Wild idea: Let defenders defend NHL penalty shots, in the innovative spirit of Roger Neilson

Rob McKenzie writes with all he gamesmanship shooters employ against goalies, it's time to let defensive players try a few tricks in NHL shoot-outs.

Florida Panthers player Jussi Jokinen shoots the winning shot during a shootout against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Monday. Wilfredo Lee / AP / February 15, 2016

I wish the NHL would make a tiny rule change. It would enable a quirk to return to the game that has lain dormant for nearly 48 years.

The change would be to allow someone other than a goalkeeper to defend a penalty shot or shoot-out attempt.

This is not something teams are clamouring for, by any means. They are quite content to have goalies do what goalies have been doing for decades.

All the same, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a team could put a defenceman in net for one of these one-on-one duels.

The crucial distinction here is that penalty shots and shoot-out attempts are different from normal play in that, as per Rule 24 in the NHL rulebook: “The puck must be kept in motion towards the opponent’s goal line.”

Frankly, shooters seem to be abusing this rule. They follow long arcing paths, they stickhandle forwards and backwards, sometimes they come to a full halt.

I watched every shoot-out this month through Thursday (the shooters’ success rate: 29.2 per cent), and the players cheat about 10 per cent of the time.

Glaring examples: Buffalo’s Ryan O’Reilly was skating parallel to the net and away from it when he fired on February 4; Florida’s Jussi Jokinen blatantly did the same on Monday, as did his teammate Jonathan Huberdeau on Thursday; and Carolina’s Jeff Skinner skidded to a stop before shooting on February 7.

The refs never call it: custom trumps code.

I’m surprised goalies do not skate out to attack the shooter as soon as the shooter slows down. As the shooter cannot move away from the net, he is hamstrung if you bear down on him. But today’s goalies have positional play so instilled into them that they play the angles and stay deep in the net.

On occasion they attempt a poke check, but that’s about it. In the shoot-outs I watched this month, the only consistently aggressive keeper was Vancouver’s Ryan Miller, who came well out of the crease and stood his ground like a sheriff.

I would be inclined to think this idea of mine for using defenders as netminders is silly, except that it was employed (once) by one of the boldest minds in hockey history.

That would be Roger Neilson. He was coaching the Peterborough Petes in the junior leagues when, on September 26, 1968, a penalty shot was awarded to Frank Hamill of the Toronto Marlboros. Neilson – who knew the rulebook inside and out – pulled his goalie and put in defenceman Ron Stackhouse.

According to a Canadian Press report, “As soon as Hamill crossed the blueline, Stackhouse rushed out from the goal crease and blocked Hamill’s hurried slap shot.”

The lords of hockey were not amused. Scotty Morrison, the NHL’s referee-in-chief, said the move was legal in the big leagues – but would not be for long, “if only because somebody is making a farce of the game.”

Frankly, if shooters can make a farce of the rules by dipsy-doodling when they are supposed to be going forward, why not let goalies share the privilege by widening who can fill the role?

While hockey’s all-time innovator would have to be Art Ross – who during his years running the Boston Bruins from 1924 to 1954 was the first coach in the league to pull the goalie, who invented a smoother-handling puck with bevelled edges, who conceived and patented a new shape for goalie nets (B-shaped at the back rather than rectangular), and who put three men on defence to stop faster teams (a precursor to the neutral zone trap) – Roger Neilson is also high up on the list.

(Others in the top 10: Jacques Plante, Frank Zamboni, Doug Harvey, Fred Shero, Wayne Gretzky, Dominik Hasek and lastly, Anatoli Tarasov with an assist from Lloyd Percival.)

Besides the defenceman-as-goalie stunt mentioned above, Neilson thought outside the box in ways big and small.

– He was the first coach to go full-bore in using videotape as a teaching tool, to the point where he was nicknamed “Captain Video”.

This is the innovation for which Neilson is best known, but it is worth noting that it was also an idea Art Ross had (though to a lesser extent, obviously, given the technology of his day).

As recounted in the 2015 book “Art Ross: The Hockey Legend who Built the Bruins”, by Eric Zweig, Ross as early as 1929/30 would film his team as well as the opposition to pick up tips.

– Neilson was the first NHL coach to use a headset to keep in contact with his assistants, who were watching the game from the booths at the top of the arena.

– If his team had a face-off in the opposing end with only a few seconds left in a period, Neilson would pull the goalie and put an extra attacker on. His logic was that this gave him an extra potential scorer, while the chance that the other team would move the puck all the way down the ice for a score was extremely low.

This practice makes perfect sense, but even today, convention-bound coaches are reluctant to use it.

– When there is a delayed penalty against the opposition, a team will sometimes pull its goalie for the extra attacker until the opposition touches the puck and play stops.

There is, however, a small risk that the team with the extra man will score on its own net via an errant pass. So Neilson told his goalie that when he left the net he should leave his stick lying in the crease as a safeguard.

This was perfectly legal but was soon made into an offence (the punishment: the opposing team is awarded a goal).

– Neilson was not satisfied with the statistics available in his day so began to chart scoring chances as an indicator of players’ contributions.

With the rise of analytics in recent years, scoring chances is coming into wider use as a key statistic.

Again, there is a parallel here to Ross, who also tried to find a statistic to measure a player’s total contribution; his idea was to assign a player one to three points for their defensive work, to balance out the offence-heavy stats of the day. (Clearly Neilson and Ross were kindred spirits, if not doppelgangers).

– One time Neilson’s team had two men in the penalty box in a game’s final minute. In flagrant disregard of the rules, he sent an extra man out onto the ice every 10 seconds or so.

This naturally caused the ref to blow his whistle and call a penalty. But since you can’t have more than two people in the penalty box at any time, and since there wasn’t enough time left in the game for the penalty to be served on a delayed basis, he was giving his defenders a rest at no cost.

The practice was promptly banned, and any team that did it would have to face a penalty shot.

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