Goal scoring is increasing and not just because love taps on the hands have become a serious crime. It isn’t only a matter of power play goals being up by .30 per game over last year, but even strength scores are too, by .18.

There were a 1219 goals scored in November, the most in that month since 2005-06. You can come back Dennis Maruk, all is forgiven; twice already a team has scored 10 goals in a game. In 2015-16, there were 4.02 even strength goals per contest. Last season it was up to 4.16. This year so far it is 4.34. When Brooks Orpik finally warms up, it’s going to be an avalanche.

We’re delighted, not surprised. As sure as Craig Berube was going to wind up one more time in Washington, Calgary and Philadelphia, everything in the game proves cyclical. So we have been floating at the red line for a decade, anxious to cherry pick this sweet news.

Hey, it’s been a tough go, two decades of watching everyone shoot like Ray Neufeld and every goalie turning into Johnny Bower. We waited in vain for too long for Ian Moran to pick up the pace. So even if scoring is up barely, even a trickler across the line by Tyson Jost makes this heart sing.

The pucks are going in again. Subject to review for goaltender interference, of course. But the mysterious men in Mom’s basement in Toronto checking every goal and checking it twice for a ripple in the goalie’s sweater––Aha! Contact!–are like little Dutch boys holding a finger in the dike as the sea surges.

The twines are bulging, just like Boris Mironov’s belly on a training camp reporting day. Josh Jooris is hot, man. There is no fake news out of the Elias Sports Bureau, the league’s official goal counters, no sir. Our man there, Bob Waterman, shoots even straighter than Steven Stamkos. The increases may seem statistically miniscule, but they are not merely a reflection of a blindfolded Tobias Reider bouncing the odd one in off three legs. Actually, even Alexander Burmistrov has a goal so maybe this, too, will pass, but we don’t think so. The trend is up, parallel to the excitement level of the contests.

Why is this happening? First, let’s blow the whistle on the assumption that all this tooting by officials is a reflection of a desperate league plot to get the red lights glowing again. No, that’s not Wayne Gretzky making a comeback secretly disguised as Yanni Gourde, and Lindsay Middlebrook is hardly back in goal for Winnipeg.
No tricks here; this is evolution doing its inevitable and beautiful work, without moving lines on the ice or unnecessarily changing the rules or even measuring Garth Snow’s shoulder pads.

Goals per team per NHL game peaked at 3.95 in 1981-82 and hasn’t made it to 3.0 since 1996-97. The league got the desired bump coming out of the lockout–from 2.46 in 2003-04 to 2.93 in 2005-06. But the increase was largely artificial, created by handing out power plays like everyday was Halloween and Patrick Lalime surrendering posts. Players adjusted to the new norm of obstruction enforcement and, by 2015-16 the average goal per contest had sunk back to 2.51, the new game looking more like the old game, even with gross interference pretty much eradicated.

Since then, the novelty of shootouts faded so badly that the league decided there were too many of them, so three-on-three overtime was born in 2015-16, a good thing. But even the three-on-threes have gotten more conservative since their early Wild West days of trading chances. Now possession is everything in the extra five minutes, just like it had become during the first 60. One more time the game has been smothered by the coaches, who, thanks to expansion and the cap and all the things that mitigate against having another 1955-56 Canadiens or 1986-87 Oilers have little choice but to keep tightening the screws defensively to the point the game couldn’t be opened again with No. 99 or even WD40.

Danny Briere made a telling comment to me a few years back. He said Peter Laviolette was the only coach he ever had on any level who coached offense. Most of the rest didn’t discourage it as long as it was a safe situation to go, but after gaining the puck, the players, basically were on his own, except for power play alignments,

We read a theory the other day that perhaps coaches can’t squeeze one more dump-in out of their teams, and are turning their attention to offense. That theory drew a roll of the eyes from Jake Voracek. Not under any NHL coach he has played under.

About a week ago, we polled some big Sharks–Joe Thornton and Joe Pavelski–why is scoring up? “It is?” they asked. Oops, wrong team to ask. It doesn’t even seem real to long time observers of the game who, skeptical anything that happens before Thanksgiving is real–besides the Coyotes being buried every year, we mean–swear that each season scoring gets tougher from Game 42 on. This is urban legend though. Seriously. For the last three seasons, the average goals per game have actually gone up ever so slightly over the second half of the NHL season.

Thus there is no indication that the latest crackdown always ebbs or that defenses tighten and October and November are fun only while they last. Instead there are whole millimeters available out there – what, you want whole feet?–for skating, shooting and passing that the game needs. In 2013-14 teams combined for an average 60.1 shots per game. Last year it was 60.4 and so far this year it is 63.6. Scoring was up last season while power plays were down. And nobody has created any more trapezoids or made defensemen play even nicer since 2005-06. So where is the uptick coming from?

Brilliant young talent coming into the league? Welcome, of course, and a theory, but actually Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews are behind last season’s paces; alone they can’t account for this season’s spike.

A better postulate is that more defensemen than ever are getting up in more plays. Since 2005-06, these poor, toothless, souls haven’t been able to give anybody a good, old, Derian Hatcher whack or even the once-beloved Bryan McCabe between-the- legs corkscrew, so they have taken their revenge up ice.

“When I first came into the NHL (in 2009) you had your power play guy or two on defense and the rest of the defensemen stayed at home,” said the Flyers’ Andrew MacDonald. “Now you have to be able to skate and play both sides of the puck.

“If you leave it up to the forwards, it’s tough to score.”

We checked. In 2003-04, the last season before the lockout, there were 17 defensemen in the top 150 in the NHL in scoring. So far this season, there are 21. That is about a 20 per cent increase, happy news for a game in which there are too many goals bouncing inadvertently off somebody’s butt rather than being fed by a pretty goalmouth pass.

We were beginning to think the only solution was to tie all the coaches to the nets and have Kris Letang shoot pucks at their head until they learn to like it. All this (excuse yourself children, we are about to use a dirty word here) structure has been good for the coaches’ ongoing employment and bad for a game which has more skilled and fast players than ever, yet is less enjoyable to watch.

Where have all the great floaters gone? They would score one and give up two, so bring them back. No only did they turn the light on regularly when you were down 6-1, but these were the guys to blame when some teams never got any better.

We pine for the Sloppy Seventies, when plus-minus was a big secret and Corsi was an average goalie, not an average number and the Cleveland Barons came to town like they couldn’t wait to get out of town, leaving Gilles Meloche to fend for himself. No, we’re not being mean, honestly found something masochistically valiant about that. Some of our best friends are goalies, the more good shots they face, the more likely they are to make a memorable save that will bring you back to the arena more than pounding pounds of pucks from bad angles through screens.

The league needs people you want to see, scoring goals you want to see again and not just while waiting for them to check whether the goalie got bumped. I still think of the eighties as the best the game ever has been, for reasons starting of course with Gretzky and Lemieux but not entirely. In those days, there was skill and room.
There were more one-sided games, but closer doesn’t necessarily make them more interesting.

The more space out there to be creative, the better. After 42 games without a goal, Michael Raffl has gotten hot, so we haven’t seen anything yet.

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