NCAA approves Changes to College Hockey Overtime Rules
"After a traditional five-minute, five-on-five overtime, conferences may use either a five-minute, three-on-three overtime period and a shootout or only a shootout to award additional conference points. Conferences are not required to use one of the alternative systems and may end play after the five-minute overtime.
During nonconference regular-season games, these alternative options are not permitted, and a game would end in a tie after the traditional five-minute overtime."
Full article with other rule changes: https://www.ncaa.com/news/icehockey-men/article/2018-07-26/college-hockey-ice-hockey-overtime-protocols-approved
Alright, someone tell me how to feel about this.
It's pretty irrelevant.
Argh editing: I should say unimportant. It just affects how hockey conferences choose to hold tie-breaking exhibitions that aren't counted in the pairwise system anyway.
So, if tied at the end of OT 5v5, pairwise points are allocated immediately? Then if conferences want to have their own tiebreaker via 3v3 or shootout, they are allowed and it impacts the conference championship, but is irrelevant to pairwise?
Basically correct. After a mandatory 5 minute 5 v 5 OT period, a game would be considered a tie for the purposes of all criteria evaluated in the pairwise, including RPI. Following that, conferences may choose either a shootout, or a 3 v 3 period followed by a shootout, to determine the "winner" for conference ranking purposes.
Additionally, non-conference tournaments may either use playoff-style 20-minute OT periods or format options identical to those available to conferences to determine winners. 20-minute OT period victories will continue to count as wins or losses regardless of actual game length.
The key decision here related to allowing conferences to continue to use creative methods to break ties, but only after a standardized overtime period had been played. This is a change from both previous seasons (I believe certain conferences went to reduced-number OTs right away for periods that counted in the PWR) and the previous proposal that would have abolished such things completely.
Tie games are un-American.
A winner and loser must be established.
But the team that loses has to get a point, too!
Why? was it that difficult for ALL games to end the SAME way ALL the time...Geesh..leave to the NCAA to "Change the rules" and at the same time do absolutely NOTHING
Shootouts are dumb. Feel generally the same way about 3x3.
I believe this leaves NCAA hockey as the only league that still uses 5 on 5 for OT (playoffs excepted). Dumb that it's mandated, at least go to 4 on 4 to open it up a bit and increase the chance of a goal.