Restoring the NHLs red line: What would happen if the two-line pass rule returned?

A couple of weeks before his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, one of the only five coaches to win at least 840 games in the NHL pondered a hypothetical question: Should the red line come back?

Ken Hitchcock’s first reaction was a one-liner.

“I was watching a game last night,” he said. “It’s still there.”

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Fair enough. There is a red line painted at the center of each league rink.

“But what you’re asking is, ‘Should the red line be part of our game the way it was?’ — and my answer is ‘yes,’” Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock’s answer is unsurprising. He didn’t survive — thrive — behind an NHL bench for parts of 23 seasons because his clubs lacked identity. Whether in Dallas, Philadelphia, Columbus, St. Louis or Edmonton, Hitchcock prioritized all areas of the ice. His squads looked to defend as well, if not better, than they could attack.

Coming out of a lockout in 2005, the NHL changed its rules to remove the two-line pass, which prohibited players from passing the puck from their own defensive zone over their blue line and past the center-ice red line. The two-line pass purportedly prevented cherry-picking but often resulted in teams clogging the neutral zone and turning games into defensive slogs.

So, of course, a coach with a preference for limiting scoring chances would favor the return of the red line as more than something that is merely decorative.

But what does it say when Mike Sullivan, himself perhaps headed for the Hockey Hall of Fame given his success coaching the Pittsburgh Penguins, also endorses restoring the red line to the modern NHL? His reputation and triumphs — consecutive Stanley Cup wins and playoff appearances in seven of eight seasons in Pittsburgh — come from squads that attack with skill and speed.

As noted by Toronto Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, whose production over 19 seasons earned him a Hall call, removing the red line “is one of those things we did coming out of the (2004-05) lockout with the idea of opening up the game.”

“We wanted to showcase speed, and we needed more scoring,” said Shanahan, who was part of the NHL Players’ Association negotiating committee during the arduous dispute with owners that cost the league a season and ushered in the salary-cap era.

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Shanahan and Sullivan share a connection through Kyle Dubas, who was Shanahan’s general manager with the Maple Leafs for five seasons and is in his first as Sullivan’s boss with the Penguins. In Toronto and Pittsburgh, Dubas has operated with an offensive-minded approach.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Dubas said of the NHL again playing with an active red line.

Sullivan, his coach, is “a proponent of it.”

“The game right now is played at a really, really high tempo,” Sullivan said. “In some instances, it’s certainly faster than it’s ever been. But I think what’s been lost in the game is maybe some of the puck possession aspect of it, and the ability to slow games down — or speed it up — depending on what circumstances present themselves.

“And if you look back at the history of the game, that’s what a lot of the great players had the ability to do; sometimes they would speed it up, but other times they would slow the game down in order to create opportunity.”

The NHL is in its 19th season without the red line. The league has no interest in bringing it back.

Why, then, is this even a discussion?

At the NHL’s annual media day in September, ESPN polled NHL players about which rule change would interest them. The face of an entire hockey generation’s response was to bring back the red line.

On a social-media post recounting the conversation, ESPN senior writer Greg Wyshynski admitted he couldn’t believe Sidney Crosby’s answer.

“I think when I was asked, it was more about the idea of what it would look like, or what you would change in the game,” Crosby told The Athletic. “And I’d be interested to see what it’d be if the red line comes back in.”

This is from a player who has averaged a point per game for 18 consecutive seasons. Only Wayne Gretzky has more, and just by a couple. Crosby — 40 goals and 39 assists from becoming only the ninth player to join the league’s most exclusive club (600 goals and 1,600 points) — is in favor of returning the red line and likely reviving the dreaded neutral-zone trap?

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“I feel like it’s become such a long-play/high-flip game; that’s the type of game that’s conducive to winning, so that’s the type of game we play,” Crosby said about NHL clubs in general. “But it would be interesting to see if you couldn’t necessarily do that, just how teams would adjust to that and how the games would change.

“It would probably bring back that trap and things like that. But it would also force teams to make a few more passes before they just air-mail one to the opposite blue line.”

Sullivan, who joked he “could talk about this topic for six hours,” had his captain’s back without having consulted Crosby. He contends that removing the red line has extracted creativity — specifically in the neutral zone — that he feels was more prevalent when he played in the league.

Sullivan’s 11-season career as an NHL player began in 1991-92, when Brett Hull scored 70 goals, Gretzky recorded 90 assists and Mario Lemieux scored 131 points. That season, 20 of the league’s 22 clubs averaged at least three goals, and 13 totaled at least 270 goals.

“I’d say that was right near the end of the big scoring era, give or take another year or two, that started in the ’80s,” said Rick Tocchet, the Vancouver Canucks coach who scored 270 of his 440 NHL goals from 1984-85 through 1992-93.

“By the end of the ’90s, nobody was scoring. Or at least that’s what it felt like a lot of nights.”

The exact birthing of the so-called Dead Puck Era is up for debate. A lot of people point to the New Jersey Devils’ Cup run in the shortened 1994-95 season, when only eight of the league’s then-26 clubs averaged at least three goals per game. Bill Guerin, who played for those Devils and is now GM for the Minnesota Wild, has long argued against that club ushering in days of downward scoring trends.

“Yeah, we trapped,” Guerin said. “We also turned teams over and went the other way and scored.

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“Our trap wasn’t the trap that people think about. But we weren’t playing fire wagon hockey out there, either. Maybe teams like Mario’s Penguins could do that and win. Most couldn’t. So we found our way.

“But we weren’t hanging on people in the neutral zone like a lot of teams did — too many teams did — by the late 1990s.”

In 2001-02, Sullivan’s final season as a player, only four clubs averaged at least three goals per game. The Canucks paced the league with 254 goals. By the end of the 2003-04 season, the NHL had gone seven consecutive years without any club scoring 300 goals in a season.

A combination of expansion that diluted talent, lack of enforcement of penalties, more teams trapping and bigger goalie equipment had transformed an NHL that more closely resembled pond hockey a decade earlier into a league that looked antagonistic toward offense. Add in a full season lost to the labor dispute, and hockey’s highest level had some work to do regarding entertainment.

NHL before/after red line removal

(Data: Paul Pidutti / AdjustedHockey.com)

The red line paid the ultimate price. It went away, even though it physically didn’t disappear.

The NHL’s all-time winningest coach, Scotty Bowman, lamented that the end-zone dimensions were changed. The NHL’s rink remained 200 by 85 feet, but in addition to losing the red line, the neutral zone ceded space to the end zones, which grew for the 2005-06 season.

“I keep going back to that,” said Bowman, who coached three franchises to nine Cup championships.

“It’s now harder to do a good forecheck because you have more room for the defensive team.”

Bowman, who coached with the red line intact, said “the center line allowed you to play a trap,” but his observation since retiring is that teams still trap.

“It’s just closer to the blue line,” he said. “You have to really have a strategy to get the puck into the offensive zone. A player can’t stickhandle his way through because there are too many guys waiting for him.”

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Bowman, a religious watcher of games from his Florida home, points to 1-3-1 or 1-2-2 systems used by many clubs that are different from the transition trap his Montreal Canadiens played in the 1970s and left-wing lock his Detroit Red Wings used from the mid-1990s through early 2000s. Instead, he said, the current systems force teams “to be careful on the forecheck.”

“Teams try to carry (the puck) and keep losing it,” Bowman said, referring to the blue line nearest the offensive zone. “When the team gets stymied and shoots it in, the defending guys are a lot closer to the puck.

“The defensemen just go and get it and fire it back. There’s not a lot of plays being made.”

There isn’t a rule preventing defensemen from making plays with the puck, as opposed to instantaneously sending it up the ice in the absence of the two-line pass rule. More defensemen can skate the puck out of the defensive zone than at any time in the league’s history. Most clubs have at least two defensemen capable of more than adequate puck movement.

The Colorado Avalanche’s Cale Makar, who has a Paul Coffey-esque skill for smooth skating with and deft dishing of the puck, has done pretty well for himself without a red line bogging him down in the neutral zone. Though he’s probably the most dangerous transitional defenseman in the league, he’s hardly alone in that ability.

Only in his fifth NHL season, he’s never known a high level of hockey that made use of the red line.

“You can’t two-line pass it, right?” Makar asked. “And ‘two-line pass’ is the blue line/red line, right? Not at the top of the circles with no red line, right?”

Indeed, the red line’s two-decade absence from the NHL has many current players confused by the concept of a center line being in play. Which, as Dallas Stars coach Pete DeBoer said, “probably was what they were hoping for when the red line came out — that there would be a whole generation of players who never gave it a second thought.”

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Makar offered the red line being part of the NHL “would be interesting.”

“Now, with the way the league plays, it’s really hard, unless you’re flipping it out of the zone — that’s kind of the only time it would be utilized unless it’s long stretch passes,” Makar said. “But those happen maybe once, maybe twice a game. I think it would change the way teams work off draws. It’d be more possession. A lot of teams just get it and flip it out (of their defensive zone), which means they’re losing possession.

“I’d be interested to see how it formulated into today’s game. I think it would turn the game into more possession, and I guess if you get that, guys are making more plays. But that would also slow things down, right?”

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman often alludes to an uptick in clubs winning despite trailing by multiple goals in a game. He’s said some variation of “our game has never been more exciting,” citing increases in overall scoring, the number of 100-point individual scorers and all the comebacks.

DeBoer and Avalanche coach Jared Bednar agree, siding against slowing the game down, even if, as Hitchcock opined, “those three-goal leads teams keep losing wouldn’t happen with a red line.”

And why’s that?

“I think there’s speed in today’s game because there’s nothing holding players back, there’s no line to force control,” Hitchcock said.

“The positional play in the neutral zone is much less in control now,” he continued. “Before, you had to build three lanes and you had to have one low player working low with a defenseman. Now you can send all three (forwards) to the far blue line. It creates this element of suddenness. But it’s chaos. And it’s hard to control a game if you’re leading because coaches are sending people early, they’re holding people at the far blue line to try to spread out your checking and your defense.

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“The element of being able to control a game — offensively and defensively — is not near where it was before.”

What’s best for a coach’s record probably doesn’t help the NHL aesthetic. Sponsors like how things look when offense increases, and higher-scoring games have boosted television ratings in every major sport.

DeBoer, with over 500 victories and two Stanley Cup Final appearances on his NHL resume, is familiar with how those things don’t usually go hand-in-hand. His first 361 of 1,000-plus games running an NHL bench were for the Devils when Lou Lamoriello was the GM. And Lamoriello, a Hockey Hall of Famer, has preferred tight-checking, defense-first, grind-it-out hockey at every one of his stops.

“I coached the New Jersey Devils, and they clogged the zone better than anybody,” DeBoer said. “The trade-off to making more plays in the neutral zone is clogging up the neutral zone. Do we want that in the game? That’s what would happen if we brought back the red line. I don’t think it would take too long. Coaches would adjust to having the red line back faster than everybody might think. We’d all be using some form of a trap. And I’ll ask again: Do we want that in the game?

“That’s the beauty of these rules, right? We coach the effectiveness of the rules out of it every time.”

DeBoer and Bednar said they’re curious what the data would show if a red line was restored at a lower level of hockey. If not the AHL, perhaps for a couple of seasons in the ECHL.

“We’ve been without it for so long, everything we’re talking about — how it would slow down the game, what it would do to the neutral zone, the trap coming back, scoring — that it’s all just guessing on our part,” Bednar said. “So, if we had some real evidence, not just comparing the last couple of decades to however many years before the red line went away, that would be interesting.

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“But the game is pretty good right now. Some people say it’s never been better. Most people agree it’s never been faster. I guess I don’t want to see it slow down. I just don’t think that’s fun for anybody.”

Into the second week of November, seven teams average more than 3.60 goals per game, with a couple, the Canucks and Los Angeles Kings at four or more. The league average for goals — 3.15 in 2022-23; 3.11 in 2021-22 — was the highest since the first post-lockout season in 2005-06 and the highest dating to the 1993-94 season, when average scoring was 3.23.

In 1994, Sports Illustrated featured a cover headline reading: Why the NHL’s hot and the NBA’s not. Temperatures haven’t stayed that way for either league, but it’s at least noteworthy there was a red line when the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1994.

This is not to suggest history would repeat itself and the NHL could challenge the NBA in terms of popularity in North America if the red line returned. The NBA wasn’t hot in 1994 in part because the scoring was too low.

“Like I said, it would be interesting to see what it’d look like,” Crosby said of bringing back the red line.

“Just seeing how the game’s evolved would be interesting. How would that change the makeup of teams? Would certain teams thrive compared to others? How would it work with the red line now?

“It might be terrible.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)

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