Fixing ice hockey’s low scoring flip side? Just flip the sides

Abstract

The global sports industry is extremely competitive. We focus on ice hockey and propose a (largely) costless reform to its operations that can potentially enhance the sport's popularity by increasing the number of goals. The reform optimizes a logistic convention on the use of on-ice sides and off-ice benches, which affects the amount of attacking play and within-game scoring dynamics through the players' substitutions. Using several empirical approaches, we provide estimates of the resulting scoring rise for all 11 geographically diverse competitions in our unique dataset. They are sizeable and robust to a number of checks, making case for trialling the reform in some (lower-tier) ice-hockey league.