NHL Scoring Doubled in 1929-30 Under the New Forward-Pass Rules

In 1928-29, NHL teams scored a goal and a half a game

In 1928-29 the average NHL team scored 1.46 goals a game, the lowest of any season before or since. George Hainsworth of the Canadiens had 22 shutouts in 44 games and allowed 0.92 goals a game. The Chicago Black Hawks scored 33 goals all season. They were shut out 20 times, and from Feb. 7 to Feb. 28, 1929, they went eight straight games without a goal.

Across the league, 15 games ended 0-0 and 36 ended 1-0, out of 220. Before the next season, the Daily Colonist in Victoria wondered whether fans would “turn against 10-to-9 games as they rebelled over scoreless ties and 1-to-0 defensive battles.”

A year later, with the same ten teams and the same 44-game schedule, teams averaged 2.96. No game ended 0-0. The league leader in shutouts had 6, and Chicago scored 117 goals. Scoring had doubled, the biggest change from one season to the next in NHL history. By December the league was alarmed enough to pull part of it back.

That is a 103% rise in one season. The next-biggest rise was 16%, in 1941-42. Skip the season lost to the 2004-05 lockout and set 2005-06 beside 2003-04, and scoring rose only 18%. The biggest fall was 23%, and it came the year before, when scoring sank into 1928-29.

So 1929-30 started from an unusually low year, and that makes any jump look bigger. A fairer test sets it against the three seasons before. From 1926-27 to 1928-29, teams averaged about 1.8 goals a game. Against those years, 1929-30 was still up 66%.

The owners rewrote the rules to open up the attack

The jump began in the rulebook. “Hockey has been knocked topsy-turvey,” the Daily Colonist told its readers in October 1929. “The rules committee rather timidly suggested that forward passing be allowed in all zones. The owners agreed, although they did not think the committee went far enough; so they shot the works, not only permitting forward passing in all zones, but also abolishing all offsides.” (An offside call stops play when an attacker gets ahead of the puck where the rules forbid it.) The paper went a little too far there: a pass still could not cross a blue line.

The forward pass came in a package of rules, and it had opened up in steps. NHL.com’s account and the Scouting the Refs rule history agree on the order:

• Before 1927-28: forward passing was limited to small parts of the ice (from 1918-19, a 40-foot area at centre ice, according to the Scouting the Refs history).
• 1927-28: forward passes allowed in the defending and neutral zones.
• 1928-29: a pass could go forward into the attacking zone if the receiver was still in the neutral zone when it was made, but not inside the attacking zone.
• 1929-30, the passing rule: at its September meeting the league allowed forward passing inside all three zones. A pass still could not cross a blue line. Nothing stopped attackers from waiting inside the zone before the puck got there, and some forwards camped near the other team’s net.
• 1929-30, the rest of the package: no more than three players, the goalie included, could stay in their own zone once the puck had gone up the ice. Goalies could no longer hold the puck; a goalie who did gave up a faceoff ten feet in front of his net. Kicking the puck was allowed, though a kicked puck could not count as a goal.

Continues below

• December 1929: the governors met in Chicago on Monday, December 16 and voted that no attacker could enter the attacking zone ahead of the puck. The *Boston Globe* reported it would take effect that Saturday, December 21. NHL.com calls it “essentially the same offside rule we have now”.

The Colonist spelled out what the new rules allowed. A team could now “station a man down around the enemy’s cage” to take a pass. The three-player rule meant a team could no longer “get one goal and then throw up a five-man defence in front of the cage guardian.” Such tactics, the paper wrote, “were the most objectionable feature of last season’s campaign.”

The Bruins went from 2.02 goals a game to 4.07. Their coach Art Ross had pushed for the forward pass into the attacking zone. Cooney Weiland, who had scored 11 goals the season before, led the league with 43 in 44 games. His teammate Dit Clapper had 41, and Howie Morenz of the Canadiens 40.

The whole league rose with them. A typical team scored 2.1 times as many goals as the season before. Among the 88 skaters who played at least 20 games in both seasons, goals per game went from 0.17 to 0.29, and 61 of them scored more often.

The Pirates scored six goals in one period and won 10-5

One night in November showed what the new rules could do. The highest-scoring night of the season was Nov. 19, 1929. In Pittsburgh, Toronto went ahead 2-0 early. Then McKinnon and the Pirates took over. They scored six goals in the second period, three of them McKinnon’s. “FOUR GOALS IN THREE MINUTES,” the Sun-Telegraph’s game story announced in capitals. It called McKinnon the man “whose play stood out on a night when every member of the Pirate squad achieved stardom.” The paper’s summary credited Frank Fredrickson, the Pirates’ manager, with five assists.

“Never in local hockey history has one club ‘stolen the show’ from an opponent as completely as did the Bucs after the Leafs jumped into their 2-0 lead in the first minute of play last night,” the paper wrote.

For a single game, the records are against Long. On Jan. 10, 1920, the Canadiens beat the Toronto St. Patricks 14-7, 21 goals in one game. Long may have had something else in mind, and he did not say which record he meant. The night as a whole was new. The five NHL games that evening produced 42 goals. The most on any earlier NHL night was 33, three nights before. The best night of all of 1928-29 had 27.

Two defencemen scored four goals each that night in Pittsburgh. In the league’s game records from 1917-18 to 1964-65, it is the only game in which that happened. McKinnon finished the season with 10 goals. His Pirates won five games all season, and this was one of them.

In New York the same evening, the Americans had not scored against Chicago with three minutes left. George Massecar scored with 2:24 to play, “to save the Americans from the undesirable distinction of being the first team shut out under hockey’s new code,” The New York Times wrote. No team had been shut out yet. The season’s first shutout came in its 22nd game, on Nov. 24, when Chicago beat Detroit 4-0.

By the end of 1929-30 there had been 35 hat tricks, against four the season before. In 1928-29 a team was held without a goal in more than one game in four (27.3 for every 100 games). In 1929-30 it was about one game in 17 (5.9).

“People who knew hockey well found to their surprise that they were watching an entirely new game,” The New Yorker’s hockey column said on Dec. 7. “It was harder to watch than the old kind of hockey. It was, of course, faster, but whether or not it was better fun was hard to say.” The column had noticed the 19th as well: “One evening not long ago, when five games were played on various parts of the circuit, a total of forty-two goals was scored.”

The players had views too. “It’s a better game for the spectators,” Frank Boucher of the Rangers said in Long’s column, “though in Canada public opinion is divided. Ottawa is strong for the new game, but Montreal and Toronto are still on the dasher.” (The dasher is the top of the boards; sitting on it meant they hadn’t made up their minds.) His teammate Leo Bourgault said the new rules “require many more miles of skating and give a defense man more to worry about. He has to watch the guy coming at him and the fellow in the corner.”

Five weeks into the season, the governors brought in an offside rule

Nights like that worried the men who ran the league. Its governors met in Chicago on Monday, Dec. 16. “The amendment forbids any player on the attacking side crossing his opponent’s blue line ahead of the puck,” the wire story in the Edmonton Bulletin reported the next day. The old rule, it said, had “permitted players to go down to the defending cage and wait for team mates to bring the puck down, similar to a ‘basket hanger’ in basketball.” A basket hanger is the player who loiters under the other team’s basket, waiting for a long pass. The passing rule itself stayed, “indicating the governors wished to tame the game down only a little.” The change, the story said, would “become effective Saturday.”

The Bulletin’s story said the change had been sponsored by Leo Dandurand, president of the Canadiens, and Conn Smythe of the Maple Leafs. The Christian Science Monitor named J. Cooper Smeaton, the referee, as “one of the chief advocates of the change.” Tom Shaughnessy, who managed the Black Hawks, had no objection to the rule, the Monitor reported, only to making it in the middle of the season.

Newsy Lalonde, who coached the Ottawa Senators, made a prediction. “I think you will find this change in the rules will lessen scoring and do more harm than good to the game,” he told the Monitor.

The last night under the old rules was Thursday, Dec. 19: three games, 24 goals. The first night under the new rule was Saturday, Dec. 21: four games, 18 goals. In Boston, the Bruins beat Chicago. “As expected there was an over-abundance of whistles during the Bruin-Hawks game which was the first played under the new rules,” Bill Grimes wrote in his Boston American column, Passing the Puck. Two nights prove nothing, but Grimes liked what he saw: the game had “far more appearance of hockey than it did when players were allowed to camp in front of their opponents’ nets.”

Lalonde was right about the scoring. The NHL’s game-by-game records date every goal, so the goals before the fix and after it can be counted separately. In the 66 games from opening night to Dec. 19, teams combined for 6.91 goals a game. In the 154 games from Dec. 21 on, they combined for 5.49, 21% fewer.

How sure are we? A drop of about 1.4 goals a game, over that many games, is far too big to be luck.

Other seasons suggest the fix took away even more than that. In four seasons with no rule change in December (1927-28, 1928-29, 1930-31 and 1931-32), games after Dec. 21 had about 0.6 more goals than games before it, on average. If 1929-30 had followed that habit, its games after Dec. 21 would have had more goals than its games before. Instead they had about 1.4 fewer. With only four seasons to compare, that stays a hint.

It did not undo the forward pass, though. After the fix, games still had 1.9 times as many goals as in 1928-29.

Most of the new assists of 1929-30 came on new goals

The goals came with assists, and that raises a fair question about the scoring jump itself. Were teams really passing more, or were scorekeepers just handing out more credit? Start with the long view. In 1917-18 the average NHL goal came with fewer than half an assist (0.42). Today it comes with 1.69. The 1929-30 season moved it from 0.60 to 0.84, but most of the climb came later, in the 1930s.

Through the 1920s the line wanders between about 0.4 and 0.7. It steps up in 1929-30 and climbs hard through the 1930s. Since 1950-51 it has stayed between about 1.4 and 1.7.

If the scorekeepers had simply grown more generous in 1929-30, they would have started giving an assist on goals that used to go down as solo efforts. Solo goals would have become rarer. They didn’t. Goals with no assist went up, from about 0.6 to 0.8 a game for each team. Goals with an assist went from 0.82 to 2.18, 2.6 times as many. So most of the new goals came off a recorded pass, which fits a rule that made passing inside the zone legal. The records cannot show whether every credited pass was a real one.

Count it another way. In 1929-30 each team picked up about 1.6 more assists a game than in 1928-29. Suppose each new goal had carried assists at the 1928-29 rate, about 0.6 a goal. Then the extra goals alone would explain a little more than half of those extra assists (about 56%). About one in six of the extra assists (16%) were second assists, the credit for the player who made the pass before the last one.

One sign points the other way. Second assists started creeping up inside the season. Before Dec. 21, 6.1% of goals carried two assists. After it, 12.8% did, about double. The share of goals with any assist at all barely moved, from 72.1% to 74.4%. So goals that already had one name beside the scorer were picking up a second. The same rise shows up inside 1930-31 and 1931-32.

The season left the NHL its offside rule and a puzzle in its assist records

Set beside the league’s other seasons, 1929-30 leaves four things to keep in mind.

• Few rule changes in NHL history have had a test this clean. Same ten teams, same schedule, mostly the same players, one package of rules built around the forward pass, and scoring doubled. The 103% rise has no rival in any other season.
• The league brought in offside to slow the game down. It let passing in, saw goals pile up, and within three months stopped attackers from waiting in the zone. Scoring dropped, but stayed far above where it had been.
• Compare early assist totals with care. Most of the 1929-30 jump came with real new goals off recorded passes, though second assists were already creeping up after December. The climb that followed, mostly second assists while goals stayed flat, is better read as a change in credit. A 1930s playmaker’s assist total and a modern one are not on the same scale.
• Recent seasons have moved far less. Since the 2004-05 lockout, the biggest one-season change in scoring was 7.5%, in 2017-18. Changes like the fall in power plays (see The Power Play Is Disappearing) are on that smaller scale.

The assist records have limits of their own. They are the NHL’s 2017 reconstruction. The rules for crediting assists before 1936-37 are disputed. The NHL’s game-by-game records hold at most two assists per goal. The newspaper quotes come from scanned pages. We read each one against the page image and left out lines we could not read in full.

Boston’s first loss in Canada all season cost them the Stanley Cup

The day after the 10-5 game, Long guessed where it would all end up. He wrote that “a gradual decrease to such scores as 4 to 2 or 5 to 3, as prevail under the same rules in the Coast League, may be expected eventually.” (The Coast League, the Pacific Coast Hockey League, was a minor pro league with teams in western Canada and the western United States.) In 1930-31, NHL games averaged 4.79 goals, counting both teams.

The Boston American’s list of Bruins records that March included one more line: “No game lost in Canada this year.” Boston had won all eight of its regular-season games in Canadian rinks, and both semi-final games against the Maroons in Montreal. The defending champions then met the Canadiens in a best-of-three Final. The Canadiens won the first game 3-0 in Boston on April 1, so Boston’s perfect record in Canada was still intact.

On April 3, in Montreal, the Canadiens won 4-3 and took the Stanley Cup. It was Boston’s first loss in Canada all season, and the only time all season that the Bruins lost two games in a row. Boston scored all three of its Final goals that night. George Hainsworth, who had allowed less than a goal a game in 1928-29, was in the Montreal net for every one.

Show the work

Tests written down

Not in advance (exploratory)

Results computed

October 27, 2026

League totals for every NHL regular season from the NHL stats API (team and skater summaries), and every goal 1917-18 to 1964-65 from the NHL game feed, with its date, period, scorer and recorded assists. The offside test splits 1929-30 at December 21, 1929, and uses the same calendar split in the two seasons either side as a check. The by-team split, the named nights and games, hat tricks (three or more goals by one player in a game), Boston’s streaks and the 1930 playoff games come from the same feed; defencemen are identified by the position in the NHL’s season summaries. Best records: every team-season of 18 or more games since 1917-18 (1,758 of them; the minimum leaves out only the 1917-18 Montreal Wanderers’ six games, and the top record is the same with no minimum), ranked by points ÷ (2 × games). Newspaper quotes come from scanned pages at the Internet Archive; each quoted line was read against the page image, not only the OCR text, and lines we could not read in full were left out. How sure the offside drop is: the gap of 1.42 goals a game is about 3.4 times its standard error (each phase’s spread of goals a game divided by the square root of its games, combined). The check seasons are the same Dec. 21 split in 1927-28, 1928-29, 1930-31 and 1931-32.

Continues below

Frequently asked questions

More in Rules

• Verdict: Data story

  How Much Do NHL Referees Change the Power-Play Count? The Busiest Crews Call About 14% More Than the Quietest

• Verdict: Data story

  A Shootout Shooter Needs More Than 200 Tries Before Skill Outweighs Luck. The Most Anyone Has Taken Is 135.

• Verdict: Data story

  Does an NHL Game Really Stop Less Than It Used To?

• Verdict: Data story

  The Overtime Faceoff’s 30-Second Head Start

• Verdict: Data story

  Spearing Hit Zero. Hooking Never Went Away.

• Verdict: Data story

  NHL Overtime Has Risen From 18% of Games to 23% Since 1999

All How Hockey Changed research →

Keep reading

• How Hockey Changed: NHL data stories →One chart-led story a day about how the NHL game, its players and its rules have changed.
• The power play is disappearing →Power-play chances hit a record low, and the recent scoring rebound came at even strength.
• Who is the NHL GOAT? →Era-adjusted scoring since 1917, and why goalie talent compressed.
• NHL GOAT series →Every NHL era on one scale: scoring, league strength and opportunity.

Sources and method

1. NHL stats (NHL.com), every season since 1917-18
2. NHL stats API: team and skater season summaries; NHL game feed goals with assists
3. NHL.com: Giving thanks for 100 years of NHL memories (forward-pass steps and the mid-season offside rule)
4. NHL.com: Boston Bruins history (Art Ross and the forward pass, the 1929-30 season)
5. Scouting the Refs: NHL historical rule changes
6. Scouting the Refs: NHL historical rule changes (the 1929-30 rules and the December 21, 1929 offside rule)
7. Scouting the Refs: Rule rewind on the 1929 forward pass and offside rule
8. The Pink Puck: December 16, 1929, ruling offside (citing the Boston Globe, Dec 16-23, 1929)
9. The Daily Colonist (Victoria), Oct. 16, 1929: Puck Rules Knocked Topsy-Turvy by the Eastern Officials (Internet Archive)
10. Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, Nov. 20, 1929: the Pirates’ 10-5 win and James J. Long’s column (Internet Archive)
11. The New York Times, Nov. 20, 1929: Chicago 5, Americans 1 (Internet Archive)
12. The New Yorker, Dec. 7, 1929: the hockey column (Internet Archive)
13. Edmonton Bulletin, Dec. 17, 1929: N.H.L. Moguls Make Change in New Rules (Internet Archive)
14. The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 17, 1929: the offside ruling and Newsy Lalonde (Internet Archive)
15. Boston American, Dec. 23, 1929: Bill Grimes, Passing the Puck (Internet Archive)
16. Boston American, March 19, 1930: A Few Reasons Why Bruins Are Champs (Internet Archive)
17. Wikipedia: National Hockey League, Board of Governors (each team appoints a governor, usually its owner)
18. Wikipedia: 1928-29 PCHL season (the Pacific Coast Hockey League, a minor professional league)
19. Wikipedia: 1930 Stanley Cup Final (best-of-three format; Boston the defending champion)
20. NHL.com: NHL historical stats now available (assist credit and the 2017 rebuild)
21. The Hockey Writers: goal-to-assist ratios (quoting Total Hockey on early assist rules)

Research and analysis, not betting advice. Past results do not guarantee future returns; bet only what you can afford to lose.