this change would also make power play situations more of a high-impact environment.
If it’s not allowed for a player to ice the puck at even strength, should icing be permitted when a team is down a player? It’s the team’s fault for being penalized, isn’t it? Why do they get an accompanying release valve in the form of permitted icings?
We’re not suggesting that icings deserve a two-minute minor penalty, but certainly, if a team ices the puck, the officials’ whistles should come out, the play should return to the penalized team’s zone, and there should be no line changes allowed until the next puck is dropped and penalized teams get the puck out of their zone.
The more you think about the difference between icings during even strength and penalty kills, the less it seems reasonable that we don’t keep the rules of icing the same. The pressure would increase on the penalized team, and that’s exactly what they deserve for breaking the rules. This is about common sense and fairness in all zones of the game, and it wouldn’t be any sort of cardinal sin to implement this change.
4. League adds one official in an eye-in-the-sky position for every game.
I touched on this possible change around the same time last year, and every time I see a tandem of referees blatantly miss an on-ice call, I get more and more of an urge to make this admittedly serious change.
We wouldn’t be asking an eye-in-the-sky official to focus on calling more penalties, whistling down offside plays or having any focus on over-officiating the NHL product. We’d put them there with the intent on getting things right. Most times, an eye-in-the-sky referee would be there to support the calls from the on-ice refs.
If they did catch something that slipped through the cracks on the ice, that would be ideal as well. But primarily, the eye-in-the-sky ref concept contains an inherent admission that the game has grown so fast, it’s virtually impossible to get all the calls right. An eye-in-the-sky ref would be an option that doesn’t add to the numbers of physical bodies on the ice and is an insurance policy of sorts that makes the overall officiating more reputable.