The NHL has announced that it will stop using pucks with built-in tracking technology for the foreseeable future, due to complaints about their performance at the beginning of the 2021 season.
The change is effective starting with the games on Tuesday night.
The NHL looked at the first supply of tracking punches it used and determined that they did not receive “the same precise finishing treatments during the off-season manufacturing process as they used during the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs.” ”.
An NHL player told ESPN on Tuesday that the pucks were “terrible” and “not slipping”, adding that the players expressed their dissatisfaction with them.
The league said a new supply of pucks will be available soon and will be “properly tested for quality control” before being used in games. Meanwhile, the league has said it will use official playoffs from the 2019-20 season. It will also continue to use optical player tracking, which is the other half of the two-way tracking system, along with the devices inside the puck.
This is the first full season of puck and player tracking for the NHL, which promises to provide a significant amount of new data to improve everything from TV shows to sports betting.
The league has been trying for years to integrate technology into pucks, finding the results too inefficient or expensive. This incarnation of the puck was used during the tests and in the post-season in 2020, with a puck sensor tracked by 14-16 antennas installed in arena rafters.