I Hate Blocked Shots
A funny thing happened in a game just before this NHL season's all-star break: The very crummy Arizona Coyotes held the mediocre Vancouver Canucks to zero shots for the first half of the game. This was reported widely enough (for something that involved a boring and largely meaningless game in January, anyway) but what some might have missed was that there were 10 blocked shots in that first period. Two of those 10 were Daniel Sedin blocking shots by Luke Schenn. Daniel Sedin, a guy who put up 100 points in a season, is taking rubber in a January game. Sedin finished that Jan. 26 game with one shot on goal to go with his three blocked shots. Did I mention Vancouver lost?
Within a week, it got weirder: Players were blocking shots in the final game of the NHL all-star tournament. The best in the league won't hit or hustle in all-star games - some of them skip the thing altogether out of fear of being injured in a meaningless game - but they're now OK with blocking pucks.
Make no mistake, jumping in front of a slapshot is dangerous. Ask Colorado Avalanche defenceman Erik Johnson, who is still out after breaking his leg while standing in the flight path of a Tyler Seguin shot. Or ask the Montreal Canadiens' Brendan Gallagher, who just returned from an injury suffered when a blast from Shea Weber broke his hand. Now, Weber's a teammate, so Gallagher wasn't trying to obstruct his shot - but this injury came a little more than a year after Gallagher injured that same hand while blocking a shot from Johnny Boychuk. That one was unmistakable, with Gallagher tucking his arms in and entering a slight crouch in anticipation of Boychuk's shot.
Go beyond anecdotes and the data shows blocked shots are unquestionably a bigger part of the game today. The stat is a somewhat recent one, but if we break down the all-time single-season team records, the top five are from 2013-14 or 2014-15. Let's look at these numbers, ripped from the webpages of nhl.com:
(Feel free to click on that table above for a closer, and more interactive, look at the numbers.) Only three teams in the top 200 single seasons - the 1998-99 New York Rangers, the 1999-2000 Rangers and the 1999-2000 Atlanta Thrashers - date from before the year 2000. The playoff numbers are even more striking: The San Jose Sharks and Pittsburgh Penguins teams that fought for the Stanley Cup last season are No. 1 and No. 2 on the all-time post-season blocked shot list, and last year's St. Louis Blues team managed to ring in at 29th all-time despite playing in four fewer games than the Sharks and Penguins.
NHL players are paid well to win, and if blocking shots is part of winning, what's the problem? I can break my objections down into three broad points:
Blocking shots does not require skill. I might only be speaking to my personal preferences here, but there are things I want to see when I go to a hockey game - goals, smart passes, big hits - and blocked shots aren't one of them. If the idea in today's NHL is that games should showcase the skills of the league's best players, shot-blocking doesn't fit with that philosophy. As an illustration, I've compiled a list to show the current NHLers who make their bread and butter by blocking shots. I've sorted all active players with at least 100 career games in the NHL by blocked shots per game. Take a look:
Who are these people? Sure, there are some very talented players on this list, guys like Roman Josi and Francois Beauchemin and the aforementioned Boychuk. But a lot of these guys only score a goal every 20 games or so, and several of them don't even manage a shot per game.
Sure, you might say, but these players are all defencemen. (No forward in NHL history with more than 50 games played has averaged more than a blocked shot per game. The two atop that list, Nick Bonino and Lance Bouma, aren't just active players, they're also under 30, so presumably there's a lot more rubber for them to block in the years to come. But I digress.) Compare this list to the career leaders in shot attempt percentage among active NHL defencemen. Of these top 22 shot-blockers (a strange number I'll admit, but it's what happened to fit on one screenshot) only three are on the top 50 of all active blue-liners in career shot attempt percentage: Radko Gudas, Niklas Hjalmarsson and ol' Boychuk. Jaccob Slavin, Jacob Trouba, Chris Tanev and Calvin de Haan rank in the top 100. These players might not be exciting on offence, but we see how solid defensive defencemen are being asked to block shots.
Look at the other side of the active career shot attempt percentage list and Josh Gorges is eighth from the bottom. Kris Russell, Andrew MacDonald, Kevin Klein, Carl Gunnarsson and Michael Stone are all in the NHL's bottom 50. Dead last in active career shot attempt percentage is Rasmus Ristolainen, who just missed out on the graphic above at 29th in active career shot blocks per game.
So we understand some defencemen are skilled offensively and also block shots. We also understand some defencemen help to eliminate offence while also blocking shots. However, there are a number of players who stand out on neither side - and guys like MacDonald and Russell aren't just non-contributors on offence and ineffective on defence, they can't even muster a hit a game. One presumes these players would have nothing to contribute on the ice if they were not allowed to block shots - or that they would be freed to focus on their otherwise ignored hockey skills, rather than serving as human goal posts.
Blocking shots is the opposite of what the NHL needs. And what the NHL needs now is goals, sweet goals. Post-lockout, the league did away with the red-line and has mused about enlarging nets and shrinking goaltenders' equipment, among other things, to improve offence. It seems pretty obvious that players freezing in place and dropping to the ice to prevent goals are working against this aim.
Further than that, shot-blocking contributes to boring goals. So many goals in today's NHL come from deflections or screens. We've all seen it: A bunch of big bodies stand in front of a goaltender, hoping to either obstruct his view of the puck or to interfere with a shot enough for it to become impossible for a goaltender to follow. Some deflection goals are pretty, sure - sometimes a player gets the tip of a stick blade on the puck in mid-air, and the puck seems to turn at a right angle on its way to the net. Other times it comes off a stick shaft, a leg, a player's rear end - little skill, and little excitement. I'm not going to pretend the NHL will (or should) make it so that players can't stand in front of goaltenders, but all things considered, it's something hockey needs less of, not more.
Beyond that, flopping onto the ice to block a shot is just a ridiculous event. There is no other situation in the sport where a skater should intentionally drop to the ice - hockey should be about getting the puck to and from the net, and a player who is lying on the ice is not participating in the game. A goalie stretching to make a save is exciting, but a defenceman falling to the ice and sprawling out in the hopes of a puck hitting him is not.
Blocking shots is unsafe. No data here, just common sense. In the NHL, slapshots can exceed 100 miles an hour, and the risk of injury isn't just apparent, it's already been established. But while we've gone over Gallagher and Johnson, the bigger concern is outside pro hockey.
Spend any time around kids who are serious about their sport and you see them mimicking what the pros do. But while every kid can't dunk like Michael Jordan, everyone in the world can fall to the ice and get in the way of the puck. And why wouldn't they? If an NHL player is hurt blocking a shot, the announcers talk about how that's just part of the game, and that message goes straight back to young players watching at home. And it's not like they aren't coached on blocking shots - a quick Google search yields a few ready-made shot-blocking drills posted online, and even a how-to video for the kids courtesy of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
I don't mean to minimize the work people do to teach kids the right way to block a puck - a lot of them are going to do it anyway, and you would never want to see a young player expose his or her back to a shot. But at a time when concussions are a top concern, it seems to be a half-measure to weed fighting and headshots out of the lower ranks of the game while encouraging the blocking of pucks. It's one thing if a professional gets hurt blocking a shot in an important game, but what about a child? Who benefits from that?
We've established that I think shot-blocking is bad for the game, but what can be done about it? People have been unintentionally getting in the way of pucks for as long as hockey has been played, so I don't pretend that the mere blocking of a shot could be penalized. One idea could be to institute a basketball-style key in front of the net to reduce the opportunities for players to block a shot (and cut down on deflections and screens) but I'm personally not enamoured with that. If I were to wave a magic wand and bring new rules into the NHL, I'd have referees call an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty any time a player fully drops to the ice (because I think it sounds like an unsportsmanlike thing to do, and it looks a lot like diving, which is what the penalty is already used for). Beyond that, I'd ask any adults overseeing youth hockey to ask themselves why they want kids blocking shots. It's not something people want to watch, it's not safe and we do enough to suck the fun out of kids' hockey without asking children to stand in the way of a puck.
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