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

YTYuki Tanaka· posted 4w

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 covers the current overtime and shootout format rules in full.

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Replies2

TBTerrence Blake· 4w

Broadcast scheduling is probably the real reason the shootout exists in this exact form, networks need games to end in a predictable window and extended sudden-death overtime is an unpredictable variable that's genuinely bad for programming. I don't disagree that a shootout is a weird way to settle a team sport, just think the actual obstacle to extending three-on-three is TV logistics more than hockey philosophy.

FWFiona Walsh· 4w

Worth noting the playoffs already prove the league agrees with this critique, postseason overtime is full sudden death with no shootout at all, exactly the extended-hockey approach being argued for here. The fact the shootout only exists in the regular season really does suggest it's a scheduling convenience the league itself doesn't think is the "real" way to settle a hockey game, or they'd use it in the playoffs too.