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If the NHL hypothetically implemented a rule that allowed stars to be loaned to other teams, could Sidney Crosby make a Stanley Cup run with Nathan MacKinnon and the Avalanche? Michael Martin / NHLI via Getty Images
It’s time for another session of Rules Court, the feature where you make the case for any kind of change that you think would improve the NHL, and a jury of three of us votes on it. Convince at least two of us, and … well, nothing happens, but you get to feel like you’re not quite so alone in the world. That’s important, right? Sure it is.
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This time around, we’ve got the usual jury of Shayna Goldman, Sean McIndoe and Sean Gentille. We have seven of your proposals to consider, plus a bonus suggestion that will show up in today’s newsletter. (Subscribe now!) Last time, you were only able to get two of your proposals through. Will you do any better this time? Let’s find out, because court is now in session.
Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.
Your Honors, I humbly submit this idea for delayed penalties.
If a delayed penalty is called in the defensive zone (which many are), just touching the puck by the about-to-be-penalized team is not enough to get a whistle and begin the actual penalty. They have to get possession of the puck and clear the zone to get a whistle and begin serving the penalty.
It would add a little more excitement during a delayed penalty that usually becomes a six-on-five with an empty net on the other end. — Rich P.
McIndoe: First of all, everyone pay attention to how Rich started his submission. Solid work pumping the judges’ tires, that can never hurt your chances.
As for the idea … yeah, I’m on board. More offense, more risk for teams that take penalties, and more exciting defensive plays than just briefly poking a loose puck. If we were starting the rulebook from scratch, wouldn’t this be the way to do delayed penalties? Then let’s make it the new rule. YES.
Gentille: Nothing makes me more unreasonably excited than the few seconds between an official raising their arm and blowing their whistle. So yeah, I’m on Rich’s side. On some level, I always have been. This isn’t an unreasonable expectation, it wouldn’t fundamentally change any aspect of the game and — though the payoff would be extremely rare — it’d add some brief, mild thrills to the proceedings. Hard YES.
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Goldman: This is a really reasonable way to add to penalty punishments without any drastic changes to power plays. It’s not like there aren’t instances where the delayed penalty six-on-five drags out for an extra 30 seconds or whatever. The key here is that, unlike actual PKs, teams can ice the puck for a whistle, so there is a way to get a whistle without relying on the goalie to make a stop. I’m in. YES.
Goalies have gotten much better at defending “breakaways” because they face so many in shootouts. Getting a penalty shot for being taken down from behind doesn’t give the skater the advantage it used to give.
Solution: The penalty shot should remain, but the power play should still happen. If the shooter doesn’t score, his team still has a power play. If he scores, they still get the power play, meaning (similar to a five-minute major) the benefit isn’t necessarily limited to just one goal.
The risk of giving up two goals (penalty shot and PP goal) for one infraction means defenders would choose to leave it up to the goalie to make the save in real time. — Chuck W.
McIndoe: I included this one mainly because it comes up a lot. Like, a stunning number of your submissions have to do with this incredibly specific scenario, and I’m not sure why. Was there a Reddit thread somewhere? Was there a game that swung on this in last year’s playoffs that I somehow missed? Does Chuck just have a bunch of burner accounts he uses to resubmit this under a different name every few weeks? I need to know why so many of you are so interested in this.
As for the idea itself, I’m pretty neutral. I’d prefer to only award the power play if the penalty shot is a miss, because the two-goal potential just gives referees even more incentive not to make the call. So I’m a NO.
Gentille: I’d rather give a team the option to take one or the other. That’s not what Chuck asked, though, is it? NO.
Goldman: Oh no, I feel like a boomer yelling at clouds already for turning down ideas. Here’s the thing: It feels like a penalty shot-worthy offense just got double the amount of punishment (and is now worth two goals) compared to any other minor infraction. I just don’t think that’s necessarily fair enough. If a penalty shot is awarded, it usually means that a team lost its scoring opportunity. Why should a team now get multiple chances of making up for that single chance? If anything, I think it’s on the skaters to get more creative to go up against goalies who are more prepared for these. NO.
Say a player from Team A does a dirty hit, injures a player on Team B, and gets suspended for three games. Team B has lost its injured player, and the suspension does nothing to help them. Instead, it actually helps out the next three teams that Team A will play.
Instead, I would propose that the suspension is not for the next three games, but instead, the next three games against Team B. That would actually help the team that suffered the injury, instead of all of their rivals.
(You would need to obviously not have this in the playoffs, or all Game 7s would turn into absolute gladiator matches, but it could work for the regular season.) — Toby D.
McIndoe: Makes sense to me. Sure, it could take a while to serve out the whole suspension in the case of teams that rarely face each other, but that’s not really the point. For those division games that turn nasty, this approach makes more sense to me than the way we do it now. YES.
Gentille: In the instance that a player does something egregious against a team from the opposite conference, you could be looking at a soup-to-nuts process that takes the better part of a decade. A marginal player would be out of the league by the time he actually served it. Plus, I think some guys would be more apt to do something ridiculous if they knew they’d get to spread the penalty out over any amount of time. I get the sentiment here, but NO.
Goldman: Sean 2 basically took the words out of my mouth. Plus, who knows how spaced out those matchups would be post-suspension. What if it’s a Devils-Kings game that leads to a three-game suspension? That would mean that the player’s punishment is spaced out over two seasons. NO.
Allow players with term on their contract to be loaned to another team for the year, like they do in soccer. Teams out of the playoffs would be able to get rising stars playoff experience or aging vets would get one last chance at the Cup, while ensuring they return the following year. Who wouldn’t want to see Sidney Crosby chase a cup with the Avs? What is the price teams would have paid to rent Igor Shesterkin for a playoff run?
Trade details would of course vary, but this would further spice up the deadline, increase star power in the playoffs and give fans of teams out of the playoffs players to root for come playoff time. — Alex F.
McIndoe: I love trades, I love the deadline and I especially love to see GMs have to get off their behinds and work to improve their teams. But this is a bridge too far, even for me. It sounds cool, right up until all the stars from bad teams with NTCs refuse to go anywhere but Florida and the Panthers win a Cup with a second line of Tage Thompson, Kirill Kaprizov and Filip Forsberg. NO.
Gentille: “Who wouldn’t want to see Crosby chase a cup with the Avs?”I can personally think of a few people. Other than that, I think something like this would cut the number of actual trades (no thanks) and lead to more tanking, which runs counter to some big decisions the league has made over the last few years. It’s a fun idea — just too many potentially unintended consequences. NO.
Goldman: I think there has to be some sort of middle ground. I’m all for the idea of designated players or franchise tags for 1-2 players per team. Maybe those are the players who can be “rented” out. But I think this idea, on the surface, could get a little complicated. Say Brad Marchand was loaned to Florida last spring, and he realized he didn’t want to go back to Boston? How does that situation get handled? So for now, NO.
Simple one: All embellishment penalties should be a four-minute penalty. — Jon W.
McIndoe: I get the appeal here, and it’s two-fold. First, all good and decent people hate diving, and recognize that it’s one of those things that drives casual fans away in droves. (If you don’t believe me, ask any random sports fan what they don’t like about soccer.) And second, we all hate the cheap cop-out of refs calling both the foul and the embellishment and having them cancel each other out.
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The problem is that the second scenario happens because referees are terrified of ever calling a dive on a play that turns out to be legit, which means we’d run into unintended consequences here. Instead of forcing diving calls to be power plays, we’d just see them disappear altogether. Instead, I think we have to lean into the only solution that works: Name and shame the divers, repeatedly, until they cry and beg forgiveness. But as far as this proposal, I’m voting NO.
Gentille: I just don’t think selling a call is as big a deal as high-sticking someone in the face. Call me old-fashioned. Fine them, make fun of them, shame them, whatever, but as stated, I’m a NO.
Goldman: Personally would rather just see more embellishment penalties called to try and deter players from selling. There are definitely more serious things to penalize with a four-minute penalty; this just doesn’t feel like one of them. NO.
The advertised start time for a game must be for puck drop, and not the beginning of the broadcast. No more 8:30 p.m. starts with the puck not dropping until 8:55 p.m., or accidentally missing the first chunk of the game because you expected an 8:55 p.m. drop and the actual drop was 8:45 p.m. — JT B.
McIndoe: The NFL does it. MLB does it. The NHL would too, if it didn’t hate its own fans so much. Give us the real start times, and if the puck hasn’t dropped by that exact time, the home team gets two minutes for a literal delay-of-game. A very easy YES.
Gentille: I think this is one of those NHL things that, on some level, seems minor, but actually belies a certain level of contempt for your audience. Gotta funnel as much betting content into folks as possible, I suppose. In any case, I can get down with the standard “puck drop at 7:08 p.m.” during the regular season, but in the playoffs, it gets truly out of control. YES.
Goldman: I am all for this, because while it’s safe to assume 7:08 p.m. on most nights, special occasions or national broadcasts tend to bend the rules a little more. Why not have a little clarity? On Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays, just say it’s going to be a 7:15 start. Or on a TNT double header on Wednesday nights, give fans the heads up that the 10:00 p.m. start is actually a 10:20 puck drop. In the playoffs, the start times are completely off the rails. So just being up-front about when something actually starts is a courtesy thing, honestly. It’s one thing that MLB has right, and it doesn’t necessarily stop fans from tuning in at the top of the hour for the broadcast. YES.
My suggestion is simple: codify the “Rule of Cool”. A.k.a., if someone scores a goal that’s extremely impressive and/or fun, it should still count even if it technically wasn’t legal. You could give the job of overseeing this to someone in the situation room. They could buzz down to the referees and tell them that, despite the obvious stick over the crossbar that the ref called on the ice, the play is now in fact a goal. Amazing dangle negated by a millimeter offside call? Referee announces that after review, it was indeed offside; however, the goal was cool enough and it’s going to count anyway.
Is this incredibly subjective and ripe for controversy? Probably. But it would only be used for a “you know it when you see it” situation, something so undeniably awesome that we have no choice but to allow it. — Adam P.
McIndoe: The obvious question here is how you decide which plays get the “cool” exemption. And the obvious answer is that you have a separate war room somewhere that has a bunch of TVs, a mini-fridge full of beer and a dozen or so drunk hockey fans from around the league. “Upon further review, Gord from Minnesota says that goal was, and I quote, ‘sick as hell.’ Good goal.” YES.
Goldman: Let me be clear, I love absolutely everything about this idea because sometimes goals are simply too cool to call off, rules be damned.
Thinking about this Trevor Zegras play from 2022 that was ruined by an offside review. It sucks!
It may have been ruled offside, but this was simply sensational from Trevor Zegras. 🪄 pic.twitter.com/YIS7SWTjIu
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) November 10, 2022
However, as much as I hate to see a cool goal taken off the board … it has to happen, sorry. Implement this for the All-Star game to have fun, but it can’t happen in regular-season or playoff action. NO.
Gentille: SG 2 really is going into full Boomer mode here, eh? Yeah, I can’t get on board with this one either — and I say that as someone who, I’m pretty sure, puts more stock than most in the cool factor. It’s a fun thing to bring up on X or whatever, but introducing that level of subjectivity into games isn’t going to work. I’m not sure officials handle objectivity all that well, either. NO.
After a docket of seven cases, we have two new rules for the NHL rulebook:
• On delayed penalties in the offensive zone, the penalized team must now clear the puck out of their zone, not just touch it, to get a stoppage.
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• Games must have an advertised start time, and start at exactly that time.
I also considered implementing the “Rule of Cool” despite it not having enough votes because I thought it was cool, but decided that was a bit too meta. So for the second straight session, we only get two new rules. Either we’re getting stingy — and by stingy I mean Shayna and Other Sean, because I’m a cool judge — or you guys need to pick up your game.
Want to submit your own idea for a future session of Rules Court? Email it to us here.
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