The NHL has announced that it will stop using pucks with built-in tracking technology in the foreseeable future due to complaints about their performance during the start of the 2021 season.
The change takes effect from Tuesday night’s games.
The NHL reviewed the first stock of tracking kits it uses and found that they did not “receive the same exact finishing touches during the out-of-production process as used during the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs.”
One NHL player told ESPN on Tuesday that the puckies were ‘terrible’ and ‘not slipping’, adding that players expressed their displeasure with them.
The league said a new stock of pucks would be available soon and would ‘undergo appropriate quality control testing’ before being used in games. In the meantime, the league has said it will use official games of the 2019-20 season. It will also continue to use optical player tracking, which is the other half of the two-point tracking system, along with the devices in the bag.
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 broadcasts to sports betting.
The league has been trying for years to embed technology in pucks, and find the results too ineffective or expensive. This incarnation of the pucks was used during tests and in the post-season during 2020, with a sensor in the puck followed by 14-16 antennas installed in the arena beams.