Sigh...... you can lead a horse to water, you can't make him drink it.,
Cut the dressed players to 16. All of a sudden 2 D get hurt, someone gets in a fight. So down to 8 - 4 -2. If the other team I try to punish your best players with their tongues sticking out, every chance I get. Hit to hurt. Doesn't matter if they are winning by three goals. They want Hughes and Hronek buried. Every chance they get.
It's not NBA. It's a physical sport. And like the union would allow it? And as a fan that pays to go to games it might be the most asinine idea I've read on here. The dude who suggested 24 man lineups is puzzled. 16 man lineups is just .......wow
Subtweeting isn’t cool.
This dynamic exists every night already. A couple of guys get tossed, a couple head to the trainer’s room… do you see opponents suddenly start throwing wild hits at the top remaining players? Of course not, it’s a foolish way to play the game on several levels. Just because a guy is double-shifting doesn’t mean he can’t expose a dummy who’s headhunting instead of playing defense.
Besides, we already know what the NHL looked like with smaller rosters, and yes the players were able to survive it just fine. The number of skaters was 16 up until 1972 and 17 until 1982 — and at that, the 17th/18th roster spots were typically reserved for specialists (including enforcers) up until about 2005, so the concept of 18 guys all playing a significant amount of straight-up hockey is really a feature of the current era. Nothing about the NHL 20-50 years ago suggests the players were in some sort of danger from being too tired.
In any case, you’re missing the point that reducing the number of rostered players has the effect of
slowing the game down. Right now the philosophy is to have everyone going top speed all the time, which is not
per se a benefit to the game. Speed is why you have so much force in the collisions, and why there's so little time and space to see those collisions coming. Slowing things down has the effect of creating space between players, which means collisions are more easily avoided, and less devastating when they do happen. It also means the east-west game becomes more of a factor, that offense can develop more organically and opportunistically. The current game heavily emphasizes north-south skating where the best play is often to just put the puck into empty space or on net and try to beat the defense to it. We’ve lost a lot of the slower-developing stickhandling and skating that were of a big part of what made hockey so beautiful prior to the advent of short-shifting, in favor of everything operating in straight lines.
This is easy to see in lower levels of hockey. We say it all the time about prospects who hold the puck and make highlight plays, “he’d get killed trying to do that in the NHL” because we are used to the idea that an NHL player can only have the puck for about a second before he gets buried. Again, this is not a
per se benefit to the game.
I’m not sure what “as a fan who pays to go to games” is supposed to signify. Do you think the rest of us don’t?
I can tell who has never played hockey in this thread lol.
Get rid of the 4th line. Have mcdavid playing 30 minutes a night!
Yeah, he'd be so fun to watch being worn out every single game you watch him play lol.
I’ve played plenty of hockey, thanks.
McDavid would be insanely fun to watch in a slower-moving, more aerobic-intensive environment. The reason for that is obvious — instead of everyone sprinting constantly and him trying to be the fastest of the bunch, he would be up against guys who are managing their shifts and trying to anticipate when they need to sprint with him. Sooner or later, he catches one of those guys flat footed and it’s a highlight play. That doesn’t necessarily even need to entail a large increase in his playing time — taking his share of the 4th line’s shifts, probably something like a raise from 22 minutes to 25. A forward shouldn’t be skating 30 minutes a night even when there are 3 lines.
