As someone who has played goaltender in ice hockey, my heart and sentiments are always in favor of the rules protecting goalies and the sanctity of the crease. But I am also someone who loves the game as a whole, and I am disturbed as the next person when a perfectly legitimate goal gets disallowed because of incidental -- and sometimes no -- contact between an attacker and a goalie.

Let's be honest here. Sometimes goalies themselves initiate the contact. And there are goalies in the NHL who are quite accomplished at feeling the slightest contact and taking theatrical flops to the ice in the hopes of getting a call. Veteran goalies can get away with more of these than young goalies, who need to earn their stripes from officials.

Already this season, there have been at least two disallowed goals that were flat out botched calls in terms of goalie interference. The latest one was a disallowed Ottawa goal against Montreal in which Jakob Silfverberg was actually sent to the penalty box for goalie inteference in addition to the goal being washed out.

The other one I'm talking about was a play in the opening weekend of the regular season in which Philadelphia's Ruslan Fedotenko made the most glancing and innocuous of incidental contact and had his feet outside the blue paint but the referees ruled he interfered with Ryan Miller. Even Buffalo was surprised that one got waved off.

I am in favor of the NHL altering the goalie interference standard in the same way it loosened the in-the-crease rule some years ago to allow goals where a skate in the paint needn't cause a wash-out if it has nothing to do with the goal being scored. On the flip side, I realize there's a bit of a slippery slope in defining what's incidental contact with a goalie and what merits a goal being waved off and/or a penalty being called. There's still a need to protect goalies, and we don't want to have a lot of accidental/on purpose bumps around the crease either.

So I leave to our HB readers to weigh in with their own views.... Vote below.

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