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Shootout comes under scrutinyThe Canadian PressThere is a move afoot to rid international hockey of the shootout.The instigators of the change are top hockey officials from Canada and Sweden, which met last month in the most dramatic shootout in hockey history, at the Winter Olympics.Sweden won the shootout — and the gold medal — but hockey leaders from the two countries are planning to ask the International Ice Hockey Federation to drop the shootout as a way of settling gold medal games and world championships.“I do not think it (a shootout) is the ideal way to have it resolved,” says Murray Costello, president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association.“There has to be a better way, says Rickard Fagerlund, president of the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation.Costello and Fagerlund were sitting a couple of rows apart during the gold medal game in Lille-hammer, Norway, less than two weeks ago. They watched 60 minutes of dead-even hockey and 10 minutes of scoreless overtime — and then the fourth Olympic shootout since the format wasadopted in 1988, the first ever for the championship.In the end, the gold medal came down to two shots — Sweden scored while Canada missed, giving Sweden its first Olympic championship.Players from both teams said they would rather have played sudden-death overtime. Their bosses agreed.Fagerlund wrote Hockey Canada last week and said he didn’t like the way his team won.“It is a little unfair to have a shootout in the final,” he says.Costello and Fagerlund both said the shootout is contrary to the spirit of hockey — that games are‘. . . There might be some opposition. The Europeans are pretty high on the shootout and they are used to it. ’— Renwickwon by a team, not individuals.“It is not a sour-grapes move,” Costello says of his rules-change proposal. “I am questioning whether it serves our game best or not.”Costello will present his motion to the IIHF next month at the world championships in Italy.One federation member who will support the change is Gord Renwick, an IIHF vice-president from Cambridge, Ont., who is also chairman of the rules committee.However, Renwick cautions that changing the rule is complicated because of off ice considerations, such as television.“In the Olympics, the (gold medal) game is going to an awftil lot of countries who are not prepared to open up their schedule or bump the news or whatever it takes,” says Renwick. “We are always under a lot of pressure to find a way to have games come to a conclusion.“If he is just asking that the final game be done (without a shootout), then we might look into that. But there might be some opposition. The Europeans are pretty high on the shootout and they are used to it.”
Newspaper Details
Medicine Hat News
Medicine Hat, Alberta, CA
Wed, Mar 09, 1994
Page 20
Full Page
Clipped by
Jason P.
USA 13 Dec 2018
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