Hockey goalies are too big now
This is written by Ken Dryden, a well-known retired goalie. Very cool. Essentially he is just arguing that because of the size of goalie pads, the most successful strategy has become cause chaos around the net and then try and push the puck in while the goalie is distracted. He’s right, I think, in that it does slow down the inherently high-speed nature of the sport.So for shooters and coaches, that is the strategy. Rush the net with multiple offensive players, multiple defensive players will go with them, multiple arms, legs, and bodies will jostle in front of the goalie, and the remaining shooters, distant from the net, will fire away hoping to thread the needle, hoping the goalie doesn’t see the needle being threaded, because if he does, he’ll stop it. The situation for the shooter is much like that of a golfer whose ball has landed deep in the woods. He’s been told many times that a tree is more air than leaves and branches, but with several layers of trees in front of him, somehow his ball will hit a leaf or branch before it gets to the green. Somehow, the shooter’s shot will not make it to the net. So he will try again. Because what else can he do?I played hockey for about a decade growing up, alternating between goalie and defense. One “unofficial” solution I had to this problem was to make it extremely unpleasant for other players to be around the net.In hockey, you have a lot of leeway in terms of physicality and you can push, shove, lock the stick of your opponent, and do a number of other things that are completely penalized in basketball or soccer. The result was that opposing players became hesitant to get too close to the net, thus solving the problem somewhat.If a player was on a breakaway, I’d also try to do stuff like this (as the goalie), which of course makes opponents stay far away from you.https://youtu.be/W5u0khFnHUgA possible solution could be to expand the goalie-only area around the net. That would, in theory, force opponents to focus more on shooting and not on piling around the goalie.