Rewarding Futility

For the longest time, the NHL was the only major sports league in which ties occured regularly (ties are possible in the NFL, but only happen once or twice in a season). I have never quite understood why hockey couldn't do what every other major sport does and play until someone wins. Why are ties acceptible in hockey? Isn't the whole point of sport to compete and to try to win?

Sure they played short overtime periods, but it wasn't uncommon for NHL teams to finish the season with 10-12 tie games. It just didn't make sense to me. If baseball games can go 18 innings, why can't NHL games go into double or triple overtime? My confusion has always been compounded by the fact that once the post-season rolls around, these games do go to double, triple, quadruple, even quintuple overtime if necessary to determine a winner.

I've heard numerous excuses, and in my mind the fact that they play until there's a winner in the playoffs negates every single one of them. The players will get too tired. Teams may have to travel. Television broadcasters won't like it. What fan wouldn't love to see a triple overtime game once in a while in the regular season? I know I would.

At some point (the 1998-99 season), the NHL attempted to curtail the tie by going to 4-on-4 overtime. It opened the game up and made overtime more exciting, and it seemed to reduce the number of ties. But it certainly didn't eliminate them.

A few years after 4-on-4 overtime started, I remember hearing a statistic that stuck with me: since the NHL began 4-on-4 overtime, approximately 50% of games that went to overtime were decided. When I heard this, the solution to the tie canundrum seemed very simple to me: make overtime ten minutes instead of five. I know the world doesn't always run according to the numbers, but if half the games are decided in five minutes, wouldn't a vast majority of overtime games be decided over the course of a ten minute 4-on-4 overtime period?

After the labour dispute that cacelled the 2004-05 season, the NHL decided to get gimmicky in their quest to eliminate the tie. They went to the shootout.

I didn't like it. I didn't like it for a long time, but now I have to admit that when a game goes to the last minute of overtime, I quietly hope for a shootout. More importantly, there's a sense of satisfaction that goes with having a winner and a loser at the end of the game rather than two teams both deserving of nothing more than a partcipant ribbon. Even if the NHL has to introduce a skills competition to get rid of that third column in the standings.

Of course, the NHL had to go and screw it up.

For whatever reason, the NHL saw fit to award futility. Somehow, unlike every other major sports league, the NHL feels that making it through "regulation" without losing is worthy of reward in the standings. Yes, they finally removed that tie column in the standings that make little sense to me to begin with, but replaced it with the overtime column that makes even less sense.

Why would you ever reward a team for losing? What does it matter if they lost in overtime, regulation, or a shootout .. a loss is a loss. I just don't get it.

-matt