NHL 18 is a hockey simulation game developed by EA Sports based on the National Hockey League, published for PS4 and XboxOne. The game also features several game modes such as: Hockey Ultimate Team, Online Mode, revamped version of “be a GM”, Manager Mode, Franchise Mode etc.
Small rosters and few substitutions meant the game was slower. Equipment was limited and rather primitive, providing only minimal protection. Players did not hit nearly as hard as they do today. The rules were different too. Forward passing was not yet permitted in the N.H.L.; it would begin to be phased in during the 1918-19 season. When play began with two games on Dec. 19, 1917, goalies were not even allowed to drop to the ice to make a save.
While perhaps not the game changer that forward passing became, it is hard to imagine modern hockey without goalies being allowed to leave their feet. Credit for the rule change has often been given to Clint Benedict, a Hall of Fame goalie with the Senators.
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Hockey looked very different when the N.H.L. played its first games 100 years ago. Arenas were smaller and darker. The players were also smaller, averaging about 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. Even so, the best of them played close to 60 minutes a game.
Benedict’s habit of dropping to his knees to stop the puck had led Toronto fans to mockingly call him Praying Benny.
“It was against the rules then,” Benedict told The Ottawa Journal in 1962, “but if you made it look like an accident, you could get away without a penalty. I got pretty good at it.”
(Goalies would have wanted to avoid penalties: They served their own penalties until the 1941-42 season, forcing their teammates to guard the net in their absence.)
Still, it seems that Art Ross, best known today as the namesake of the N.H.L.’s scoring trophy, was the man behind the rule change. Ross’s lifelong friends Frank and Lester Patrick had changed the goaltending rule in the rival Pacific Coast Hockey Association. Ross liked the modification and introduced it for the 1916-17 season in the Art Ross Hockey League, an amateur organization he led in Montreal.
Ross had been one of the top players in hockey since the winter of 1905-6. The 1917-18 season would be his last as a player, and a few days before the start of the N.H.L.’s inaugural campaign, he spoke about changing the rules for goalies. Ross, then 32, pointed out that any other player could drop to his knees anywhere on the ice — even if he found himself guarding the net with his goaltender out of position.
Three weeks after the start of that first season, the N.H.L. made the switch to allow goalies to drop to the ice. Ross’s Montreal Wanderers had already withdrawn from the league, but newspapers in Montreal and Ottawa noted that he “can enjoy a measure of moral satisfaction from the fact that a suggestion made several weeks ago has been officially adopted by the National Hockey League.”
“I think that’s one of those things where you want to be patient,” Andersen said.
Patience is hardly the word to describe Bower’s coaches, whether it was Punch Imlach in Toronto or any number of them during his long tenure in the American Hockey League.
“If you fell down, the coach would come after you,” said Bower, who played in the 1950s and ’60s. “ ‘Stand up as much as you can,’ they’d say. ‘If you fall down, you’ll be in trouble.’ ”
The Hall of Famer Ken Dryden, the Montreal Canadiens’ goaltender in the 1970s, said standing up was the style of play long after Bower, and it was reinforced by coaches and the news media.
But playing standup did not necessarily mean playing upright. Of the goalies he watched growing up in the 1950s, Dryden said: “Terry Sawchuk crouched, but he didn’t go down much. Jacques Plante played on his skates. He was very fluid, and in a deep crouch, but it was still a standup style.”
Before Hall, and for a long time after, when goalies went down, they often flung themselves to one side of the net or the other, stacking their pads to provide the largest barrier.
“I found that you could spread your legs wide and cover more of the dangerous part of the net,” Hall said. “If you stacked your pads, it took you all weekend to get up. With the butterfly, all you needed was to catch an edge with a skate blade, and with a slight rocking motion, you were back up and in position.”
It was not until the 1980s, with François Allaire as the first modern goalie coach and Patrick Roy as his star pupil, that the butterfly style became the norm. Modern innovations also lightened and strengthened goalie equipment.
