The Time Has Come For Bigger Nets
from Adam Proteau of The Hockey News,
Goaltending has been made into a near-science, with a good dose of instinct establishing the difference between those who made it to the NHL, and those who didn’t. I respect the position, and the people who play it, a great deal.
But let’s be real: we’re at the stage where great goaltending too often overshadows the other superstars of the sport. The NHL’s top netminders – including the starters for the two Stanley Cup Finalists this year, Tampa’s Andrei Vasilevskiy and Montreal’s Carey Price – can now post save percentages at or near the .940 mark on a fairly regular basis. That’s terrific for them, but not nearly as good for skating stars like Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, and Auston Matthews, the latter of whom was the only NHLer to get close to or broach the 40-goal plateau this past regular season.
To me, someone who grew up in the Wayne Gretzky/Mike Bossy/Guy Lafleur Era of iconic goal-scorers, that’s just not good enough.
The league has tried to address the issue by cutting down on the size of goaltending equipment, but for many reasons – chiefly, safety reasons – the crackdown hasn’t had much effect. The league had a goals-per-game average of 2.74 in the 2021 campaign – the lowest number in that regard since 2016-17, when the number was 2.59.
Coaches in this league cannot teach offense in the same way they teach defense, so any gain in the goals-per-game aspect usually fades as coaches, bless their hearts, find new ways to dull down the game (normally in the guise of “cutting down mistakes”). The days of coaches like the late Pat Quinn, who always wanted to play an up-tempo, more entertaining style than many of his peers did, are long gone. Goalies, like the average human body, are only growing bigger. This issue will only get worse as the years pass.
But if the league chose to increase the nets, just by a few inches on either side and on the crossbar, something different would happen: stars like Price, Vasilevskiy and Vegas’ Marc-Andre Fleury still would be stars, but there would be much bigger separation between them and the game’s “average” goalies.
read on...
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