Wednesday’s FTB: Rule change

On Monday the official Twitter Sports account posed this question to the internet: if you could propose a rule change in your favourite sport, what would it be?

It’s a great question, and provoked a lot of fun answers ranging from completely improbable...

Here's one for the NHL. This is radical, but bear with me.

When a team commits a penalty infraction, the officials send them to the box for the appropriate amount of time regardless of score or the previous amount of penalties that team had taken. https://t.co/q80kQH1KiV
— Jesse Marshall (@jmarshfof) April 21, 2020

...to intriguing...

goalie gets a brick, its up to them what they do with it https://t.co/ihsk3xkxUH
— crosscheck carlos (@francouz666) April 21, 2020

...to desperately needed for the success of the sport.

hockey gloves should be on a string like little kids' gloves so when they drop them they just dangle https://t.co/A4W4vZ5ZbT
— daisy (@delayedcall) April 20, 2020

I am, of course, going to shamelessly steal that question to once again talk about how much the shootout sucks. Also, I can’t really remember any of the other rules of hockey right now, and at this point have only the vaguest memories of the sport as a whole (there’s... sticks, right? and maybe knives? ice??)

Anyways. The shootout is bad.

I think that’s fairly universally agreed upon – feel free to yell at me in the comments section if not – and yet there it remains in the NHL rule book, an unceremonious anvil falling on the adrenaline rush of 3-on-3 overtime, leaving the goalie to drag the limp body of many a game over the finish line. It’s boring, it’s not actually hockey, and occasional moments of brilliance don’t quite make up for how much of a sad, limp ending it slaps on to what very well might have been an otherwise amazing hockey game.

I’m not saying there’s no place for it at all though. While I do think that if you let 3-on-3 go on for an undetermined amount of time, the game will always eventually end with someone scoring a goal, arguably there is always the off-chance that both goalies might decide to stand on their heads and/or both teams might decide that trying to score goals is overrated. Or, maybe more realistically, a certain union might take umbrage with their members being required to play for an unending and indeterminate amount of time.

Which, of course, brings us to my proposed solution: ten minutes of 3-on-3 overtime, which is then followed by the shootout, because honestly any team that can’t score a goal with ten minutes of 3-on-3 deserves the shootout. If, however, extending 3-on-3 is truly impossible, I do have another, acceptable alternative that just involves a minor tweak to the set up of the shootout itself: the goalies take the shots in the shootout and a rotation of skaters try and stop them from scoring.

I’m ready for the rule change when you are, National Hockey League.