Earlier this week, the NHL announced that its five minutes of 4-on-4 overtime would, instead, be replaced by five minutes of 3-on-3 for the coming season as a means of reducing the number of shootouts.

This is a good idea because the shootout is bad, and it stands to reason that more goals will be scored at 3-on-3 than 4-on-4. Remember, the AHL went to a sort of hybrid format for this past season: three minutes of 4-on-4 before another four of 3-on-3, then the shootout if nothing was decided.

And with that system — which the NHL did not fully adopt — 75 percent of overtime games were decided before the shootout became an option. That was more than double the previous season. So effectively, that shows how effective this can be in getting rid of the shootout which, again, is stupid and bad.

And since the shootout was implemented, the share of NHL games that went to overtime has always been between about 23 and 25 percent. In an 82-game season, that amounts to about 290-300 games, or roughly 10 loser points per team per season (though obviously not distributed evenly). And of those 290-300 games, it's usually about 50-60 percent that are decided in a shootout. Over a 10-season period, this is what it looks like:

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So basically, everyone agrees 13 percent of all games (160 per year) is too great a portion to basically have games decided on a skills competition. Everyone is also right on that count. If the league can get that number down to the AHL's no-shootout success rate — I'm dubious of that for reasons we'll discuss in a second — that means only about 6 percent of all NHL games would be decided with a shootout. A little more than 1 in 16, which is a lot better than 2 in 15. Assuming that next year is a perfectly average season in terms of the number of games going to the shootout, this is about what the breakdown would look like:

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If you're wondering, that means that only about 74 games out of the league's 1,230 next season would go to a shootout. You'd much rather have that than the current 158 or so.

But the reason I doubt that the league will have that level of success in reducing shootout instances is that, frankly, three minutes of 4-on-4 then four of 3-on-3 is going to give you a lot more goals than just five minutes of 3-on-3. The extra two minutes per game may not seem like a lot, but in terms of the impact it would have on goal-scoring, it's actually pretty big.

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