the larger sheet does make it tougher for defencemen to play the North
American slam and bang style of hockey, the European game is pretty much
considered to be non-physical and more attuned to stickhandling and making
nice little unzipping moves on Dmen, but I believe I've heard a lot of talk
from some of the Europeans on some of my other hockey mailing groups as well
as a lot of other people on the larger ice sheets actually slowing down the
game because a lot of teams will play a  trapping defence to keep the quick
forwards. my guess would be that it's really 12 of one half a dozen of
another, your team will have an advantage if you're playing on a surface like
the one you have at home if the other team is not, ideally there would be a
standardisation on sheet size, but the world of college hockey is not
idealised, kind of like MLB fields everyone has it's own quirks. I've also
heard a lot of griping that eliminating the redline in Finland (well it was a
Finn who was commenting on it so I can't speak for griping in other
countries), something the NHL is supposedly considering in their endless
tinkering with the rules of the game trying to inflate the scores so that
twits who think a game has to be high scoring to be entertaining or exciting
will watch (and it may be just my pet peeve but if Bettman is so worried
about the unappealingness of 2-1 scores on the board why doesn't he just make
every goal worth 7 points like they did in Football, since no football fan
who's ever argued with me about how hockey is too low scoring for them has
ever been able to come back once I point out that a 14-7 win in football is
2-1.) that instead of opening up the game like they thought it would it's
slowed it down considerably and cut down breakaways instead of increasing
them.
                                               --JB
<< I wonder if I'm missing something here. I thought the major difference
between an NHL and International rink was that the NHL rink was narrower and
possibly with less room behind the goal lines.  If so, the DU coach's
comments are
 counter-intuitive.  I would have guessed that the larger ice surface would
make it more difficult for the "slower" skating defensemen to keep up with
the speedier forwards, hence making the game on the larger rink more
"offensive".  Did I get my
 definition of rink sizes backwards? >>
 
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