D’oh. Must have had the 18-yard box in my mind.
The NHL does have specific limits on the size of the various pads which goalies wear. My gut tells me that, if they felt that oversized pads are to blame for lack of scoring, they’d change those limits.
NHL scoring is a bit higher now than it was a few years ago. Like most sports, the scoring levels go up and down as rules, players, tactics, and conditions change.
Pre-1967 expansion the NHL was quite low scoring. Goals per team per game were around 3 and sometimes lower. In the 1970s the average started climbing, hitting 4.01 in 1981-1982, not coincidentally the year Gretzky scored 92 goals and had 212 points. (In the first game of the playoffs that year, Gretzky had a goal and three assists, the the Oilers still lost… 10-8.)
Scoring remained high until the mid-90s when the neutral zone trap strategy came into fashion and goalies began adopting the modern butterfly/profly technique. Allowing two-line passes briefly helped but not much, but scoring now is better than it has been in recent history, half a goal per game higher than in the nadir of 2003-2004.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that too little scoring hurts, but the current levels are historically right down the middle. You’d be hard pressed to show me that the offensive explosion of the 1980s made much of a difference in attendance. In 1974-1975 attendance per game peaked at 13,250 per game; in the offence-crazy Gretzky peak years it got up to about 14,900, but that’s in 1991-1992, after 16 years of population growth and the economic boom of the 1980s and it didn’t get that high in the highest offense years.
completely agree with this. I would favor doing away with the offsides rule completely in soccer. Purists will deride the idea, but it’s such a difficult call for officials to get correct (video review has made this less of an issue at the highest levels but it remains at all lower levels) and does nothing for the game. Abolishing the rule would open up the whole field, and give more space for the most skilled players to exhibit their skills.
I suspect doing away with the offside rule would significantly change soccer. You’d basically have to keep your defense deep. There’d be a ton of room and I feel like bombing long balls into forwards that are anchored deep up the field would be a good strategy and also not attractive. Maybe I’m wrong, but feels like too massive a change.
The best suggestion I’ve heard is to just make a goal in American soccer count seven points. Instead of having all those boring games that end up 2-1, we’ll have exciting 14-7 defensive battles!
Then we could make penalty kicks worth three points…
Maybe they should go Quidditch-style. Make the goal smaller, but add two more for the goalie to defend.
There’d still be people moaning about 0-0. Let’s just make it 1 point per goal, but start the game at 20-20. There, low scoring games solved and every game’s a nailbiter!
Yeah. I would think getting rid of offside would upend the game. I played soccer in junior high for a couple years, so I’m no expert, but it was pretty clear from playing why the concept of offside exists. That said, I’d be curious to see what a professional game played without offside rules would play out like. Maybe it’s not as destructive to the game as I’m thinking it would be.
I think yhe soccer goal size is fine. If I could change anything about soccer it would be the number of players on the field. With 11 per team nobody seems to get control for very long, no plays have a chance to develop, I can’t watch 10 guys snd see anything resembling a strategy. 6 players and a keeper if I had my way.
Regular hockey goal (a.k.a. “ice touchdowns”) are worth 7 points and penalty goals (a.k.a. “ice field goals”) are worth 3 points. Now a 3-1 snoozefest becomes a 21-7 blowout!
I gotta tell you, if I was in charge of THE MOST POPULAR SPORT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, I would probably not change the rules much.
And if I watched that sport and said, of this multizillion dollar sport, “I don’t see the strategy,” my conclusion would be that - given the money and reputation at stake by the people in charge of implementing and executing strategy - I hadn’t watched the sport enough and I must not yet understand it.
I would challenge this as an absolute. If what accounted for the higher scores was essentially noise (randomness), it would dilute the scores meaning rather than affirm better play. And goal size seems to have randomness as a factor, not entirely as there are others, but a factor. Small goals take skill, larger goals can have more lucky shots go in by less skilled players/less accurate shots. And that last part really defines hockey - shot accuracy which comes from skill. Larger goals can bring back less accurate shots and bring back the slapstick. But does not seem to indicate better team play in a game.
“Slap shot.”
Slap shots are declining in hockey not because there is more skill in not using them - in fact, slap shots are quite hard to learn to do correctly, and it should say something that the slap shot was the favoureite weapon of the most skilled player who ever lived, Wayne Gretzky.
They’re disappearing because the game is moving faster than ever, and a slap shot takes more time to set up and execute than a wrist shot. If the defensive player is on you a bit faster your ability to use the slap shot in some situations is lost.