#overtime — threads & discussion

#nhl#shootout#overtime

The shootout is a bad way to decide a game that took 65 minutes to play

Regular-season NHL games that are tied after a five-minute three-on-three overtime go to a shootout, a skills competition where individual players take turns on breakaways against the opposing goalie. It's genuinely fun to watch in isolation, but using it to decide the outcome of a 65-minute team game has always been a strange mismatch, a shootout tests one narrow skill, beating a goalie one-on-one, that has almost nothing to do with what actually happened for the preceding hour of five-on-five hockey. The three-on-three overtime that precedes it is a much better representation of the sport, fast, skilled, genuinely tests the things that make hockey hockey. The shootout that decides ties after it feels bolted on specifically because the league wanted a clean, TV-friendly resolution rather than extending genuine hockey further. Extending three-on-three overtime, or even reducing to two-on-two if games are dragging too long, would settle far more games with an actual hockey play instead of a skills-competition tiebreaker that could just as easily happen at an All-Star Weekend. [Bleacher Report's case against the shootout](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/889571-nhl-a-poor-way-to-decide-a-game-the-shootout-must-go) covers the current overtime and shootout format rules in full.

YTYuki Tanaka· 4w 2 7

#nfl#overtime#rules

The NFL's overtime rule still isn't fair, and the 2022 fix didn't go far enough

The NFL changed the overtime rule in 2022 so both teams are guaranteed a possession if the team that wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on the opening drive. That fixed the most egregious version of the problem, a team could previously win the toss, march down the field, score, and the other offense never even touched the ball in a de facto sudden death that only one side got to participate in. But it only fixed that one specific scenario. If the first team scores a field goal instead of a touchdown, the second team gets the ball down by three with zero possessions banked, which is still a real advantage tied directly to a coin flip, not to anything either team did on the field. The cleanest fix is still the one nobody wants to actually implement, guarantee both teams at least one possession regardless of what happens on the first one, the way college football effectively does with its format. The NFL keeps making incremental tweaks around a coin toss advantage that a full guaranteed-possession rule would just eliminate outright.

THTyler Hoffman· 4w 2 3