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The NHL Goes Postal
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Look! It's the Michelin Man. No ,that's just an NHL goalie
For the last decade or so, the National Hockey League has been tinkering with new ways to increase scoring. These ideas have ranged from, going to full time 4-on-4 hockey(ridiculous) to radically altering the shape and size of the goals(even more ridiculous). So when it was brought to my attention that the NHL recently tested some new net prototypes in Toronto, I was very much intrigued. However, my intrigue quickly turned to disgust when I found out that the new prototypes were essentially the same net I have seen for the last twenty years, with one slight alteration, the shape of the goal posts. That's right, the NHL thinks that it's the goalposts, that kept scoring down throughout the late 1990's and into this decade. The main change to the goalposts is the shape goes from the traditional round shape to a more oval shape that is designed to have more pucks bounce in the net instead of out. This may be Gary Bettman's most idiotic idea ever, actually it's not , but it's right up there with making getting rid of divisional playoffs, changing the conference names, and giving every city south of the Ohio River an NHL team. The goal posts were not the reason that scoring decreased in NHL.
There were several more significant factors that I think decreased the amount of scoring in the game. The first, is over-expansion. The NHL had 21 teams as recently as the 1990-91 season. Starting from the 1991-1992, the NHL added teams in San Jose, Tampa Bay, Ottawa, Nashville, Columbus, Anaheim, Atlanta, Minnesota, and Florida. My hypothesis is that increasing the number of teams by roughly a third, created about 225 new "jobs" in the NHL. What this means is that in all likelihood, players who were not good enough to play in the NHL were now filling up the rosters of these expansion teams, because well, the players had to come from somewhere. You add a couple hundred players into the league that are maybe a step or stride slower, and naturally, more holding and grabbing will come into the game to compensate for the lack of skill.
The second factor that kept scoring down was the rapid increase in the quality and talent of the NHL goaltender combined with the enormous equipment goaltenders started to wear. Goaltenders typically were considered less athletic players than their skater counterparts, however, over the last fifteen years or so, goaltenders have not only gotten much larger in physical size, but these bigger men are also much more athletic and talented. For example a goalkeeper like Olaf Kolzig is around 6'3 220 lbs. Goaltenders today have goalie coaches from age 10 and I think this also has had a huge impact on goaltending quality in the league. However, if the NHL was serious about increasing scoring in a way that doesn't artificially strip the game of its purity, they should seriously crack down on the size of goalkeeper equipment. I mean compare this to this. The open areas of the net from 20 years ago has now been obscured by goalie equipment. It is clear that over the last twenty years, goaltenders have gone from looking like normal guys with just the necessary amount of equipment to enormous men wearing even more enormous equipment. If the NHL truly wants to naturally increase scoring in the game, then goaltender equipment regulation should be a main issue of discussion in the offseason.
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