Why the NHL should move to a 10-minute overtime

The NHL regular-season schedule offers few glimpses of best-on-best hockey across conferences, so when the Colorado Avalanche and Toronto Maple Leafs got together on Wednesday night, excitement was high.

But the game failed to deliver on two fronts. First, Colorado and Toronto – two normally up-tempo teams – skated through a two-goal slog for 65 minutes. The cherry on top was the game being decided by a shootout.

To say the shootout is unpopular among fans would be an understatement, but the league sees it as a necessary evil to curtail game lengths and keep players reasonably fresh. It’s a balancing act of sorts.

In the past, I have argued the league should consider going to a 10-minute overtime period. An extra five minutes wouldn’t be punitive, but it would minimize the frequency of shootouts by a considerable degree.

As a reminder, adding five minutes of overtime would mean the average NHL teams sees about two or three shootouts a season, about a 50 per cent reduction from current levels:

One of the things I was curious about watching last night’s shootout was whether the familiarity with the new 3-on-3 format – it wasn’t long ago, remember, that teams were considering a one-forward, two-defencemen setup – has led to higher scoring rates, and by extension, a natural decline in the number of shootouts around the league. Think of it as a natural evolution of sorts, akin to how fighting in the sport has transitioned from commonplace to rather rare.

So, two questions to explore. First, I wanted to look at was shootout frequency since the overtime format changed in 2015-16. Here’s what that looks like, by year:

The good news is the league, by introducing the 3-on-3 overtime format, cut the number of shootouts observed per team in half. The no-so-good news is it’s been quite stable there – despite higher rates of scoring league-wide – since the introduction of the change in 2015-16. Teams consistently see about six shootouts a year, give or take.

Here’s the other interesting wrinkle. We have talked about the surge in even-strength scoring many times over. Power-play rate scoring continues to rip to the upside, too. That’s not the case at 3-on-3. Some of it may be owed to how little time is spent there – only about 4,000 minutes on the year – but at any rate, there hasn’t been much change:

The NHL has been adamant that it wants a more offensive league, and to a degree, it has realized that goal. Scoring is up virtually everywhere. But it’s not at 3-on-3, and because it’s not, the NHL hasn’t seen shrinkage as it relates to the frequency of shootouts. Perhaps the league is comfortable with six (plus-or-minus) shootouts per team, per season. If that’s the case, this isn’t an issue.

But to the extent the league is trying to minimize the skills competition, I’d say it is approaching a stalemate. Perhaps this off-season we might start to hear more chatter about expanding the length of the overtime format for the regular season.

Five minutes would make a world of a difference. Is it amenable to the NHL and the Players’ Association? That’s a different question altogether.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference