I’m not an avid hockey fan, but I was watching a game the other night and they mentioned pulling the goalie out towards the end of regulation to have an extra player.
Has a team ever just gone a whole game without a goalie?
Having an extra guy could keep your opponent from having too many shots on the goal, and if things are looking rough couldn’t a player just hop into goalie mode momentarily?
Pretty good bet the answer is no.
Pulling the goalie for an extra skater is a desperation play. Maybe 20% of the time it pays off and the team with the extra player scores. Maybe 40% of the time it backfires and the team without a goalie gets scored against. and 40% of the time it does neither harm nor good. But if you’re losing by one score and the game is nearly over, there’s not much downside in trying a desperation play; you’re already doomed and you might get lucky.
The key thing is that as long as your team has possession of the puck your goalie is useless. But the instant the puck changes hands to the other guys, the goalie is the most important guy on your team. So teams tend to pull their goalie only when the remaining time in the period is short enough that it’s at least plausible they’ll be able to retain control of the puck until the clock runs out. And by and large whether the desperation play backfires or is ineffective comes down to whether the other guys get the puck back or not.
If somebody pulled their goalie with, say, 3 minutes to play, instead of 60 to 90 seconds, it’s a virtual certainty the puck would change hands to the other guys. Who’d quickly stuff it in the undefended net for a score.
The problem with trying to use another player as a part time goalie is that he’d have to stay back there near to goal most of the time. A part time goalie who’s in the offensive end of the rink adding to his team’s offense won’t be able to get to the other end to defend the goal any faster than the other team’s guys will be able to get there to shoot point blank into the undefended goal.
Also, there’s no need for point blank shooting. A pro player won’t miss very many clear shots taken from near mid-rink. And a shot puck is far faster than a skater. So all the bad guys need to do is get control of the puck in their own defensive end, outmaneuver 1 or 2 defenders then fire the puck half the length of the ice into the goal.
Having no goalie in basketball works because it’s darn hard to shoot a successful basket from mid-court. Imagine the basket was 10 feet in diameter and 5 feet off the floor. Guys would be scoring baskets from the opposite free throw line. That’s what hockey with no goalies would be like.
The goalie is one of the most important players on the team, so no, you don’t play without a goalie except in a desperation situation, for the reasons LSL Guy sets out.
A goalie is a specialized player, with specialized equipment. The stick, the pads, the mask, and the training are all different than the other players. A regular player just can’t play the same role as a trained goalie.
As an example of the importance of the position, the general wisdom, for instance, is that a team with a mediocre goalie in the NHL might be able to make it to the playoffs, but will be eliminated quickly. Only teams with good or exceptional goalies have a shot at winning the Stanley Cup.
I think I remember reading that there’s been some (possibly informal) research done on this, and it seems you’re more likely to be successful by pulling your goaltender earlier (around two or three minutes before the end of regulation) than later (60 to 90 seconds before the end of regulation). A single minute isn’t quite enough to organize a 6-on-5 situation, but on the other hand coaches know they’ll be blamed if they pull their goaltender with three minutes to play and they get scored on so they’re averse to doing it.
I agree though that if you play without a goaltender for several minutes, the chances you’ll give up a goal become very high.
It may have happened at some point in time, due to injury, equipment problems, or one of those bizarre tie breaker playoff situations where a team needs to score a bunch of goals and they don’t care about winning the game or how many goals are scored against them. But unless you completely outmatch your opponent and can assure they rarely gain control of the puck it’s a losing proposition.
http://www.ithappenedinhockey.com/2010/09/starting-a-game-without-a-goalie/
Probably the closest it ever came was at the end of the 1969-70 season. The rangers finished the season with a 38–22–16 record. Montreal was playing its last game that evening against Chicago. A win or a tie would give them a better record than the Rangers and the final playoff spot. If they lost they wold have an identical record with the Rangers and the next tie-breaker was total goals scored. The Rangers were ahead by 4, having won their afternoon game by the incredible score of 9-3. (They knew they had to win and score a lot.)
In the third period of the Montreal-Chicago game with with 9:16 left and Montreal losing 5-2, they knew scoring three goals would get them into the playoffs and they needed that many for a tie in any case, and it wouldn’t matter then how many Chicago scored. So they pulled their goalie. It was much less than successful. They gave up 5 empty-net goals and scored none, losing 10-2.
Hey, it’s Hypnogogic Jerk! Welcome back! Haven’t seen you posting for a while.
Moved to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Why thank you! I’ve posted a few times in the last few months, but I mostly lurk these days.
Here’s a 538 article about pulling the goalie. It doesn’t answer the percentage questions except by modelling which indicates if you pull the goalie 2:30 left you have a 19-20% chance of scoring. It does not give the percentage of times you’ll give up an empty net goal.
It also shows a graph indicating coaches are moving towards earlier pulling.
ETA: Shoulda refreshed. This was a lot shorter when I started this now mostly redundant post.
For the OP’s benefit …
Hockey already includes a feature called the “power play”. When a team commits a foul, one of their players is removed from the ice and they’re forced to play shorthanded for 2 minutes or until the other full-strength team scores a goal.
While a power play is in progress, the full-strength team has 5 players plus a goalie. The short-handed team has 4 players plus a goalie. These events happen many times in every game. 5 or more for each team would be typical. So there are many, many minutes of experience by teams playing shorthanded or playing with what amounts to an extra man.
The full-strength team usually spends most of the power play time on offense. Once in awhile they lose the puck to the short-handed team. But what matters for our purposes here is that the success rate for scoring with the extra man in offense is not all that high. It helps, but it’s not an overwhelming advantage. A large majority of power plays expire with no scoring.
The point here is that the extra man is statistically provably not a huge increment in offense; more like a small increment. And as discussed above, the loss of a goalie is a gigantic decrement in defense. These two things together are why goalie-less play is not common.
You can find examples of teams which discover, at the last minute, that one of their two goalies is injured or ill, and unable to suit up. They’ll wind up getting an equipment guy who plays goalie in an amateur league, or the like, to suit up for the game, just in case, because a goalie’s skills are so different from other players.
For example, last year, the Blackhawks were in Philadelphia, to play the Flyers, when their starting goalie, Corey Crawford, had an emergency appendectomy. They wound up signing a local amateur named Eric Semborski to act as backup goalie for the night.
For anyone wondering what would happen if a team went without a goalie, there is an (almost) example from the German second league. In October 1999, GEC Nordhorn played without a goalie nearly the whole game and lost 5:27. The game was not rescheduled despite the Nordhorn team already being severely handicapped due to a flu outbreak, which caused many players to miss the game. When the goalie could not continue past the first few minutes (for the same reason), the team decided to play out the remaining time with six skaters on ice, with predictable results. Apparently the game was actually annulled later, as GEC Nordhorn went bankrupt mid-season. A news video about the game (in German) is available on Youtube.
I remember this unusual incident because a player from my country (Latvia) was playing for the Heilbronner EC (the winning team) at that time, thus the game caught the attention of one of our biggest sports magazines who wrote a brief recap in the “weird sports happenings of the week” section.
I think the underlying point is that while pulling your goalie - if done intelligently* - gives you a usefully better chance of scoring first in a given time interval, it incurs a substantially worse chance of scoring more goals during that time.
So it makes sense when the value of scoring before the other team is high and the cost of allowing a goal is low - e.g. when trailing by one goal with a short time left in the game. It makes little or no sense when this isn’t the case.
*e.g. when your team is controlling the puck in the opponent’s end.
Yeah. That cuts to the chase. Much cleaner than what I was musing about writing.
It’s a 3-way a race between the offensive team with an extra man, the defensive team short a man, and the horn ending the period. The offense is a sprinter, the defense is a marathoner, and they each hope the clock plays to their strong suit.
Tangent 1 …
I had an interesting observation along the way as I was thinking about all this.
The game ends just once. But there are 3 periods where the clock guarantees play will stop soon.
Ahead or behind, a team with possession very late in either of the first two periods could choose to pull their goalie for the 6 on 5 attempt. Yes they’d have more downside potential than does the team down by one with 90 seconds remaining until their guaranteed loss at the end the game. But they’d still have the same upside potential as well.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this tried.
Tangent 2 …
Consider the double power play, and how much more often the full-strength team scores in that 5 on 3 situation vice the conventional 5 on 4. That a big difference. So … I also wondered about the full-strength team in a 5 on 4 power play pulling their goalie to make it 6 on 4.
That would be a higher risk move vs. the end-of-period maneuver since game play doesn’t automatically stop when the PP expires.
Which leads to the question of whether the advantage in unequal headcount situations comes more from the offense having players who’re free from man-to-man coverage, or is it from the defense simply running out of enough people to block all the avenues of approach to the net?
Said another way, from evenly matched teams in a 5 on 5 situation, does going 5 on 4 or 6 on 5 produce the bigger increment in benefit to the team with more men?
I know I don’t know. Anyone?
I have seen the goalie pulled at the end of periods (faceoff in the opponent’s end) when the time left on the clock is estimated to be too short for the defense to win the faceoff and then shoot the length of the ice.
Pulling when you already have the power play means any icings when the defense takes a shot at the open net are automatically waved off. Still often see them pull him anyway.
While it’s rare for it to matter, teams will also have their goalie head to the bench for an extra attacker when there’s a delayed penalty waiting for the other team to get the puck.
I don’t watch as much hockey as I used to, so my hockey mind is a bit rusty.
Wow, that’s clever. It essentially offers a one-way bet other than the extreme bad luck of an own goal. I think the real practical problem here is having everybody in on the plan to execute it quick enough to matter when the surprise delayed penalty occurs.
I believe Roger Neilson originated this idea if there was a face off in the offensive zone with under 3 seconds left in a period.
Neilson also told his goalie to leave his stick lying on the goal line across the goal when he headed for the bench at the end of the game. He also put in a defenseman to face a penalty shot once. The defenseman rushed the surprised attacker rather than waiting in the crease.
Both of these tactics are now illegal.
I’ve never seen this done except at the end of a game where the team on the power play needs a goal to tie. One thing to keep in mind is that the team playing short handed can chuck the puck down to the other end of the ice without consequence, which makes it easier to get the empty net goal. An even strength team trying to hold on in a 6 on 5 can still do that, but they risk getting called for icing, and they wind up with a defensive zone face-off and they can’t change out players.
I don’t know how you go from even strength 5 on 5 to 5 on 4 without a penalty. But in general, scoring goes up when you have fewer players on the ice overall because there’s more open space to move the puck around. I’ve never seen numbers on it, but it sure seems to me like you’d see more goals per minute played in 5 on 4 than you would in 6 on 5.