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BGonline.org Forums
When to pull goalie in hockey? (OT)
Posted By: Colin Owen In Response To: When to pull goalie in hockey? (Havard Raddum)
Date: Thursday, 4 June 2015, at 10:42 a.m.
Sorry that it's completely OT, but Havard's poster on Tradition made me think of an almost equally stupid (though less dangerous) one that we've followed in our game for donkey's years: that of playing matches to only an odd number of points.
Quite simply, this tradition reduces the flexibility of some organisers to provide players with A LITTLE MORE BG - and that's what we're there to do, I reckon. At my club, for example, in order to try to finish the weekly tournament on the night, our TD allows the semis and final to be 7 points rather than 5 providing they're started by a certain time. He did agree, in principle, with my suggestion that it would be nice to have an intermediate point where you could start a 6 point match.
Or take the schedule of the UKBGF run UK Clubs Championships later this month. There will be 8-16 teams of five players and, in the preliminary, round robin phase, some groups will play 3 point matches, and others 5 points, depending upon the exact number of entries:
http://ukbgf.com/the-uk-clubs-championship/how-it-works/
Of course, in calculating these match lengths, the organisers needed to take into account that any group with an extra round (of shorter matches) needs more 'setting up' time, but surely it would have been advantageous to have had the option of 4 point matches?
It is true that score boards, with the possible exception of the (risible) 2 pointer, do not have the facility to display such match lengths but, until they do, would it be so awkward to have it show 7 points, and start at 1-1? The possible advantage with flexibility is mainly in the shorter matches, so they would probably only need to display 4 and 6 point lengths (whilst perhaps also dispensing with the 2!).
Why did this tradition take hold in our game? In other pursuits a match to 5, for example, would be described as a 9 point match, as it's the best of 9 (scores). In order to produce a winner, this number must be odd, but the winning post can be odd or even, of course. For some reason, we defined things differently in our game, and I suspect that this might have created confusion in the minds of some. Three players, when posed independently with this even point option, each thought about it for a few seconds then, with real sincerity, stated that the match could then result in a draw. (And we wouldn't want that.)
Anyway, apologies once again for going totally OT!
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