Wooden Sticks or Smaller Equipment?

[WingsFan95]

Somewhat simple I guess, if the two choices were given to you, and you must choose one of them, what would you go with?

Make Wooden Sticks Mandatory? Supposedly more control and decreased high sticking.

or.

Decrease goalie padding to 1980s levels?

[Bure All Day]

well as a player, i know using a wooden stick sucks, so for an NHL guy who brings 5 of the same composite sticks to one game, i think they'd be pretty pissed about that

[TAnnala]

You have made a lot of threads and basically every single one of them is pretty arbitrary. These really don't make any sense.

[mytor4*]

Easily Decrease goalie padding to 1980s levels?Bring back more skill to the position.

[Ville82]

option 4: dont change anything

[Habsterix]

Originally Posted by WingsFan95

Somewhat simple I guess, if the two choices were given to you, and you must choose one of them, what would you go with?

Make Wooden Sticks Mandatory? Supposedly more control and decreased high sticking.

or.

Decrease goalie padding to 1980s levels?

The choices in my opinion go hand in hand. If you decrease the equipment, you must go to wooden sticks for safety purposes.

[WingsFan95]

Originally Posted by Bure All Day

well as a player, i know using a wooden stick sucks, so for an NHL guy who brings 5 of the same composite sticks to one game, i think they'd be pretty pissed about that

Oh my word. Dear lord what would they do?

The game was played with wood for about 80 years. Was fine.

[PoundCake]

I choose hidden option #4:

Give players foam sticks, make goalie pads out of wood.

[Niet]

I'm sure companies like Easton, Bauer, and Reebok would not be too happy if the NHL banned composite sticks. It's also about 10 years too late to ban composite sticks as many of the players grew up using them at this point, flex points, balance of the sticks, and the feel among other issues. I don't really see the point of banning composites anyways high sticking happened before composites (just ask Toronto fans) and will continue to happen even with wood sticks.

This poll is also loaded with a lot of loaded answers, 'significantly' and 'bigger' are relative and there is no way of voting for no changes.

[Lacaar]

I don't believe for a minute the current size of the goalie equipment is for safety.
It's to make GAA look great for the goaltenders. That's why they fight so hard to keep it.
Can't blame them for resisting but in the long run it hurts them as it takes the skill out of the position. 15-20 years ago. You knew damn well who the best goalies in the league were. Now you just know who's had the best year/team.

[ponder]

There's no reason to have this tradeoff. Goalie pads could be made smaller while remaining protective. Slightly reducing the dimensions of leg pads should make virtually no difference to have protective they are, and the chest protectors are made ridiculously bulky on purpose, to take up extra net. Chest protectors could be made slimmer and leg pads could be made smaller while keeping them plenty protective.

Furthermore, while wrist shots are arguably a bit harder than they used to be with wood sticks, slap shots are barely harder at all, for 16 years nobody had beat Al Iafrate's hardest shot record, and he set that with a wood stick. When it was beat, it was more about Chara being a 6'9" beast than about the stick technology, Chara uses a 2-piece which is pretty old in terms of recent stick technology.

[ponder]

These are what goalie chest protectors look like nowadays:





If you think all that bulk is purely for protection, I really don't know what to say.