I’m not the type of person to pull up topics out of nowhere and present them for publication but this is something that has been bugging me for the last few months. It is the topic of special teams play in hockey. We all know how important they are; to be successful on the powerplay and penalty kill can have such a dramatic effect on whBruins Hurricanes Hockeyere a team sits in the standings and even how far they can advance in the playoffs.

I for one am the type of person to despises games decided by goals not at even strength, especially when the referees doing the game decide to go on a power trip and call fifteen penalties in one period. So I have a proposition for the NHL, and I will get to it in a moment.

We’ve all seen the situation: a team takes a penalty and then three seconds later the opposing team takes one, cancelling out the powerplay. So the effect of this play is both teams go 0-1, and over the course of an entire season, this will happen countless times and not allowing for an accurate representation of overall special teams percentages.

So here is the new idea. Instead of the percentage being goals per chances, how about goals per minute instead? I think it makes much more sense seeing that teams will get credit for scoring a quick power play goal but not negatively affected when they don’t score on a minuscule powerplay.

The Hockey Writers Archives

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