First let me admit I am not a knowledgable fan of either one. That said I couldn’t help noticing that the scores in each were usually very low. I have also noticed some fans complaining about this. When scores are this low (2-1), (1-0) etc. the odds that the higher scoring team is actually the better team are small, whereas if the score is say, 5-2, 10-7 the odds are much better. The announcers mentioned that the shots on goal were ~ 45 for the Canadians and ~28 for the Americans in the medal game, with a final score of 2-1. All of this seems to indicate that the goals are just too small and that it is much too easy for the goalkeeper to block shots. Why not just expand the goals by several feet? The same basic argument goes for soccer as well.
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I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard serious fans of either sport complain about lack of scoring. This sort of complaint sounds like it’s coming from American fans of sports like gridiron football, who are accustomed to more frequent scoring in their favorite sport, giving reasons why soccer (or, to a lesser degree, hockey) is a sport they hate.
I’m not convinced of this argument.
Both sports have been well-tuned against their current rules, and current goal sizes, for many decades. Changing the size of the goals would (a) essentially make all scoring statistics incomparable against historical stats, and (b) feels like a solution in search of a problem.
One of my beefs about American sports fans (and I am an American) is the constant complaining about low scores. It seems to me that American sports fans have no appreciation for the strategic element of the game and no appreciation for defensive play. For years I was a fan of the National League in baseball because they did not implement the designated hitter rule. The money side of the game decided that fans like higher scores so now the National League has the DH. Virtually every aspect of the game I loved as child has been diluted in the name of increasing scoring. Defensive play is as important as scoring, and frankly I thought this year’s Super Bowl was phenomenal, specifically because it was a defensive game that forced the teams to think strategically. But all the fans griped and complained.
Fine - baseball is an American game. Gridiron football is an American game. Hockey and Football (aka soccer) are not. Leave them alone
While we’re at it let’s double the size of basketball hoops so people can easily score from the other end of the court.
Old but good article.
As for soccer, though, no, I think it’s a fair size enough. It is already a very large goal relative to the goalkeeper’s body.
How do you account for the 40 something shots on goal with 1 score? It’s like the goalie is the only important player and the rest are extranious.
There are a few different things going on here.
For the NHL, there is possibly an issue that goalies are bigger than they used to be. This does in fact make it easier for them to cover more of the net. However, NHL scoring is actually at the highest it’s been since the 90s, so I’m not sure there is really a problem here.
Soccer is fine the way it is. The only thing I would maybe consider is some modification to the offside rules to make a low block harder to play. Maybe you can’t be offside if you’re below the 6-yard box or something like that.
Connor Hellebuyck is the best goalie in the world. He was literally the NHL MVP last season. Extrapolating rules changes based on him would be like making it harder to score in the NBA because Michael Jordan scored so many points.
While we’re at it let’s raise the basket by a foot or two to eliminate the genetic freaks that spend most of there time elbowing each other under the basket in the hope of stuffing the ball.
What are typical shots on goal to score ratios? Anyone have an idea?
Soccer and hockey are actually rather different in how their goals work.
The expectation in soccer is that an attacking player one-on-one with the goalie will score almost always. Penalty kicks are 18 yards away and they are still 80% successful. The reason scoring is low in soccer isn’t the size of the goal - it’s the quality of the defenders.
For hockey the goalie is much more like even-money in a breakaway situation. The lack of scoring (which is still much higher than soccer) is because the goal is largely covered by the goalie so it takes great offensive skill (either passing move or shot quality) to score.
Are you seriously implying that the performance of one goalkeeper in one game is the norm? There is a very good reason that Connor Hellebuyck was praised so highly for his performance in the gold medal game - it simply almost never happens. Even his career save percentage is somewhere around 90%, not the 97% he managed for that game.
Yes, absolutely. It’s called save percentage. In the NHL during the 2020s it’s been around 90%. So 40 shots you would “typically” expect 4 goals.
Hellebuyck’s SP this season is also exactly at 90% this season. For career he’s more like 92%. In the Olympics he was 95% Some of that is probably the quality of the defense, but he also played phenomenally well.
As per Hockey Reference, for the season-to-date in the NHL, goalies save (i.e., don’t allow a score), on average, 89% of the shots they face. So, the overall ratio in the league, across all teams and games, is 9-to-1 shots-to-goals rate.
I’m not a huge hockey fan, but a roughly 90% save rate seems pretty typical, in my understanding.
Edit: I took a random look at other NHL seasons, going back to the '70s. Save rates haven’t varied that much over time: the lowest I saw was 87%, and the highest was 91%.
What the NHL has done, when they have felt that scoring has become too low, is make other changes. For example, in the late '90s and early 2000s, the “neutral zone trap” defensive strategy had become dominant, which led to low scoring and “boring” games; the league made changes that weakened the effectiveness of that strategy.
Edit #2: in this NHL season, teams are scoring an average of 3.1 goals/game, and taking an average of 28 shots/game.
There isn’t; players have learned to snipe very accurately nowadays, taking advantage of any opening the goalie allows and hitting that spot quite often. The butterfly isn’t as effective as it used to be because shooters know to elevate shots over the pads much better now. If you watch old games, players will just whale away on their shots without too much concern as to where they are going (the old fashioned slapshot has gone out of favor precisely because of how inaccurate it is).
Note the linked article above is 5 years old, and a lot has changed in that time–save percentages this season are below .900 for the first time in THIRTY years. [Coke to kenobi_65].
Quantity more like, which is fine I guess.
As long as you’re going to tinker with something that ain’t broke, why not put TWO goals at each end, but with only one goalkeeper? That SOB is going to work his ass off!
Ahem, 12 yards, or 11 meters.
ETA: as for the thread: as a former football goalie, i can say that the dimensions of the goal are fine and well. FIFA does fine-tuning on the rules each year (which mostly confuses everything and everyone), but even they aren’t corrupt enough to dare to make a change as drastic as enlarging the goal.
Pro hockey would benefit from limiting the massive pads that goalies wear.
Soccer goal size seems reasonable. The sport would benefit more from real penalties for flopping.
There has not been a trend downward in the English top flight…
Some people have been complaining about the number in the current season, though prior to that we had a season with above average.
IMO increasing the goal size would just make set pieces easier to score from and there have been much more complaints about the style of play, and reliance on set pieces vs open play.
Exactly. The New Jersey Devils liked to exploit that strategy and I remember attending a playoff game vs the Toronto Maple Leafs where the Devils scored first and then played the trap for the rest of the game, resulting in a very boring game with a final score of 1-0 Devils.
And other changes were made, too, like eliminating the stupid crease rule that was supposed to invalidate any goal when the player was in the crease in front of the net, and caused such incredible controversy when Brett Hull scored the winning goal in triple overtime in Game 6 of the 1999 Stanley Cup Final. It probably cost the Buffalo Sabres the Stanley Cup, and to this day I’m convinced it was an illegal goal and the NHL officials screwed up and then tried to cover it up.
Hockey is a fast-paced action-packed game and doesn’t need high scoring to be exciting. The fact that each goal is a pretty big deal is part of what makes the game fun to watch.
LOL! I agree that messing with the long-ago standardized net size would turn it into a different game requiring different play strategies. Breakaways and penalty shots would have a completely different calculus. It wouldn’t be hockey any more.