Goalie equipment changes

While searching for my essential question on the change in hockey equipment I found that most of the changes have been with goal tenders. These goalies of today's NHL are heavily favoring oversize equipment. The oversize equipment has made the scoring in the NHL deacrese over the years.

With the decrease in the number of goals scored by players, the NHL has been working on making these numbers increase again. A new NHL rule is aimed at reducing the overstuffed, Michelin Man look favored by goaltenders. In its latest effort to give shooters a fighting chance, the league has set new limits on the size of leg pads used by NHL goalies (Fitzpatrick).
Back when hockey first started out goaltenders wore very small padding compared to the goaltenders today.

As you can see by these pictures, goal tending equipment has changed drastically since the start of the National Hockey League. In the first picture you can see that goalies wore no face protection as well as very small padding. In the second pictures you can see that the goalies are wearing equipment that fits them and that they now are wearing helmets. In the last picture you can see how today's goalies are wearing equipment that is huge and over sized.

With the great number of goalies wearing pads over 38 inches the NHL decides to start penalizing teams. Beginning with the 2003-04 season, NHL goalie pads are limited to 38-inches (76 centimetres) in length. If a goaltender's pads are found to exceed the limit, his team will be fined $25,000 (Fitzpatrick). The reason they started doing this was that in the previous season goalies were wearing pads over 38 inches. In fact, The NHL says about one-third of its goalies used pads longer than 38 inches (Fitzpatrick).






Fitzpatrick, Jamie. "NHL Goalie Pads: Size Matters." About.com 27 08 2003 20 May 2008 . (Fitzpatrick )

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