IPB's Take On Outlawing Shotblocking, Wherein We Are Cranky Old People

Watching the Sabres/Thrashers game tonight, we couldn’t help but roll our eyes heavily at the lunatic ravings of the crotchety old men on MSG during the second intermission as they discussed the latest rule-change talk in the NHL. But you know what? We can rave like crotchety lunatics with the best of them, and since so many people clearly care what we think about the state of the game (thus the way the league has hastened to take shootouts away), we’d like to go on record saying that we love the idea of a rule banning skaters leaving their feet to block shots. We might be making this up, but we think we can remember a time when you wouldn’t see three or four guys topple over every time an opposing player made like he was going to fire a shot. Again, that might be apocryphal, but it just seems much more prevalent than it used to be. (And we used to walk to school in the driving snow, with shoes made of newspaper, uphill both ways. Shut up! We did!) Now, we’ve not got as much of a beef with shot blocking while players are standing upright (like little Rory Calhouns!), or with the half-butterfly “one foot on the ice and one knee on the ice” approach, both of which would be legal if a rule outlawing leaving both feet was put into place. When a guy doesn’t splay himself prone all over the ice to block shots with the entire length of his slightly armor-clad body, he’s leaving himself open to, we don’t know… keep skating after blocking the shot. And he’s also letting, we don’t know… his goaltender do the job of splaying out all over the ice to block shots with his own totally armor-clad body. Call us Devils fans, but we just feel like the flop-style shotblock isn’t as sound a hockey play as the staying-on-your-feet shotblock. So why not encourage defenders to play smarter, instead of just harder? And get off our lawn!

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