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Is it time to blow away the NHL shootout?
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Scott Hartnell's flailing flub Thursday dropped the Flyers to 8 for 28 all time in
shootouts. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
After celebrating Veteran’s Day with a win at the Nassau Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum (AKA the arena with the completely inconsequential hockey team and obnoxiously long but admirably unsponsored name), the Flyers traveled to Pittsburgh Thursday night for an Eastern Conference Finals rematch with their divisional and intra-state rivals in Pittsburgh. While the game itself was wildly entertaining, it’s only what happened after 65 minutes of play which has people talking in Philadelphia tonight. That would be, of course, the shootout.
Perhaps it’s because the Flyers have been absolutely atrocious in them since the shootout was introduced following the NHL’s lockout season, or because we Philadelphians are just plain ornery folk who are quite resistant to change. Regardless, the prevailing opinion among Flyer fans both on the internet and on Philly sports radio tonight is that the shootout must go.
I think everyone can pretty much agree that the shootout is here to stay, as it’s just exceedingly rare to ever see these sorts of things reversed in sports. But the question of whether the shootout should stay is one which is much harder for me to get my head around.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of watching games end in ties. I can’t stand the old cliché that it’s “like kissing your sister,” because I think it sounds like something a bad sitcom writer wrote. But the taste that phrase leaves in my mouth is as close a facsimile of watching a game end in a tie as I’ve yet to come across.
So when the NHL came out of its hibernation with shootouts on the docket, I was as happy as this guy. Watching them over the past few seasons, I can’t say they’ve turned out to be nearly as much fun as I had hoped they’d be. There’s no doubt that it’s a much more climactic ending than a tie ever was, but it’s also just about as legitimate an indicator of which team played better as an XFL coin flip.
While my Flyers have been among the NHL’s absolute worst shootout teams, I’ve personally been inundated with almost nothing but pro-shootout sentiment living in New York during the league’s no-tie era, and for good reason. The Devils, Islanders, and Rangers all rank in the top five in all-time shootout wins and the top eight in all-time shootout winning percentage.
Little as I think it has to do with the actual game of hockey, the shootout isn’t inherently unfair. As much as I hate watching the Flyers give up extra point after extra point, I’ll take a climax over an anti-climax 100 times out of 100.
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