The NHL announced that it will stop using pucks with built-in tracking technology in the near future due to complaints about their performance at the start of the 2021 season.
The change will take effect from Tuesday night’s games.
The NHL assessed the first stock of follower pucks it used and determined that they had not “undergone the same precise finishing treatments during the off-season manufacturing process as they did during the 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs.”
An NHL player told ESPN on Tuesday that the pucks were “terrible” and “not sliding,” adding that players had expressed displeasure with them.
The league said new stock of the pucks will be available soon and will “undergo appropriate quality control testing” before using them in games. In the meantime, the league said it will be using official gamepucks from the 2019-2020 season. It will also continue to use optical player tracking, the other half of the dual tracking system, along with the devices in the puck.
This is the first full season of puck and player tracking for the NHL, which promises to deliver a significant amount of new data to improve everything from TV coverage to sports betting.
The competition has been trying to embed technology in pucks for years, with the results being too ineffective or too expensive. This incarnation of the pucks was used in tests and post-season in 2020, with a sensor in the puck being tracked by 14-16 antennas installed in the rafters of the arena.