The NHL Needs to End Its Dead Puck Era

Jeff Sharon
Jeff Sharon
Published in
5 min readJun 25, 2014

The NHL is still licking its wounds from the lost season of 2004–2005. While I’ve already expounded upon how the league can find its truest audience previously, as far as improving the game on the ice, there’s one thing the league can do right now to enhance excitement on a nightly basis.

Hockey could always afford more scoring. The NHL did its best after the lockout to enhance offense, but as the data shows, things have tapered off dramatically:

Hockey NHL goals
Graph of NHL goals per team per game since 1917 (Data: Pro Hockey Reference)

Scoring in the NHL’s modern era peaked in 1984 at around 4 goals per team per game, as the dust from the WHA Merger and subsequent expansion settled. Since then, the NHL has seen a steady decline in offense, down below three goals per game before the lockout. Post-lockout rule changes resulted in another spike in goals, but only just above three, and nowhere near early 80’s levels. Since the lockout, things have again leveled off well at well below 3 goals per game.

What caused this decline? Talent dilution from expansion should have increased scoring, but that didn’t happen.

Shots per game is back up to early ’80s levels after a big dip, so that’s not it:

NHL Scoring Shots
Shots per team per game since 1983–84 (Data: Pro Hockey Reference)

Maybe the goalies are better. Turns out they are. Goalies are saving more than 91% of shots, a four-point increase since 1984:

NHL Goaltending Save Percentage
Average Save Percentage per Team per Game since 1983–94 (Data: Pro Hockey Reference)

Their job is also easier. Power plays are down, and have been going down for a while, despite a post-lockout spike, and are lower than ever, at just over three per game:

NHL Power Plays Hockey
Average power plays per team per game, 1983-Present (Data: Pro Hockey Reference)

And the guys in front of the goalies are getting better at killing off those power plays, although at 82%, they’re not quite as good as they have been recently:

NHL Penalty killing
Penalty killing percentage per team per game, 1983–84 to Present (Data: Pro Hockey Reference)

So the goalies are better, and the defenses in front of them are having to deal with being short-handed less. In addition, defenders (and hockey players in general) are so big now that, even if there is room, it gets clogged up rather quickly.

If the NHL is to see more scoring, there’s really only one practical answer, and it is not calling more penalties:

Widen the rink.

I am a big fan of international hockey. Ever since I saw the World Cup of Hockey in 1996, and then NHL players began going to the Olympics in 1998, I have always thought that the international game was faster, more fluid, and far more exciting.

Check out this beautiful comparison of the difference between NHL and IIHF (International) rink dimensions:

NHL Rink Size
NHL-IIHF Rink Size Comparison (Source unknown)

While both rinks are 100 feet long, the international rink is 15 feet wider than the NHL rink. Although the neutral zone is smaller in the NHL, the size of the attack zone makes it so that defenses have less area to cover. That’s an additional 340 square feet that goalies and defenses would have to mind.

Also, the IIHF allows an extra two feet of room between the goal line and the boards, providing skaters some extra room to roam behind the net.

Now, widen the rink, and keep the blue line where the NHL currently has it (25' from center ice), and increase the room behind the net to the 13' IIHF standard, and you have an attack zone that is 62 feet long by 100 feet wide, for an area of 6200 square feet — 740 square feet more than the NHL currently has. That’s a lot of room for the best skaters in the world to roam.

The only issue owners would have is the removal of the seats closes to the ice. But that would only account for 7.5 feet on either side of the rink, equivalent to one row, or maybe two, and that’s without sacrificing seats behind the end boards. This can easily be made up for in ticket sales.

Other critics claim that the wider rink would not result in higher scoring at all, and Olympic statistics do bear this out. In Sochi 2014, teams averaged 2.35 goals per game, less than the NHL’s current average. But the reason for this has less to do with the size of the rink than it does with the quality of the players.

Of the 300 players who took the ice at Sochi, 148 were active on NHL rosters (BLAST YOU, ILYA KOVALCHUK). Canada, the USA, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic were the most well-represented nations. Effectively, these were mini-all-star teams, and the overall quality of two-way play, especially among the top six teams in the tournament, was better than it would be in the 30-team, 750+ player league.

NHL Olympics rosters
Breakdown of percentage of Sochi 2014 rosters by percentage of NHL players (Dan Ryan — @bruinshockeynow)

The L.A. Kings have shown that letting the skaters skate and possess the puck can lead to success. Increasing the size of the rink and giving the offense more room to work while avoiding defenders can help the NHL break out of its modern Dead-Puck Era.

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Jeff Sharon
Jeff Sharon

Journalist, teacher, play-by-play guy, multimedia producer, sports nut, aerospace nerd. Publisher of Aerothusiast and Black & Gold Banneret.