The Calgary Flames won half of their regular-season games and fell only three points shy of a playoff spot in 2011. Without the 12 points they earned for regulation ties, they would have had less of a fair shot and the race would have been far less exciting.Victor Decolongon/Getty Images
The approach of another NHL season means it won’t be long before at least a handful of hockey pundits unleash their annual complaint against the idea of awarding single points for overtime or shootout losses.
To preempt that, here is this author’s umpteenth argument in favor of this perfectly logical, practical and underappreciated concept.
Back in the pre-lockout, pre-shootout era, most printings of the NHL standings included the following columns: W for wins, L for losses, RT for regulation ties and T for ties.
Did you catch that? A team’s tally of regulation ties, a telling synonym for overtime losses, was appropriately sandwiched between losses and ties.
Today, the operative acronyms are OTL (overtime loss) and SOL (shootout loss). But it’s the exact same system, as it should be.
Regulation losses are finalized by the sound of a horn or a siren as a clock hits straight zeroes. Conversely, overtime losses and shootout losses are finalized spontaneously with either a puck hitting the back of the net, a goalie foiling a penalty shot or that shot traveling wide of the cage.
That ought to tell you something. Regulation and overtime decisions are different in the way they come about and should be different in the way they affect a team’s record.
An RT, OTL or SOL is not quite a tie in that by the game is no longer tied when the contesting teams hit the showers.
On the other hand, the team with fewer goals has experienced something different from a regular loss in that they could not be finished off within the standard 60-minute time frame. The victors had to work a little longer and harder to vanquish the losers.
For that reason, what many derisively call the “loser point” actually has merit that is as clear as a lane of ice freshly Zambonied for a shootout.
The way some purists rail against overtime points, one would think that the losing team skates away with as many points as the winner at night’s end.
Newsflash: They do not.
In a similar vein, quit playing this card: “Giving single points for an overtime loss encourages teams to play for overtime instead of trying to win it in regulation.”
Maybe it does sometimes, but teams that apply that strategy do so at their own peril. If anything, the prospect of morphing a two-point purse into a three-point package at the end of a 60-minute tie should deter teams from playing for overtime if they can score late in regulation.
Simply put, under the current system, it is especially unwise in divisional and conference games to give away points. Even with an eventual victory, Team A still gives a point to a fellow racehorse in Team B.
In turn, it could turn out to be Pyrrhic victory for Team A, for that single point could ultimately spell the difference in postseason seeding. Those teams could meet again in the playoffs and Team B could have home ice for Game 7 because Team A failed to knock them off before that third-period buzzer several months ago.
And you know what? That would serve Team A right for its complacency and/or reward Team B for its perseverance in a hard-fought, regular season overtime battle.
But under the purists’ proposed policy, Team B would come up empty despite capitalizing on Team A’s laid-back approach. In turn, playing for overtime when such is not necessary wouldn’t hurt Team A in the long run, nor would Team B’s consistency reward them.
You might retort, “Teams don’t get partial credit for overtime losses in the playoffs, so they shouldn’t in the regular season, either.”
The postseason and regular season are already inherently different species, so treating their overtime stakes differently is not problematic. In fact, it makes all the more sense.
In the postseason, any given team is focusing on strictly one opponent for a span of one or two weeks. Any loss, regulation or overtime, pushes them closer to the end of their season and automatically elevates the urgency for the next game against the same adversary as last time.
The regular season, however, begins and ends with 30 active teams and nobody engages the same opponent four or seven consecutive times.
In the regular season, win or lose, the next task is to turn the page to another opponent. And once again, the goal is to accumulate as many points as possible in hopes of having enough to finish among the top eight in one’s conference after 82 outings.
To gain two points is the best-case scenario. To come up empty is the worse-case. And in the event of a regulation tie/overtime loss/shootout loss, responsible teams are left to assess simple math and say, “One point is more than zero, but it’s less than two. If we had only completed our comeback…”
In the other locker room, any responsible team will say, “We took two out of three. But if we had just hit the net one more time, we could have taken two out of two. If we had only finished them off earlier…”
And both teams can learn from the experience in preparation for the playoffs, when the overtime policies are naturally more stringent and the stakes naturally higher.
If need be, perhaps a switch to the oft-discussed 3-2-1-0 points system wouldn’t be such a bad compromise in this debate. Make it a three-point package every night so that the losing team always takes less than 50 percent of the pie (instead of one out of two) and motivate the winner to take care of business within the standard 60-minute time frame.
In a race for a playoff spot, tighter games should amount to tighter positioning in the standings.
