Why Do Teams Pull the Goalie?

A team down a goal with two minutes left waves its goaltender to the bench and sends a sixth skater over the boards. The net sits empty, 200 feet away, begging to be scored on. It looks like panic. It is actually some of the sharpest math in hockey.

Here is the uncomfortable part. When a team pulls its goalie while trailing by one, it ties the game only about 15% of the time. Down two, the tactic works barely 1% of the time. So why do teams pull the goalie at all? Because leaving the netminder in, down a goal in the final minute, ties the game almost never. Bad odds still beat no odds, and that trade of a wide-open net for a sliver of hope is the whole tactic.

Those are the real rates, drawn from seven NHL seasons by Hockey Graphs. You score at 6.5 goals per 60 and get scored on at roughly 19, about three times more often. You pull the goalie anyway, because the clock, not the empty net, is the real opponent. That is the gamble in one line.

What Pulling the Goalie Actually Means

Strip away the drama and it is simple bookkeeping. A team is allowed six skaters on the ice at even strength as long as one of them is not a goaltender. Send the netminder off, and that freed-up spot becomes a sixth attacker. The result is a six-on-five, the same man-advantage a power play gives you, except you have manufactured it yourself by giving up the one thing that stops pucks.

The surprising part is that nothing in the rulebook says you cannot. As the rules put it plainly, a team is not obliged to use a goaltender and may play an extra skater instead. There is no whistle, no minimum, no requirement that someone guard the crease. Coaches leave a goalie in for almost the entire game only because an empty net can be scored on from anywhere, including your own end. The tactic is pure cost-benefit, and for 60 minutes the cost usually wins.

The Two Empty Nets: Desperation and Insurance

An empty net shows up in two very different moments, and fans often blur them. The first is the desperation pull: your team is losing, time is short, and the goalie comes off so you can throw a sixth body at the tying goal. The second is the opposite feeling entirely. Your team is winning, the other side has pulled their goalie, and one of your players flips the puck the length of the ice into that empty cage for an insurance goal. Same empty net, opposite emotions.

Then there is the sneaky third case, the one that carries almost no risk at all. On a delayed penalty, the referee raises an arm and lets play run until the offending team touches the puck, at which point the whistle blows. Because the penalized side can never gain the puck and shoot before that whistle, the team about to go on the power play simply pulls its goalie for a free six-on-five. The only way it backfires is if the pulling team knocks the puck into its own empty net by accident, which does happen and counts as a goal the other way. Once the whistle sounds, play restarts with a faceoff, no harm done.

The Math of Desperation: How Often It Works

Now to the number that makes coaches sweat. A one-goal pull in the final couple of minutes ties the game roughly 15% of the time. That figure has held steady across seasons of tracking. Down two goals, the pull rescues a point about 1% of the time; down three, it is essentially zero. So most pulls end one of two ways: the puck ends up in your empty net, or the horn sounds with nothing changed.

Put the six-on-five rates side by side and the gamble comes into focus. The trailing team scores at about 6.5 goals per 60 minutes of extra-attacker time and concedes into the empty net at roughly 19. You are two to three times likelier to get burned than to tie it. And yet the move is still correct, because the honest comparison is not 15% against getting scored on. It is 15% against the near-zero chance of tying with your goalie glued to the net. When the alternative is nothing, a long shot is a bargain.

"Thirty seconds over seven seasons might seem like an improvement, but compared to the models on when teams should pull their goalie to maximize possible standings points, there is quite a lot of progress left to be made." — Meghan Hall, Hockey Graphs (May 2020)

When to Pull: The Math vs. the Men Behind the Bench

If the tactic is correct, the next question is timing, and here the analytics and the coaches openly disagree. A widely cited study by Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown ran the probabilities and concluded that a team down one goal should pull its goalie with around six minutes left, and a team down two should pull past the midpoint of the third period, somewhere in the 11-to-13-minute range. Most benches wait until the final minute or so. That gap is not small, and pulling that late instead of when the math says is estimated to cost a team a couple of standings points across a full season, which is often the difference between a playoff spot and a tee time.

Why the timidity? Because a goal into your own empty net is loud, public, and embarrassing, while a slightly-too-late pull is invisible. A coach who pulls at six minutes and surrenders two empty-netters gets torched on the postgame show, even if the decision was right. So benches hedge, and the researchers are blunt about it.

"You're not pulling your goalies nearly early enough; well, at least not yet." — Clifford Asness & Aaron Brown, Chicago Booth Review

Slowly, the benches are catching up. The average pull now comes earlier than it did a decade ago, and analytics staff keep pushing. The stigma is real, though, and it is why the smartest move in the final minutes is still the one coaches reach for last.

Why an Empty-Net Goal Never Dents the Goalie

One myth worth killing: pulling the goalie does not wreck the goalie's numbers. The moment a netminder skates to the bench, their clock stops. Any goal that follows into the empty net happens on time that belongs to no goaltender, so it cannot be charged to anyone. It counts against the team and is filed separately as an empty-net goal against.

That means an empty-netter never touches a goalie's goals-against average, and it never touches their save percentage either, because there was no shot on a goalie to begin with. The same convention covers shootout goals, while overtime goals do count. So when you see a goalie yanked for a sixth attacker and the other team buries one from center ice, feel free to groan for the team, but the goalie's line comes out clean. For the skater who scored it, though, an empty-netter is a full goal, which is exactly why the record book cares.

Ninety Years of Nerve

The empty-net gamble is nearly as old as the modern NHL. The first coach known to pull his goaltender for an extra attacker was Art Ross of the Boston Bruins, who lifted Tiny Thompson on March 26, 1931, in a Stanley Cup semifinal against Montreal. It failed, Boston lost, and the idea sat mostly dormant until Frank Boucher of the New York Rangers popularized it later that decade. For most of the century it stayed a last-ditch move, deployed with a minute left and a prayer.

The record book tells you who has feasted on the other side of it. Alex Ovechkin owns the career mark for empty-net goals with more than 70 and counting, having passed Wayne Gretzky's total of 56 in February 2024. Ovechkin needed far fewer games to do it, a quiet marker of how a great goal-scorer turns garbage time into history. One more wrinkle rewards the aggressive: since 1999-2000, a team that pulls its goalie in overtime and loses forfeits the guaranteed point it earned by reaching the extra session, unless the goalie came off for a delayed penalty. It is the league's gentle nudge that in the three-on-three era, going for the win has a price too. The same fearlessness shows up on a penalty kill late, when a team down a man and a goal will pull the goalie to skate six on the same disadvantage they were just fighting, and on an icing call, where a tired unit cannot change and the empty net suddenly looks very far away.

Sources and Reporting

• Hockey Graphs: one-goal success rate and six-on-five for/against scoring rates across seven seasons.
• Chicago Booth Review: Asness and Brown on the optimal, earlier pull time.
• Empty net goal (reference): empty-net goals excluded from goalie GAA and save percentage.
• Extra attacker (reference): no rule requires a goaltender; delayed-penalty pull mechanic.
• ESPN: Ovechkin passes Gretzky for the career empty-net goal record.

The Verdict: The Math of Desperation

Pulling the goalie will always look reckless, and that is exactly why it works better in a spreadsheet than on a coach's nerves. The tactic ties the game only about one time in seven, you are likelier to get scored on than to score, and the smart move is to do it even earlier than any bench dares. But the math does not flinch: when the alternative is losing for certain, a 15% shot is not desperation at all. It is the correct call, dressed up as panic. The next time you see that net go empty, watch the clock, not the cage. The team that pulls first, and pulls early, understood the Math of Desperation better than the one still hoping.