This article is a commentary, which is driven by an author’s perspective on the sport they cover as a beat reporter. In a commentary, writers are expected to take a position on an event or topic relevant to the sport they cover, and suggest a course of action.
Caleb Peterson writes commentary articles about university sport administration from his position overseeing The Ubyssey’s coverage of varsity sports on campus as Sports Editor.
Last March, UBC Women’s Hockey strode into nationals on an all-time heater. After finishing the regular season with the best record in both team and conference history, they decimated their opponents in the Canada West playoffs, outscoring the Trinity Western Spartans and Manitoba Bisons by a combined score of 13–2 across four games, sweeping both series.
They entered the U Sports Women’s Hockey Championship as the clear No. 1 seed and the favourite to win their first national title in program history. Then, in their first game against the Montreal Carabins, that dream came to a crashing halt.
After an intense battle in regulation, during which the T-Birds erased an early two-goal Montreal lead, the game went to overtime tied at three. Then, after 10 minutes of extra play, both teams’ seasons came down to a shootout.
The first two rounds were dead even. Then, Montreal’s Jade Picard beat UBC goalie Elise Hugens. The T-Birds’ Cassidy Rhodes was stopped. Game over.
Montreal went on to win the national championship, defeating Concordia 5–2 in the gold medal game. For UBC, however, the loss marked more than the end of a promising season. After being eliminated, the team left with some of the best players in their history — including the T-Birds’ all-time leading scorer, Grace Elliott — having played their final meaningful game in blue and gold. The stakes for those final moments couldn’t have been any higher.
The way they were decided was a sham.
When I learned this was how the T-Birds’ season ended, I was shocked. I’ve been watching hockey for as long as I can remember, but I couldn’t recall a game of that magnitude ever resorting to a shootout.
For the uninitiated, the shootout is essentially a glorified skills competition, designed to end games quickly. Once a game has gone too far into overtime without a deciding goal, the shootout takes away the five-on-five action that defines hockey to pit an individual skater against an individual goaltender. The two teams alternate shots, going back-and-forth until one team scores and the other doesn’t. It’s a crude tool, effective only at efficiently deciding a winner.
It doesn’t belong anywhere near the playoffs.
To understand why this is a bad idea, the best place to turn to is the shootout’s origin — at least on professional hockey’s biggest stage. While the shootout had existed on the international scene for some time before 2005, it had been nowhere to be seen in the NHL. For decades, the NHL had decided regular-season games that went past five minutes of overtime by simply … not deciding them. Any game that was tied after overtime remained that way, going into the record books as a draw. While perhaps unsatisfying for the casual fan, it was simple and workable.
That was, until the turn of the century. As the league entered the new millennium, it faced two major problems. For one, scoring was down. After the heights of the 1980s, when games averaged more than eight total goals throughout the decade, those numbers plummeted. In the early 2000s, scoring was down to about half those numbers, a five-goal-per-game pace that lessened the game’s excitement and a stretch boring enough to have its own name: the “Dead Puck Era.”
Their second problem was even more pressing. Leading up to the 2004-05 season, the NHL was embroiled in a labour dispute with its players. As they neared the start of play, they still hadn’t come to terms. The conflict extended past the theoretical start of the season in 2004 and eventually into 2005, and the league had to make the call to cancel the entire season. To this day, it remains the only major North American professional sports league to cancel an entire season because of a lockout.
While the two sides would come to an agreement in time for the 2005-06 season, the NHL had lost some goodwill with their fans. To bring them back, they’d have to do more than just show up. They needed to inject life back into the sport.
The 2005-06 campaign introduced sweeping rule changes meant to increase scoring — including reducing goalie equipment and allowing greater freedom in moving the puck up the ice — but the most drastic would come after the typical conclusion of a game. The NHL had killed the tie.
In a New York Times article published about a month before the lockout ended, now-famous hockey correspondent Rick Westhead detailed a league in panic, throwing countless potential rule changes at the wall, many of which Westhead deemed “doubtful that the NHL will adopt.” However, one proposal stood out above the rest — the shootout.
Hockey Hall of Famer and then-Boston Bruins President Harry Sinden dismissed the change as “cosmetic,” comparing it unfavourably to other sports by saying: “You don't have a home-run-hitting contest in the 10th inning, and you don't have 3-point shooting to decide an N.B.A. game."
Edmonton Oilers General Manager Kevin Lowe, part of the rules committee that introduced the shootout, acknowledged the move to eliminate ties “largely [came] from an American influence” — a nod to the diversion from the traditional game that Canada had defined itself by.
But it was New York Islanders General Manager Mike Milbury who put it most succinctly.
"The fans want it, and it's the least we can do after spitting at them the past 12 months," he said.
So, the shootout was born, largely as a concession. A white flag waved in a desperate attempt to draw fans back into a sport on life support. Now, more than 20 years later, it survives. While it’s common to hear players and coaches grumble about the gimmicky, constructed nature of the shootout’s setup — lacking resemblance to the actual game that was played for 65 minutes prior — they’ve mostly come to terms with the bargain they made.
The fans get a winner in every game. The players get to show off their individual skills by demonstrating dekes they’d rarely get away with in real action. It may have gone against what hockey was supposed to look like, but it was a necessary evil.
But only for the regular season.
When the shootout was introduced to the NHL, they didn’t have the playoffs in mind. They already had a solution for playoff games that needed extra time. They ordained that, if a playoff game remained tied after 60 minutes, the action would just … continue as it had before.
In the playoffs, overtime could go as long as it needed to. The rules wouldn’t change. The periods would stay at 20 minutes, and the teams would stay at five skaters per side. The only stop to the fun would be if a team scored, granting us fans the ecstasy of a game-winning, walk-off goal. Since the 1947-48 season, NHL playoff hockey has operated this way, defined by its stubborn persistence, sometimes stretching deep into the night before a winner emerges.
To arbitrarily cut that short for a shootout would cause a riot within the league — and it all has to do with stakes. For a regular season game, going into the shootout is a concession that teams are willing to make, because while it’s not quite the same as actually playing out the game to the conclusion, it’s just one of 82 games. They all matter, but more in totality than individually. The shootout can’t really kill a team, and a loss doesn’t define a season.
But in the playoffs, every game is vital. The four-round gauntlet to decide the Stanley Cup is meant to determine the best professional hockey team in the league — and as much as they may try, shootouts are not hockey.
By removing 10 of the 12 players from the ice, a shootout turns a team game about coordination, positioning and formation into an individual sport. It flattens the numerous intersecting variables that a hockey game provides into an overly simple equation — skater against goalie. It exists solely as a mechanism to erase ties, which haven't been in the playoffs for nearly 80 years. As Sinden essentially put it 20 years ago, it’s a gimmick. But when things actually matter, gimmicks don’t work.
So, as they have for as long as I’ve been alive, the NHL plays on in the playoffs. I’ve had the joy of watching games that extended into three, even four overtime periods — such as the 2023 matchup between Florida and Carolina that ended with Matthew Tkachuk’s goal with 13 seconds left in the fourth overtime. The bizarre, surreal experience of watching a game that couldn’t seem to end is one of my all-time favourite hockey memories, a beautiful, near-six-hour experience.
U Sports wouldn’t even give its women’s teams more than 10 minutes.
At the U Sports Women’s Hockey Championship — the national tournament to decide the best team in Canada — the overtime rules are starkly different from what you might expect, if, like me, you grew up watching the NHL.
Instead of continuous five-on-five, 20-minute overtime periods, U Sports women’s hockey playoff games allow only 10 minutes of extra time, with one overtime period played at four skaters a side. Then, they rush to a shootout. While they make an exception for the gold medal game, which plays continuous five-on-five until a winning goal, all other elimination games are decided this way.
In the last 20 years of the U Sports Women’s Championship, there have been 15 games decided by shootout, with four of those coming in the last three seasons. While that may not feel like a large number, for a tournament of only 11 games, it’s not insignificant, especially considering that the tournament is single-elimination. If you lose once, you’re out.
No other major hockey league in North America operates like this in the playoffs. I’ve checked.
After going through the playoff overtime rules for the NHL, PWHL, AHL, ECHL, NCAA, WHL, OHL, QMJHL and the general Hockey Canada rule book that defines most minor hockey play north of the border, I couldn’t find another setup like the one U Sports employs. In all eight rule books, they define a clear separation: shootouts are for the regular season, and continuous overtime is for the playoffs.
Most embarrassingly for U Sports, even the leagues they oversee don’t seem to be on the same page about how to administer overtime. Canada West, Ontario University Athletics (OUA), Atlantic University Sport (AUS) and Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) — U Sports’ four major conferences — all break from their governing body when administering their conferences’ playoffs. None of them use shootouts. All four opt for continuous five-on-five overtime periods (with the exception of the RSEQ, which is continuous four-on-four) until one team scores.
It’s a strange island to be on — but it gets weirder. Up until this most recent season, U Sports wasn’t even consistent within itself. While the women’s game has always operated with shootouts in the national tournament, the same rules weren’t applied equally to the men’s game.
In the August 2024 edition of U Sports’ rule book for men’s hockey, it states that after a game finishes in a tie, the teams will play on in a “20-minute sudden victory overtime period,” with play continuing “until a goal is scored.” While U Sports only keeps public records of their playing regulations back two seasons, there’s evidence of this rule being in place for essentially the entirety of their history, with numerous multi-overtime playoff games as far back as 1974-75.
Why the discrepancy between the two sports? As far as I can tell, there was no obvious reason to allow the men’s teams to play on, while the women’s teams were hurried out of the arena in a shootout. It’s a little insulting to the women’s teams. As has been shown in the NHL — and copied by essentially every other organized league — shootouts work best when the stakes are low, and the outcomes matter less. Whether it was their intention or not, by not applying these shootout regulations equally across both sports, there’s an unspoken prioritization of one over the other.
To U Sports’ credit, in their recent edition of the playing regulations for this latest season, inequality has been mostly paved over, with the playoff overtime rules now being fundamentally similar.
But they took it in the wrong direction.
Instead of applying the rules from the men’s game to the women’s side — eliminating the playoff shootout once and for all — U Sports instead introduced playoff shootouts to men’s hockey. Having the chance to level the playing field and allow the women’s teams to compete under the same conditions as essentially every other hockey team on the continent, they opted to artificially shorten the men’s game, introducing new problems rather than solving their current one. Now, all U Sports hockey teams can sit on the bench and watch as a single player determines an entire team’s fate. Great.
They didn’t even properly balance things out between the two rule books. While they are more similar than they were before, with both now having playoff shootouts, the men still have a longer runway to get to that point than the women’s teams do. Where U Sports allows only 10 minutes of overtime for women’s teams, the men get 25; with one full 20-minute, five-on-five period, followed by a five-minute period of three-on-three, before eventually succumbing to a shootout. It’s a flawed solution that doesn’t fix anything.
Through all of this, one question remains. If the shootout is a near-universally despised way to end any hockey game of consequence, why is U Sports one of, if not the only, hockey league in North America to use them in the playoffs? I have a theory.
Eagle-eyed hockey fans might have noticed a glaring omission in this conversation around shootouts. While, as noted, playoff shootouts are essentially unheard of in North America, there’s one organization that has held onto them for more than 30 years — the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF).
If you don’t know what the IIHF is, just think of it as hockey’s version of FIFA. It governs the sport’s international competition, including the World Championships, the World Juniors, and most notably, the Olympics. As part of that responsibility, the IIHF also gets to set the rules for how the international version of hockey is played — and while it mostly tracks with the NHL and other professional leagues, there are some key differences. Like how they handle shootouts.
The IIHF loves shootouts. While the history I detailed earlier outlines how the shootout became part of the hockey fan’s everyday life through its introduction to the NHL, it wasn’t its true breakout moment. That would be 13 years earlier, at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
While this surely wasn’t the first time a shootout had ever decided a hockey game (in 1992, the Times claimed that the only other Olympic shootout was in 1988 during a game between France and Norway for 11th place), it was the first time the IIHF had properly enshrined it in their rules — including elimination games. In the quarterfinal matchup between Canada and Germany, a game that gave us the tournament’s first shootout after ending overtime tied 3–3, the policy became consequential. Canada scored three times. Germany scored twice. Canada advanced.
Neither side was really satisfied with how those events played out. Ludec Bukac, Germany’s coach, suggested the teams should have just flipped a coin, because to him, “[it’s] the same thing.” Eric Lindros, who scored the winning goal in the shootout for Canada, was equally unenthused, claiming it was a “stupid way to end a terrific game.”
Still, the IIHF doubled down. Since 1992, shootouts have been the norm at any IIHF competition — even in the gold medal game. If nothing else, it’s produced some memorable moments, such as Peter Forsberg’s eponymous move that won Sweden the gold medal in 1994 or TJ Oshie’s repeated shootout heroics for the United States in 2014 — but there’s a reason that the most iconic Olympic moment of the century came in overtime.
Recently, even as the stalwarts of keeping shootouts in play no matter the stakes, the IIHF has been forced to correct course. In 2019, after numerous World Championship games between 2017 and 2019 were decided by shootout, the organization was forced to concede that this arrangement wasn’t ideal. Going forward, they would decide all gold medal games without a shootout, playing three-on-three overtime for 20-minute periods until a goal was scored. It may not seem like much of a concession — but the IIHF moving away from shootouts in any capacity is noteworthy.
But why were they so determined to stick to shootouts? Why were they in such a rush to get these games — which are often arguably the most important hockey games of the year — over with? It all comes down to scheduling and capacity.
In an interview with The Athletic after the 2026 Olympics, IIHF President Luc Tardif explained their reasoning behind only taking a half-measure towards full five-on-five overtime.
“It’s the best rules to fit in a tight schedule,” Tardif said. “We have to figure out 30 games in 11 days for men, and for the women, 28 games in 13 days. 58 [games] altogether in 16 days. [It’s a] huge challenge.”
Venue space is limited. Schedules are inflexible. They simply can’t afford for games to go past their scheduled end date, so they artificially cap how long they can go. It costs the product, but for them, there’s no other choice.
I bet U Sports thinks the same way. For the women's tournament, they squeeze all 11 games into four days (eight games for the men’s tournament) — playing two games on Thursday, two games on Friday, four on Saturday and three on Sunday. Because these are all hosted at one university, and therefore, one venue, any delay in one game pushes back everything else. That’s likely why they institute playoff shootouts at nationals, while their constituent conferences don’t.
While it’s impossible to be certain, I believe I can point to one specific moment as the catalyst for U Sports’ embrace of playoff shootouts, particularly on the men’s side of the bracket. In the 2024-25 quarterfinals, the TMU Bold took the Mount Royal Cougars to quintuple overtime, where they would win 5–4 — the longest game in U Sports history at a whopping 143 minutes in play time. A game that started at 1 p.m. didn’t end until 7:48 p.m. This had a costly domino effect, pushing back the game for the host Ottawa Gee-Gees to 9:16 p.m., where they would eventually also go to overtime, ending the night at 12:24 a.m. My guess is that U Sports took one look at this chaos and said: never again. The overtime rules were changed the following season.
But to extrapolate from this one scenario would be quite short-sighted. For starters, the odds of another game even going to a fifth overtime any time soon are low. Even with nearly 100 years of history and significantly more playoff games than U Sports, the NHL has only had five games go that long. There were also other factors at play that lengthened the game, such as a Zamboni malfunction that delayed the start of the second period. I understand why this chain of events might have scared U Sports away from keeping up playoff overtime, but whatever scheduling nightmares you may or may not have to figure out after a game goes late — it’s not worth sacrificing the on-ice product.
Every team that reaches the U Sports championship — on both the men’s and women’s side — is full of talented, driven athletes who have put their bodies on the line and sacrificed for a year to get to this point. A national championship is the ultimate prize of university sport. It means everything to them. It’s insulting to hastily wrap up the most important games of these players’ lives. It’s insulting to, in many cases, have them sit on the bench for a skills competition, depriving them of the chance to pay off all the work it took to get there, all because of an overbooked venue. It’s ludicrous.
Venue space and scheduling are valid issues, but the integrity of the game should not be the first thing sacrificed to fix it — there are other options. They could spread out the games over five days instead of four. They could distribute the quarterfinal games back to home-team venues, and host only the final four teams at a neutral site. They could further spread out start times to give more wiggle room for potential overtime. In the women’s bracket, they could even kill the pointless consolation bracket where teams fight for fifth place, an exercise that currently comprises three games. Cutting three full games should buy more than enough time for full overtimes.
Or, considering that they had got along just fine with continuous overtime until last year, U Sports could simply do what it did successfully for men’s hockey for the past 50 years: play exactly the same, but without playoff shootouts. It’s not too late to go back.
But this time, don’t forget to include the women’s teams.
