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Jean-Yves Ahern-USA TODAY Sports
Shooting.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea when it comes to ending NHL games. However, the alternatives – unlimited overtime and / or draws – are less attractive for a number of reasons. The shootout is a better endgame mechanic than Major League Baseball’s absurd second baseman rule to start each inning with sudden death, and the shootout clearly has an impact on the NHL standings.
This ensures that matches end within a reasonable timeframe, and while it would be best if the league increased the number of shooters in shootout to five (instead of the current limit of three shooters), shootout has become an integral part of the shootout. team results.
Last season, the Nashville Predators netted 64 points to claim last place in the Central Division playoffs. Five of their points came from the shooting. They were the best in the league 5-0 in a shootout. Take those five points off, and it’s the Dallas Stars (and their 60 points) that make the playoffs, not Nashville.
Elsewhere, the New Jersey Devils were the NHL’s worst 0-5 in shootouts in the 2021 campaign. Had they won all of those games, New Jersey would still have been eight points behind the Philadelphia Flyers. sixth in the East Division, but the Devils would have at least reached the 50-point plateau.
I get fan dissatisfaction with the shooting. I really do. It’s not ideal to turn a team game into an individual competition, but you must try honestly and expertly to project what would happen if the NHL allowed unlimited overtime: this hyper-coached league, in which the Each team’s bench chiefs do their best to instill a defensive spirit in each player, would have games that would drag on until 11pm, and possibly longer. Teams would sit and wait, and the arenas partially empty as fans walked home to pay babysitters and get ready for work the next day.
All of the entertainment value of the game would be like a slowly leaking balloon; the longer the game lasted, the flatter the ball would become. You need a reasonably quick end to overtime games, and the current NHL system of five minutes of 3-on-3 team play, followed by a shootout, is a reasonable setup for quickly deciding on a. winner. I’d be happier with 10 minutes of 3-on-3, but there’s a good chance the result would be the same after 10 minutes, and you’d be leaning on the shootout again to end it. The shootout wouldn’t happen as often, but it would still impact the standings.
And that’s the point – because the shootout will remain in the NHL, her teams need to focus on it to some extent. Teams can play cool and refuse to openly acknowledge the shootout, but they do so at their own risk. There is an element of luck, but there is still a good way to prepare for the shootout. Your most skilled skaters need to practice taking creative photos that they will use in the 1 on 1 showdown. You need a group of snipers to trot after segment 3 ends. 3 without a winner. They might not be the best point scorers in the roster – some teams have players who score a lot of goals and don’t have a lot of assists, and these are precisely the type of players made for a shootout – but players who can thrive under tremendous pressure, with everyone in the arena’s eyes, are the ones who could be the difference between making and missing the playoffs.
The shootout is like your local motor vehicle registration office: not necessarily fun all the time, but it’s not going anywhere either. Some people know how to navigate it better than you do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve yourself. NHL teams should and should have retained coaches to assist their shooters, but some have really failed.
Over the past 10 years, the New York Islanders and San Jose Sharks have had more shootout wins (49) than any other team in the NHL. It may not have done much for the Sharks in recent years, but it has certainly helped the Islanders become true Stanley Cup contenders and move up the rankings. The strongest teams tended to lead more in the category of wins in regulation or overtime – the top five of the last decade are all recent Cup winners: Pittsburgh, Boston, Tampa Bay, Washington and St. Louis . But every point counts. And, as we’ve seen in MLB this season, the difference between the playoffs or the playoffs can boil down to just one win.
This is why the shooting is so important. The league uses it primarily for practical purposes, but it can be crucial to a team’s success on the ice. The better a team performs, the more points it scores in the standings, and that’s never a bad thing, especially in the NHL where parity is riddled with. We should enjoy it more, because it is likely to stay here.
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