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.