“Let’s make the game more exciting,” they said.
“We need more scoring,” they said.
“Let’s make the nets bigger,” they said.
On Saturday night both the St. John’s IceCaps and the Montreal Canadiens previewed the concept of bigger nets, not physically of course, but rather with the anomalous performance of the entire goaltender depth in the organization.
The nets may as well have been large gaping chasms, large enough to hear the cavernous echo of Gary Bettman rubbing his hands together and saying “Good. Good”, like some movie villain whose plan was coming to fruition.
And boy were the games exciting, although they almost drove me to madness. Look at the stats:
| SH | SV | GA | SV% | Mins | GAA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zachary Fucale | 31 | 23 | 8 | 0.742 | 54:53 | 8.73 |
| Eddie Pasquale | 8 | 7 | 1 | 0.875 | 6:22 | 9.23 |
| Dustin Tokarski | 13 | 11 | 2 | 0.846 | 20:00 | 6.00 |
| Mike Condon | 11 | 7 | 4 | 0.636 | 40:00 | 6.00 |
Woof! Safe to say that Stéphane Waite and Vincent Riendeau probably laid low and avoided any calls coming from Marc Bergevin, and secretly wished for Carey Price to come back as soon as possible.
Would bigger nets make the game more exciting? For one, you can expect high scoring games like this more often, including the occasional one-sided blowout or the low scoring football game. Does it make the game better?
Are fans simply conditioned to react to goals and nothing more? With fighting, the other cheering trigger, being eliminated from the game is the league so concerned with ‘action’ that they don’t see the value of a well executed power play, or a great defensive play to break up a 2-on-1?
In essence the question at the centre of this debate can be asked as such: “Does more goals mean a better product?”
