With less than 12 seconds remaining in the third period of a game against the Nashville Predators on Saturday, New York Islanders goalie Ilya Sorokin scored. Sorokin’s goal, which sealed a 7-4 Isles victory, gave the 29-year-old fifth-year starter one of the few accomplishments that eluded his legendary head coach, Hall of Famer Patrick Roy, during Roy’s 19 seasons in net. “It was part of my bucket list, scoring a goal in my career,” said Roy, who settled for 45 assists and a goose egg in the goals column. “Hit the post once, I think. Scored [when] there was no more time. … Would’ve been nice, but I didn’t have that shot.”
Sorokin can hardly shoot either, as he repeatedly demonstrated at the 2023 All-Star skills competition. Nor did he have to shoot in this instance; he got credit for the goal because he was the last Islander to touch the puck before Predators forward Steven Stamkos accidentally passed the puck into his own goal. But he does have better timing than Roy, in a historical sense. Sorokin’s empty netter was only the 20th goalie goal in NHL history—but the third this season, with only three-quarters of the schedule complete.
Three doesn’t sound like a lot, but by goalie-goal standards, it’s a deluge: No previous season has featured more than a single goalie goal. Sorokin’s tally is the latest sign that this era of hockey has heralded the golden age of the goalie goal. And the recent rise of the goalie goal doesn’t just say something about the modern NHL. It also helps explain the wider state of sports.
I’ve long loved goalie goals. From Shohei Ohtani to Travis Hunter, two-way players are my favorite phenomena in sports, and the goalie goal—particularly the kind where the netminder does shoot—might be my favorite type of two-way play. Partly because it’s so rare; partly because the puck must traverse nearly the full length of the ice, setting up the sort of suspense and satisfaction that accompany a hole in one or a Hail Mary pass completion; and partly because the armored, mostly immobile men crouched in the crease look like the last people on the ice who could be capable of scoring. Usually, they are. But every now and then, the player whose lot in life is to take a ton of punishment and try to minimize the damage turns the tables and gives the other team a cathartic taste of its own medicine.
For much of hockey history, this didn’t happen. The NHL was founded in 1917, and the first goalie goal wasn’t scored until 1979, when Billy Smith (also an Islanders goaltender, in a 7-4 game) got credit for an opponent’s own goal. (Two years earlier, “pandemonium broke out at the Forum” when Los Angeles Kings goaltender Rogie Vachon was briefly credited with a goal, before the ruling was changed.) The first true goalie goal didn’t come until the NHL was about to turn 70, in December 1987, when Philadelphia Flyers goalie Ron Hextall—to date, the only two-time scorer on shots—sent one into the Boston Bruins’ empty net.
The lack of goalie goals before the NHL-WHA merger wasn’t for lack of trying. In the early days of hockey, goalies would sometimes skate down the ice like offensive players, but that behavior grew scarce as the position became more specialized and the padding and equipment more cumbersome. Later, it was outlawed, after a game in Montreal in 1966 in which Maple Leafs goalie Gary “Suitcase” Smith tried to become the first goalie to score a goal.
In a 1997 interview, Smith recalled, “This was in the old six-team NHL and I didn’t know if I’d ever play another game. They scored three or four goals and I thought, ‘I’m going to get the hook. What can I do to make people remember that I played in the NHL?’ So I thought I would go down the ice and try to score. [Canadiens defenseman] J.C. Tremblay didn’t know what to do. He never hit a guy in his life, but then he decided to take a run at me. He nailed me. I was at their blue line and I was spinning around.”
Other goalies, including the Rangers’ Chuck Rayner, had tried this before, also unsuccessfully. (Rayner once scored in an exhibition game during World War II and later came close in an NHL game.) After Smith sustained that hit, though, the NHL instituted rule 27.7: “If a goalkeeper participates in the play in any manner (intentionally plays the puck or checks an opponent) when he is beyond the center red line, a minor penalty shall be imposed upon him.” With that, goalies were confined to their side of the ice—though Roy rebelled in 1997, when he carried the puck up the ice, deked Wayne Gretzky, and unleashed a spinorama. (It’s not clear what kind of move he was trying to do.)
To put a puck in the opposing net from the vicinity of the crease, a goalie typically has to shoot the puck past a few defenders, into a 6-foot opening, from almost 180 feet away. It’s easy to miss, as the Rangers’ Igor Shesterkin has found out a few times. And if the shot goes wide, icing is called, unless the team is playing shorthanded. Thus, the feat is rarely attempted, especially with a one-goal lead, both because it’s risky and because it’s hard. Hence the meager all-time total of 20 goals (by 17 goalies), roughly halfway between the number of unassisted triple plays (15) and perfect games (24) in Major League Baseball. A highlight reel of every goalie goal before Sorokin’s runs for barely 10 minutes.
Only 12 of the 20 were intentional goals, which tend to be much more exciting and skill-based. (“If I shot this goal, I think it would have been a different emotion,” Sorokin said.) Yet before Sorokin’s, six consecutive goalie goals were of that kind, including the two that preceded Sorokin’s this season. In October, the Minnesota Wild’s Filip Gustavsson, with the clock close to zero, put some pace on a puck that he lifted over a few St. Louis Blues’ upraised sticks.
And in January, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Alex Nedeljkovic left the crease, intercepted a puck that was dumped along the boards, spun around, and skied it toward the opposing goal just before he got clobbered by the Buffalo Sabres’ Sam Lafferty. As the puck made the long, exciting slide to glory, Nedeljkovic skated straight over to the Penguins’ bench, jumped onto it, and got mobbed by his teammates.
Not so long ago, a play like that was almost unheard of. In the 15 seasons from 2002-03 through 2017-18, only one goalie, Mike Smith of the Phoenix Coyotes, scored on a shot. But goalies are now on an unprecedented streak of scoring on shots in three consecutive seasons—or four consecutive full seasons, if you exclude the COVID-shortened 2020-21 campaign. So why are goalies suddenly lighting the lamp with relative regularity?
The goalies themselves deserve some praise for improved stickhandling. Nedeljkovic, who made 40 saves against the Sabres, also recorded an assist, making him the first goalie to get a goal and an assist in the same game. (He was one fight away from a Gordie Howe hat trick.) And although that was his first goal in the NHL, it was his record fourth professional goal: He also scored twice in the AHL and once in the ECHL, making him the first goalie to score at all three North American pro levels. That’s not an accident. Nedeljkovic, who said he has “always enjoyed playing the puck,” also “watched and learned from the likes of Martin Brodeur” (the only three-time goalie goal scorer) and “wanted to [score] for a long time.”
Professional athletes get bigger, faster, stronger, and more skillful all the time, and today’s goalies grew up in a world in which goalie goals were viewed as attainable. That they’re increasingly treating distant nets as targets, and hitting those targets more often, has something to do with “how excellent every goalie is now with the puck,” says analyst Paul Pidutti of Adjusted Hockey and Daily Faceoff. “It used to be a special skill, and now it’s the norm. … The best puck handler 20 years ago is a regular guy now. Athleticism at the position has risen.”
Mostly, though, individual goalies are scoring more frequently because they have more opportunities to score—ironically, because goalies as a group are getting removed more often.
Pulling the goalie to gain a man advantage, a strategy introduced to the NHL by Bruins coach Art Ross in 1931, was nearly nonexistent until the 1950s and sporadic until the late ’70s, when the seal on goalie goals was broken. But it’s become much more common in recent years, and Roy himself had a hand in its ascendance. The former Canadiens and Avalanche goalie’s greatest contribution to the profession was popularizing the “butterfly” approach to playing net, in which goalies get low because that’s where most shots on goal go. That stylistic shift helped put a damper on the extreme scoring rates of the 1980s. (Relatedly, goalies’ athletic cousins, catchers, have adopted lower crouches because it helps them secure more strike calls.) But early in his coaching career, both in junior hockey in the 2000s and in his first NHL head coach incarnation in Colorado from 2013 to 2016, Roy pushed the envelope in a new way by yanking his goalies aggressively.
The numbers support that strategy. An influential 2010 paper titled “Strategies for Pulling the Goalie in Hockey” made a statistical case for “pulling the goaltender at much earlier times,” which some scholars had advocated for decades. Extensive subsequent research confirmed that, as one study concluded, coaches weren’t pulling goalies “nearly early enough,” and ample mainstream media coverage reinforced that takeaway. Eventually, NHL teams got the message, and they started pulling goalies earlier and more often right around the time of the league’s so-called “summer of analytics” in 2014.
The rationale is simple: Desperate times call for desperate measures. If you’re trailing late in the game, you have to catch up quickly. Ultimately, a loss is a loss: Playing it safe and sticking with your goalie makes it less likely that you’ll allow additional goals and go down further, but goal differential doesn’t affect the standings, except as a tiebreaker in unlikely scenarios. Thus, if you’re losing late, it pays to get aggressive, upping the odds of a blowout but also slightly raising your hopes of scoring an equalizer. The only downside is the potential embarrassment of a more lopsided final score—and the even greater shame of allowing a goal to a goalie—which once cemented the stigma surrounding early hooks.
The math reveals that the break-even point for when it’s worth risking those jeers arrives earlier than teams traditionally believed. As teams, media members, and fans have internalized that truth, resistance has eroded, and coaches have called for a sixth skater sooner. Nedeljkovic, for instance, scored his goal with 2:42 to go, as the Sabres tried in vain to erase a two-goal deficit. (When Ross pioneered the tactic in 1931, he replaced goalie Tiny Thompson with forward Red Beattie with only 40 seconds to go in a one-goal game, which the next day’s papers labeled “daring,” “an amazing maneuver,” “the most unusual bit of strategy ever attempted in a professional hockey game,” and “a gesture of defeat, a concession of failure, but an original and novel stunt.”) As a result, there’s much more ice time with one goal unoccupied, which has led to massive spikes in the rate of empty netters per game (or per 82 games).
Approximately 0.4 empty net goals have been scored per game this season, or one every 2.5 games. Twenty years ago, the rate was more like one every seven games, and back when “Suitcase” Smith tried to score, it was one every 20 games. Almost 7 percent of all NHL goals are empty netters now, about double the proportion in the season preceding the summer of analytics, and quadruple what it was when Hextall first scored. Goalie goals are scored exclusively with empty nets, and it stands to reason that more of the latter would mean more of the former.
This profusion of “cheap” goals distorts the league’s stats in some subtle ways. For one thing, scoring averages, which are down compared to the past few seasons, are in fact inflated by empty net goals, much as offense in MLB has been propped up by zombie runners and position-player pitchers. Those “artificial” factors serve to obscure what would otherwise be steeper, more concerning scoring declines.
For another, empty netters come with the caveat that, well, there wasn’t a goalie, which makes those tallies seem somewhat less earned. Alex Ovechkin, who’s nearing Gretzky’s career goals record, has taken some heat for his 64 empty netters, which is already a record. (He has seven this season, which is tied for the league lead.) Of course, Gretzky scored 56 empty netters himself, and barring injury, Ovi should top Gretzky’s overall goal total by a big enough margin that this isn’t worth worrying about. Still, empty net goals suffer from the perception that they didn’t come from fair fights, just as Ohtani’s claim to the greatest game ever is somewhat weakened by the fact that one of his three homers in that memorable contest last September came on a 68 mph, garbage-time meatball from Marlins utility man Vidal Bruján.
So that’s how the goalie goal—a rarity, but no longer a (so to speak) pipe dream—takes us under hockey’s hood. How does it explain the wider state of sports?
Well, once you start looking, you see the same process playing out all over the sports landscape. In league after league, for both better and worse, analytics have overcome risk aversion, pushing players and teams to employ riskier strategies that nonetheless promise to provide positive value.
In baseball, pitchers are throwing down the middle and trusting their stuff instead of trying to locate pitches precisely on the corners, while hitters are swinging away instead of sacrifice bunting, and prioritizing power over contact. (Similarly, T20 cricketers are embracing hitting over batting.) In football, teams are going for it on fourth down instead of punting, and trying for two-point conversions instead of settling for one measly, almost-automatic point. In basketball, shooters are spamming 3-pointers rather than relying on easier but less rewarding 2s, and constructing small-ball starting lineups that put pace, speed, and skill above size and rebounding ability. In soccer, clubs are playing out from the back even though turnovers in a team’s own territory can be costly. In tennis, players are aiming their second serves to the forehand side, accepting some double faults as the price of avoiding devastating returns.
All of these advances—some of them tedious, some entertaining—are part of the perpetual push and pull that sets each sport’s meta. No tactic is effective forever. Some strategies so saturate their sports that they get canceled out: As that 2010 paper about goalie pulling put it, “If every team were to adopt improved strategies for pulling the goaltender, an advantage would cease to exist.” Some stop working when confronted with a rule change or countermeasure—pressing in the Premier League, perhaps, or Barcelona’s high defensive line. Some are rendered moot by mold-breaking talents: Who needs small ball when Wemby or Nikola Jokic gives you size without compromise?
But let’s look past the tactical trees and focus on the forest. Any individual advantage du jour may be outmoded tomorrow. But taken together, these risky but rational game plans reflect a shift in mindset that could prove permanent: a sabermetric tolerance for short-term shame—a goalie goal here, an airball there, strikeouts everywhere—in pursuit of small edges that add up over time. Some of these gambles produce pits in the stomach, but the backing of hard data makes it more feasible not to go with your gut.
If you’re sick of empty netters, then goalie goals are the canaries in hockey’s coal mine. Ovechkin would disagree: “Every goal is hard to score in this league,” he insisted in December. It’s certainly still hard for goalies to score, even though they have it easier than ever. As a goalie-goal enthusiast, I’ll accept the trade-off of more empty net goals in exchange for a few more goalie goals, just as I tolerated 2019’s record home run barrage in order to savor the silver lining of more home run robberies.
There may come a time of too many goalie goals; at some point, the fun would wear off, as it has with position-player pitchers. But for now, I, for one, welcome our new netminding snipers (and, in the cases of largely lucky scorers like Sorokin, our new beneficiaries of bad breaks). The next time a goalie runs up the score, remember that it means something. Goalie goals aren’t just fun flukes. They’re whimsical symptoms of a sweeping sports revolution.
Thanks to Paul Pidutti for research assistance.
