Florida Panthers player Jussi Jokinen shoots the winning shot during a shootout against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Monday. Wilfredo Lee / AP / February 15, 2016
Florida Panthers player Jussi Jokinen shoots the winning shot during a shootout against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Monday. Wilfredo Lee / AP / February 15, 2016

Wild idea: Let defenders defend NHL penalty shots, in the innovative spirit of Roger Neilson



I wish the NHL would make a tiny rule change. It would enable a quirk to return to the game that has lain dormant for nearly 48 years.

The change would be to allow someone other than a goalkeeper to defend a penalty shot or shoot-out attempt.

This is not something teams are clamouring for, by any means. They are quite content to have goalies do what goalies have been doing for decades.

All the same, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a team could put a defenceman in net for one of these one-on-one duels.

The crucial distinction here is that penalty shots and shoot-out attempts are different from normal play in that, as per Rule 24 in the NHL rulebook: “The puck must be kept in motion towards the opponent’s goal line.”

Frankly, shooters seem to be abusing this rule. They follow long arcing paths, they stickhandle forwards and backwards, sometimes they come to a full halt.

I watched every shoot-out this month through Thursday (the shooters’ success rate: 29.2 per cent), and the players cheat about 10 per cent of the time.

Glaring examples: Buffalo’s Ryan O’Reilly was skating parallel to the net and away from it when he fired on February 4; Florida’s Jussi Jokinen blatantly did the same on Monday, as did his teammate Jonathan Huberdeau on Thursday; and Carolina’s Jeff Skinner skidded to a stop before shooting on February 7.

The refs never call it: custom trumps code.

I’m surprised goalies do not skate out to attack the shooter as soon as the shooter slows down. As the shooter cannot move away from the net, he is hamstrung if you bear down on him. But today’s goalies have positional play so instilled into them that they play the angles and stay deep in the net.

On occasion they attempt a poke check, but that’s about it. In the shoot-outs I watched this month, the only consistently aggressive keeper was Vancouver’s Ryan Miller, who came well out of the crease and stood his ground like a sheriff.

I would be inclined to think this idea of mine for using defenders as netminders is silly, except that it was employed (once) by one of the boldest minds in hockey history.

That would be Roger Neilson. He was coaching the Peterborough Petes in the junior leagues when, on September 26, 1968, a penalty shot was awarded to Frank Hamill of the Toronto Marlboros. Neilson – who knew the rulebook inside and out – pulled his goalie and put in defenceman Ron Stackhouse.

According to a Canadian Press report, “As soon as Hamill crossed the blueline, Stackhouse rushed out from the goal crease and blocked Hamill’s hurried slap shot.”

The lords of hockey were not amused. Scotty Morrison, the NHL’s referee-in-chief, said the move was legal in the big leagues – but would not be for long, “if only because somebody is making a farce of the game.”

Frankly, if shooters can make a farce of the rules by dipsy-doodling when they are supposed to be going forward, why not let goalies share the privilege by widening who can fill the role?

While hockey’s all-time innovator would have to be Art Ross – who during his years running the Boston Bruins from 1924 to 1954 was the first coach in the league to pull the goalie, who invented a smoother-handling puck with bevelled edges, who conceived and patented a new shape for goalie nets (B-shaped at the back rather than rectangular), and who put three men on defence to stop faster teams (a precursor to the neutral zone trap) – Roger Neilson is also high up on the list.

(Others in the top 10: Jacques Plante, Frank Zamboni, Doug Harvey, Fred Shero, Wayne Gretzky, Dominik Hasek and lastly, Anatoli Tarasov with an assist from Lloyd Percival.)

Besides the defenceman-as-goalie stunt mentioned above, Neilson thought outside the box in ways big and small.

– He was the first coach to go full-bore in using videotape as a teaching tool, to the point where he was nicknamed “Captain Video”.

This is the innovation for which Neilson is best known, but it is worth noting that it was also an idea Art Ross had (though to a lesser extent, obviously, given the technology of his day).

As recounted in the 2015 book “Art Ross: The Hockey Legend who Built the Bruins”, by Eric Zweig, Ross as early as 1929/30 would film his team as well as the opposition to pick up tips.

– Neilson was the first NHL coach to use a headset to keep in contact with his assistants, who were watching the game from the booths at the top of the arena.

– If his team had a face-off in the opposing end with only a few seconds left in a period, Neilson would pull the goalie and put an extra attacker on. His logic was that this gave him an extra potential scorer, while the chance that the other team would move the puck all the way down the ice for a score was extremely low.

This practice makes perfect sense, but even today, convention-bound coaches are reluctant to use it.

– When there is a delayed penalty against the opposition, a team will sometimes pull its goalie for the extra attacker until the opposition touches the puck and play stops.

There is, however, a small risk that the team with the extra man will score on its own net via an errant pass. So Neilson told his goalie that when he left the net he should leave his stick lying in the crease as a safeguard.

This was perfectly legal but was soon made into an offence (the punishment: the opposing team is awarded a goal).

– Neilson was not satisfied with the statistics available in his day so began to chart scoring chances as an indicator of players’ contributions.

With the rise of analytics in recent years, scoring chances is coming into wider use as a key statistic.

Again, there is a parallel here to Ross, who also tried to find a statistic to measure a player’s total contribution; his idea was to assign a player one to three points for their defensive work, to balance out the offence-heavy stats of the day. (Clearly Neilson and Ross were kindred spirits, if not doppelgangers).

– One time Neilson’s team had two men in the penalty box in a game’s final minute. In flagrant disregard of the rules, he sent an extra man out onto the ice every 10 seconds or so.

This naturally caused the ref to blow his whistle and call a penalty. But since you can’t have more than two people in the penalty box at any time, and since there wasn’t enough time left in the game for the penalty to be served on a delayed basis, he was giving his defenders a rest at no cost.

The practice was promptly banned, and any team that did it would have to face a penalty shot.

rmckenzie@thenational.ae

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MATCH INFO

CAF Champions League semi-finals first-leg fixtures

Tuesday:

Primeiro Agosto (ANG) v Esperance (TUN) (8pm UAE)
Al Ahly (EGY) v Entente Setif (ALG) (11PM)

Second legs:

October 23

COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Director: Alfonso Cuaron 

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville 

Rating: 4/5

About Seez

Company name/date started: Seez, set up in September 2015 and the app was released in August 2017  

Founder/CEO name(s): Tarek Kabrit, co-founder and chief executive, and Andrew Kabrit, co-founder and chief operating officer

Based in: Dubai, with operations also in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon 

Sector:  Search engine for car buying, selling and leasing

Size: (employees/revenue): 11; undisclosed

Stage of funding: $1.8 million in seed funding; followed by another $1.5m bridge round - in the process of closing Series A 

Investors: Wamda Capital, B&Y and Phoenician Funds 

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Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants

UPI facts

More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions

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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

Kanguva
Director: Siva
Stars: Suriya, Bobby Deol, Disha Patani, Yogi Babu, Redin Kingsley
Rating: 2/5
 
Cry Macho

Director: Clint Eastwood

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Dwight Yoakam

Rating:**

If you go
Where to stay: Courtyard by Marriott Titusville Kennedy Space Centre has unparalleled views of the Indian River. Alligators can be spotted from hotel room balconies, as can several rocket launch sites. The hotel also boasts cool space-themed decor.

When to go: Florida is best experienced during the winter months, from November to May, before the humidity kicks in.

How to get there: Emirates currently flies from Dubai to Orlando five times a week.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Persuasion
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Wicked
Director: Jon M Chu
Stars: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey
Rating: 4/5
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Super 30

Produced: Sajid Nadiadwala and Phantom Productions
Directed: Vikas Bahl
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Pankaj Tripathi, Aditya Srivastav, Mrinal Thakur
Rating: 3.5 /5

57%20Seconds
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Story%20behind%20the%20UAE%20flag
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COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
From Zero

Artist: Linkin Park

Label: Warner Records

Number of tracks: 11

Rating: 4/5

The specs
Engine: 2.7-litre 4-cylinder Turbomax
Power: 310hp
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Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh192,500
On sale: Now
THE BIO

Bio Box

Role Model: Sheikh Zayed, God bless his soul

Favorite book: Zayed Biography of the leader

Favorite quote: To be or not to be, that is the question, from William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Favorite food: seafood

Favorite place to travel: Lebanon

Favorite movie: Braveheart

The specs
 
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
Ain Issa camp:
  • Established in 2016
  • Houses 13,309 people, 2,092 families, 62 per cent children
  • Of the adult population, 49 per cent men, 51 per cent women (not including foreigners annexe)
  • Most from Deir Ezzor and Raqqa
  • 950 foreigners linked to ISIS and their families
  • NGO Blumont runs camp management for the UN
  • One of the nine official (UN recognised) camps in the region
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets

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