NHL Rule Change: 3-on-3 Overtime

The NHL has been tinkering with a couple rule changes this offseason. One is the coach’s challenge, which still seems to need some fine tuning. But sounds like it could be ready to go on puck drop come opening night.

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The other change is 3-on-3 overtime. We’ve already got a slight sneak peek at it and it looks as though the experiment should generate more goals and assists in the individual stats category. This is a move in the right direction for hockey. We’re only talking about maybe 20-40 more goals this season (estimated guess)?

But it brings up some interesting questions. Should we really be giving points to teams who lose in 3-on-3 overtime? Should we not be putting more emphasis on declaring an outright winner? These extra points have had a mixed reaction throughout the hockey community over the years.

Can we somehow incorporate shootouts to being more of a statistical factor? There’s nothing more irritating than looking at the box-score of a 3-2 win, where there’s only 4 actual goals recorded. It’s never made sense since day one. It’s great, you get your own pretty shootout goals category, but it accounts for virtually nothing.

Can we not award a goal to the game winning shootout scorer, maybe add some assists if other guys scored? An assist in hockey is awarded to the players who help set up the goal (last two if more were involved). Wouldn’t previous shootout goals have assisted in helping set up the game winner?

The stats don’t need to suffer with these off the chart goalie performances and players struggling to hit a point per game rate. Yes the goalies these days are quicker and maybe even better than past. Yes there’s more emphasis on playing defense and doing things like blocking shots. It’s obvious why scoring is down, but it’s a question of what we can do to address that. And I don’t think adding ghost goals (shootout) that are awarded to no one is asking all that much.

At what point do we start going down the road, proposing the idea of larger ice surfaces? As the game evolves and gets faster, there’s less room to move on the ice. Could we increase scoring by doing that?

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If we use Europe as reference, the evidence would suggest not. Finding point per game players in Europe is a rarity. Europe also produces a ton of great goalies, and is littered with ex NHLers so I’m not even sure if you could use it as an example.

The good news is that at the bare minimum we should see a slight increase in goal scoring for the 2015-2016 NHL season. Maybe not in the goals scored category for teams, but definitely in individual player stats.

For example, if 14-15 and 15-16 each had 80 games go to overtime that year, then obviously only 1 more goal can be scored. What’s the difference? Say half of those games in 14-15 went to a shootout. That’s a lot of games with one of those unaccounted goals on the stats sheet. Whereas in 15-16, we could see half as many games reach a shootout. That’s an extra 20 goals with however many assists attached to them.

But I beg to ask the question, what else can we do with our beloved game to increase goal scoring? Because as much as we love watching a goalie get a shutout, we really just want see as many goals as possible.

When guys like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux set records that double or even triple some of today’s regular numbers, we’ll never be able to fairly compare players like Sidney Crosby, John Tavares, or Connor McDavid. So what’s the next step to increasing goal productivity in the NHL?

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