Ice Hockey Rules Committees Propose Overtime Format Changes

The NCAA Men’s and Women’s Ice Hockey Rules Committees met for there biennial rules committee meeting this past week, and came up with a set of recommendations that will passed along the NCAA’s Nightmare Ladder of Bureaucracy to the Playing Rules Oversight Panel for final approval.

For a third consecutive rules cycle, the main focus of the rules committee was the format of overtime. Here’s what the spinning wheel has landed on this time:

Committee members, who met virtually for four days this week, recommended that all teams tied at the end of regulation would play a five-minute, 3-on-3 sudden-death overtime period to decide a winner. If neither team scores, a three-person shootout could be used in conference games or in-season tournaments for advancement purposes.

In regular-season nonconference games that go into overtime, teams would be allowed to play a five-minute, 3-on-3 sudden-death period. If neither team scores, the result of the game would be a tie.

The move to just a single 3-on-3 overtime before a potential shootout in league play only should help clarify some of the confusion fans had surrounding overtime, especially as it pertained to stats counting in the 3-on-3 overtime.

The rest of the recommendations were extremely minor, mostly pertaining to face-offs. The big suggestion for increasing scoring—a major issue in the sport right now—is to let teams decided which face-off circle they take a face-off at after an icing or delayed penalty. The committee also tackled pace of play concerns by suggesting centermen no longer be thrown out of the face-off circle after a face-off violation, but simply be given a warning with another violation on that same face-off resulting in a penalty—a change that could potentially shorten game lengths by seconds.

Finally, the committee suggested to formally remove a national rule requiring a post-game handshake and instead let conferences and individual teams decide what they want to do.