Quoting: hanson493
Boston is paying collectively 9.75m for their goalie tandem. If you get more than 4 as a goalie you better start being a workhorse. Dallas got bishop cheaper because of injuries with the kings. Cheaper guys like Grubauer or Keumper were young guys coming from situations where they werent starting regularly. Really it comes down to player development.
Onto the main topic, it seems hockey is moving away from the barbaric sport that the game was founded on because of lawsuits for player safety. We have had this player safety topic before my opinion remains unchanged. But in terms of goal scoring, im not sure im following what you mean. its easy to see that late 80s early 90s hockey was much more scoring oriented. look at lemieux, gretzky, hull, any of the dominant players from that generation and look at their totals. in 88-89 lemieux had 85 goals and 114 assists for a whopping 199 points. You wont see that ever again unless they make changes to goalie equipment, or net size. The goalies in this era are massive. bishop for example is 6'7 how many goalies back then were that massive? I think another aspect that loses out right now is the physicallity. you dont have too many guys going for HUGE hits taking themselves out of play anymore. They have really simplified the game to a point where they dont want heavy contact, they dont want to take away a players protections, but they also want to increase scoring when teams are starting to just hang more guys back and hope they can counter attack effectively. Add in the fact that guys have become faster and sticks are longer etc etc and your standard rink is too small to generate that type of scoring. Watch most games and without the powerplay advantage the score is significantly lower. I would simply argue that 5 on 5 hockey is killing the sport because of the way they are "redesigning" the game.
Scoring was higher in the 80's b/c competition was lower. We now have much greater balance overall. The league's top teams could always count on wins against the bottom tier teams and they'd often blow them out. There are no free wins anymore and no free 4-5 point games for top scorers. Lemieux scored 199 points b/c he was able to put up 4-5 points per game against the "bad" teams. I don't believe for one second that McDavid, Sid, and Ovi are simply not even close to as good as Mario, Hull, and Gretzky. It's just much more difficult to pile up points and goals in a much more balanced and competitive league.
I def. agree w/ you about the physicality aspect. Player safety has become a paramount issue.
As for the goaltending, would you rather have Price, Bob, or Vas in the playoffs after a 65 game season or a rested Rask or Bishop? MTL is spending an absurd $12.25M on goaltending this year. That's $2.5M more than BOS and almost $5M more than DAL. That's a huge disadvantage in a cap league.
One final note: Remove the salary cap and watch league scoring skyrocket. A group of super teams (TOR, MTL, BOS, NYR, LAK, etc...) would dominate small market teams. Competitive balance is the primary factor that dictates scoring.