The trapezoid punished the wrong goalies

Drawing a shape behind the net to help forecheckers ended up removing a skill the game did not have too much of.

Draw a shape on the ice behind the net and you decide who is allowed to be good at hockey.

The trapezoid arrived to solve a real irritation. A goaltender who could handle a puck was effectively a third defenceman on every dump-in. He would beat the forechecker to the corner, stop the puck, and either leave it for his partner or fire it up the wall himself, and an entire forecheck would be neutralised before it started. Teams with such a goalie could kill offensive pressure at will, which made for slow hockey, so the league restricted where he could play the puck and the forecheck came back to life.

Fine as far as it goes. But look at who paid.

The goalies who could do this were not many. It is a hard skill, and it takes years, and it was one of the very few ways a goaltender could distinguish himself outside of stopping pucks. The rule did not reduce the advantage of the great puck handler; it deleted the category. Meanwhile the goalie who could not play the puck lost nothing at all, because he was already not doing it.

And the cost landed somewhere the rule makers did not intend. Defencemen now retrieve every dump-in themselves, with their backs to a forechecker arriving at speed, on the same end wall where the icing collisions used to happen. If you want to know why defencemen take so many hits in that spot, part of the answer is a line painted on the ice to make life easier for forwards.

I am not arguing for a return to the old arrangement, exactly. I am arguing that the trade was accepted too cheaply. The problem was never that some goalies could play the puck. It was that a small number could do it so well that the play died. There were narrower answers available: keep the restriction on the wall rims that killed forechecks and allow the goalie to stop and set a puck anywhere behind the goal line.

What we have instead is a rule that punishes ability and protects nobody, while quietly making one of the most dangerous plays in the sport more frequent.

The skill did not migrate. It just stopped being developed.